Unrequited (14 page)

Heinrich made it clear he wanted to see her again. He gave her his address in former East Berlin, an exotic place to her in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he encouraged her to visit. A couple of months later, she traveled to the city with a friend. They didn’t know anyone there, so they bought a bottle of wine and stopped by Heinrich’s apartment unannounced. The three spent the evening drinking together. He invited Angela to return.

It was a time in her life when she felt “extremely unmoored.” Her adolescence and early twenties had been consumed by a relationship with a much older man. Her job in Germany was giving her some badly needed confidence. But she also felt alone. “All of a sudden I was out there in the world trying to figure things out on my own,” she said. “I hadn’t ever learned to be a grown up by myself. I wasn’t used to feeling like an adult without a man to guide me.”

The next time she was in Berlin, she met Heinrich for drinks. He kissed her. His assertiveness “marked him as a good beacon” for her, she remembered—he was what she thought she needed to feel more settled. And then she was smitten.

Heinrich visited her in Stuttgart, where she was teaching. They fell into bed. She was astonished when he entered her without using a condom. They hadn’t talked about whether she was on birth
control. Before the next time they made love, she bought condoms and gave them to him. He didn’t use them, though, so she started taking birth control pills.

Their affair lasted just a few weeks. When she came to see him, he would greet her at the train with two bicycles. “East Berlin was all about bicycling, so I was riding around on my perfect Eastern bicycle. It was great,” she said. “I dreamed what was happening into this fantasy, and he was providing the props for me to live it out.”

She arrived one weekend on the eve of his thirtieth birthday. They planned to celebrate the next day with his friends. Soon after she got to his apartment, he excused himself to make a phone call. There was no private telephone service in his neighborhood, so she knew he would have to go to the corner and stand in line. She waited patiently. When he came back, he said, “I have something to tell you. I’m not really in love with you.”

She focused right away on the phone call. Whom did he call? Did the conversation change his mind, or was it irrelevant? “I felt like if I could only figure out what was wrong about that phone call, that would have made it all right again,” she said.

She went back to Stuttgart in disbelief. She could barely get herself out of bed each morning to drag herself to her office. “It was paralyzing,” she said.

All she could think was that she needed to talk to him. She sent letter after letter asking him to call her. The mail service was fast and reliable throughout Germany, so she knew he was getting all her letters. She imagined that same phone booth, and all the people in line who would hear him as he spoke to her, witnessing what was going on between them. Perhaps these German strangers would recognize the injustice of it all, of this bright-eyed man who had romanced her and then, very suddenly, backed away. He didn’t
answer her letters and he didn’t call. Two weeks later, his silence became so oppressive that Angela impulsively rushed to the train station and boarded the train to Berlin, an eight-hour trip.

She showed up at Heinrich’s door at midnight. She was terrified that he wouldn’t be home or that he would be with someone else. He answered the door alone. He set up a pallet on the floor and asked her to go to sleep. “I made a point of sobbing so long and so loud that he eventually came in to comfort me by having sex with me,” she said. “Then he sent me away the next morning.”

From an evolutionary perspective, Angela’s dramatic journey was a demonstration of commitment, of the time and attention she was willing to devote to him:
See how much you mean to me? See what I can give you?
Rejection goads us to action despite the possibility of failure and stigma, because “being cut out of mating is an evolutionary dead end,” Geher said. “That’s why we see a lot of things in the mating domain that make people uncomfortable, that people see as difficult or strange. At the end of the day, mating is Darwin’s bottom line.”

Intense pursuit and expressions of need can force the beloved to heed his pursuer, shifting his attention and energy away from competing interests, sexual and otherwise. The pursuer’s demanding presence may cause the target’s other mating prospects to decide they’d rather not go through the trouble of dealing with an insistent rival. For these reasons, pursuit can sometimes succeed in winning back an estranged partner; adaptations have to work only some of the time to have staying power in a species. Angela’s chase worked only as what evolutionary psychologists call a “short-term mating strategy”: consolation sex with Heinrich.

Adding salt to the wound of rejection is the fact that the beloved’s ability to turn you down in itself makes him more appealing. It’s a sign of “high mate value.” As Geher explained, “It’s an
ironic and not pleasant fact of human social life that not everyone’s in a position to engage in social rejection, but when they do, it’s immediately attractive. That person sees himself as having options.”

The stakes in winning the rejecter rise. People who have been refused may “want that person even more because they perceive that person as having a higher mate value,” he said. “But they are also thinking, ‘Wow, this is going to help my confidence and assessment as a person and my own mate value if I can get the person to say yes.’”

Inasmuch as the impulse to nurture prospective offspring could make a woman a discriminating “chooser,” once she’s chosen, she may very well chase. J. D. Duntley, a professor of criminal justice and psychology at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, have published research theorizing that women engage in stalking primarily to prevent a partner from leaving or to get him back if he does leave. Men, they hypothesize, stalk for those reasons as well, but they are more likely than women to engage in “
pre-relationship” stalking as a strategy to win a mate in the first place. Buss’s extensive surveys on jealousy revealed that women reacted more strongly to emotional infidelity, in keeping with the evolutionary psychology theory that a partner’s involvement with another woman siphons off his resources and attention. Men reacted more strongly to
sexual infidelity, which could trick them into providing resources for offspring who aren’t their own.

OUR REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS
may be the furthest thing from our mind. We use birth control (including methods such as implants and IUDs, which require attention only every few years), until we’re ready for children—and then, increasingly, we rely on technologies from hormone shots to IVF to help us conceive. We may
choose never to have children. Same-sex romantic pursuit, no less intense than hetero chasing, doesn’t have the same direct link to reproduction. The lived connection between sex and childbearing is far looser for us than it was for our ancestors, even if the same genetic impulses course through us. Even Angela, who had unprotected sex and thus real reason to worry about potential offspring, wasn’t consciously thinking about losing a possible father to her child. She mourned for the loss of his companionship to
her.
Without Heinrich, she remembered, the unmoored feeling in her life returned. “I had to get him back,” she said. “It was an existential fear. I thought he was my lifeline. He really wasn’t, but it sure did seem like it during that time.”

