Many people have heard about the Peter Pan Syndrome. Dr. Dan Kiley used the term in his book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. He fondly referred to the women who were involved with these Peter Pan types as “Wendy”, Wendy Complex or Wendy Syndrome. Others have even coined the epidemic of Wendy’s as the “Wendy Club”. Wendy is the character in the Peter Pan story who falls head over heels hopelessly and romantically in love with Peter Pan, even though he will never be a suitable partner for her. Peter Pan doesn’t feel love, and so he only holds an immature fondness and curiosity of the girl who is so smitten with him.
Such is the plight of the girls who are attracted to the immature man. I have many such ‘Wendy’ readers write to me on a regular basis. They touch my heart as an author, and because I know their stories all too well. As women, our heads tell us one thing – that our man is too immature to be a good relationship partner. But our hearts are filled with awe and wonder and curiosity about him. Women dream of the knight in shining armor coming to rescue us from our boring lives. Women fall for small gestures and charismatic smiles and the visions in their heads of the perfect family in a little house with the white picket fence.
There are many reasons why we choose to be a ‘Wendy’. Many of us have grown up in homes where we were emotionally invalidated in some way. This could be because our parents were neglectful or abusive or intrusive or overindulgent. This could be due to our fathers being rigid and inflexible about our behavior or unsupportive of our goals in life. We might have been born with an especially sensitive temperament due to the makeup of our genes and our DNA.
We might not have found a mentor or a coping mechanism when we reached our adolescence. Our parents may have been too tired, too overworked or too wrapped up in their own problems. They may have had autism or social anxiety or PTSD which caused them to look at the world as frightening or foreign. They may have been picked on by bullies for being different, and thus carried these negative experiences forward into their parenting styles and in the way that they interacted with you.
Wendy’s are a bit of a complexity as one looks at the dating world and the pieces of the puzzle. We look past the obvious flaws in someone’s personality instead of passing them by like other girls would have. We become curious about the mysteriousness of the puzzle that is put before us. We want to analyze it and dissect it. We want to rid it of its demons. We want to help it to grow and mature in the ways that we have. We want to share the world with this creature. We feel that loving it is quite enough, and so we set about to do just that.

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