clinging vine

American  

noun

Informal.

1. a person who behaves in a helpless and dependent manner in relationships with others.

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clinging vine British  

noun

1. informal a woman who displays excessive emotional dependence on a man

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clinging vine Idioms  

1. An overly dependent person, as in A clinging vine since her marriage, she's never made a decision on her own. Nearly always applied to a woman (or wife), this metaphor for a climbing plant today criticizes dependency rather than, as in former times, praising the vine's fruitfulness.

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Etymology

Origin of clinging vine

An Americanism dating back to 1960–65

Example Sentences

He checked a clinging vine with white flowers.

From Los Angeles Times

She was a veritable clinging vine.

From Project Gutenberg

Not so closely interwine The graceful Elm and clinging Vine, When to bosom of the tree Bacchus' clusters prest you see, And the Nymph the fruit receives, And hides it amid dewy leaves; Ev'n as the poets tell of old, In legends of the Age of Gold.

From Project Gutenberg

Her mother's affection was something, but it was the love of a stronger nature than her own that she craved, a staff to lean upon, a guiding, protecting love, a support such as is the strong, stately oak to the delicate, clinging vine.

From Project Gutenberg

She stood silent amid the cool, green restfulness of this shadowed place, and viewed with amazed eyes the wonder of its vegetation which grew in a tangled luxuriance of varying shades of green; particularly she noticed the long trailing moss which hung festooned from the trees over the stream; the longer trails of clinging vine that wound itself about every plant and tree and linked the whole together in an ordered and pleasing confusion.

From Project Gutenberg