We most often hear the psychological term “attachment” to describe the importance of a secure bond between parent and child for the child’s survival and emotional development. But attachment has powerful benefits for adults as well. Romantic love holds out the promise of connection to a person who, in an echo of the parenting role, can provide an interchange of caregiving and attachment. It’s what psychologists call a “secure base for exploration,” promoting feelings of safety and confidence that allow partners to
engage in the world in a focused and secure way.

Neuroscientists, in fact, are finding that both parent-infant bonds and adult couples work from the same motivational systems in the brain.
Men and women react to separation and loss much as children (and, for that matter, other baby mammals) do. Their bodies gear up for pursuit. Heart rate and body temperature go up. The abandoned mammal is vigilant, stressed, and unable to sleep, its entire body geared toward reestablishing attachment. It’s what psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon identified as the “
protest response,” activated when emotional attachments are ruptured. We can focus on little else. “The drive
to reestablish contact is sufficiently formidable that people often cannot resist it, even when they understand that the other person doesn’t want anything to do with them,” the authors write in
A General Theory of Love
.

This basic response doesn’t vary significantly by gender.
Brain scans of men and women who have been rejected recently look similar, said psychology professor Arthur Aron, who was part of the team of researchers on Helen Fisher’s landmark brain-scan studies on people in love and after romantic rejection.

What may make a difference in whether the lovelorn follow through on the urge to chase are childhood trauma and attachment style. Neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse early in life increase the likelihood of criminal stalking and soft stalking—unwanted pursuit behaviors (UPBs) that characterize obsessive relational intrusion, but
are less extreme than criminal stalking. People who have what’s called an anxious (also known as preoccupied, ambivalent, or insecure) attachment style
are more given to experiencing unrequited love. And as several studies show, they’re more inclined to engage in UPBs after
romantic rejection in both opposite-sex and same-sex scenarios.

One study revealed a majority (58 percent) of pursuers were classified as
insecurely attached. The markers of insecure attachment are obsessiveness, insecurity, and moodiness in relationships. People with an insecure attachment style have high expectations of love. When they’re in a relationship, the partner’s attention is never quite enough. They have trouble making relationships last, or they’re given to serial unrequited attractions, always seeking someone they can’t have. “More anxiously attached people place a lot of importance on relationships and place their identity on these relationships,” said Leila B. Dutton, one of the study’s authors and a professor of criminal justice at
the University of New Haven. “Relationships are more significant to them than to someone with a secure attachment style.”

Her study found that another, equally significant predictor of pursuit is how much distress the rejected lover feels over the loss of the relationship.
The level of hurt, anger, frustration, resentment, loneliness, and jealousy all contribute to the likelihood of pursuit. Someone who has a generally positive view of herself and others and is usually comfortable with intimate relationships could end up a needy chaser if her emotional investment in the relationship is sufficiently fraught.
A recent major personal loss, such as a death or a prior breakup, may be a contributing factor. And if rejection occurs in a situation that’s antagonistic to the relationship in the first place—such as a same-sex couple marginalized in a predominantly straight community—
unwanted pursuit is more likely to happen. “Someone who is otherwise a fine and healthy person may try to get someone back and participate in unwanted pursuit because of the circumstances, even though they would say the behavior is uncharacteristic for them,” Dutton said.

WHILE THE PROTEST
response can push the unwanted woman to behave in ways she may regret, it’s important to acknowledge the life-preserving impulses the reaction embodies. You’re not only protesting rejection, you’re also protesting the emotional and physical body blow it can entail. The next emotional stage after the protest response is despair, a physiological state that can include lethargy, loss of appetite, and profound sadness. Rejected lovers react very much like people suffering physical pain,
or grieving over the death of a loved one. Forty percent of rejected lovers show signs of depression. Women are more inclined toward anxiety and depression than men, while men are more likely to resort to substance abuse. The finality of a breakup is rougher on young unmarried women, whose
mental health tends to decline more than their male counterparts (who, interestingly, have a harder time than women when
ongoing
relationships get stressful); researchers speculate that, despite all the changes in women’s social and economic status, a woman’s identity and self-worth may still
be overly tied up in having a man.

Overall, the loss of love can affect sleep and weaken our immune response. Though the end of a relationship shouldn’t be fatal, it can be;
it is a leading factor in suicide. We’re more vulnerable to social isolation, which increases death rates among heart and cancer patients and
heightens the risk of illness or death. That’s not to say that winning over an estranged beloved, or even having a committed partner, is the only way to a healthy existence. But
the protest response is linked to our survival instincts and our need to have a caring social support system.

Though the unwanted woman’s chase might be in vain, it offers her a way to ward off this cascade of misery. “Getting on the train to go see him, that was my first happy moment,” Angela said. “I thought I could get him back. I could get my life back. I felt powerless, and I took action.”

I have listened to many stories like Angela’s, of women who took action to protest rejection. I’m struck by the rebellious freedom of getting on that train. There’s an emotional honesty in these moments—the unwanted woman is
doing something
instead of sinking into despair. She is swept up by instinct, by the profound human need for attachment, which the era of romantic practicality has tried to reduce to a game.

I know I should be moved only so far. The journey of the chase, whether it is a daylong train ride across Germany or years of effort to win a beloved, may take us away from our hopelessness. But once we confront a beloved and his refusal to love, we face a new set of questions. How vigorously do we protest?