Unrequited (15 page)

Maggie, a thirty-six-year-old country singer and songwriter, was raised with the message that she could pursue what she wanted in life with just as much determination as a man. Her grandfather was a sanitation worker in Brooklyn, and her father started working at age nine delivering newspapers. He shined shoes, joined the army, and struggled his way into the middle class, becoming an accountant. As he brought up his own children in relative comfort, he tolerated few excuses from either Maggie or her older brother. “I was raised never to give up,” she said. “You were supposed to just keep trying.”

When her boyfriend of three years left her abruptly, she felt she had to do something to get him back. She came up with the most romantic gesture she could think of: She would serenade him with love songs. She rehearsed a set list of Johnny Cash tunes with a fiddle player and another singer to harmonize. Her gesture was a traditionally male one, but she didn’t think about it that way. “I believed in the power of music. I wanted to come back with that redeeming quality,” she said. “I thought, ‘If I don’t try, I’ll never know if I could have gotten back with him, and the worst thing that could happen is that I’ll feel as awful as I’m feeling now.’”

Her ex left town for three weeks, during which her plans for the ensemble fell through. She prepared to serenade him alone. He had always loved her music. She fantasized that the moment he heard her, he would remember that he loved her.

She knew he worked an overnight shift once a week, changing the displays at a gourmet supermarket. He was living with his parents, so serenading him after work was the only way to find him alone. The first week he was back, she drove by the store during his usual shift and saw his car there. She waited in the parking lot until he emerged at sunrise. The moment she walked toward him with her mandolin, she realized her plan wasn’t going to work. She
began to play anyway. He stopped her. “I can’t hear that right now,” he said. “It’s over.” He got in his car and drove off.

Not giving up staved off her hopelessness and despair for a while. But her persistence also obscured what I call The Line. The Line is the often blurry boundary between trying hard and trying
too
hard. It’s the divide between courtship and aggression, between striving and violating someone else’s life. However well intentioned Maggie’s idea was, she was so absorbed in her plot that she couldn’t see that confronting her ex alone in a parking lot before dawn might come across as disturbing rather than romantic. Romantic pursuit may be just as natural a tendency for a woman as for a man, but both have to face the same question: How ardently can you protest rejection without crossing The Line?

WHEN SYLVIA, THIRTY-FOUR
, an editor, met Joseph, she had recently broken off her engagement to another man. The split wasn’t traumatic. She had gradually realized that they didn’t have as much in common as she once thought. She knew she didn’t want to live permanently in France, where he was from. She moved to Chicago, ready to set up her own adult life in the city she loved. She planned to find a steady job, establish deep roots, and find someone she felt more compatible with.

From the first time Sylvia spotted him at a cocktail party, Joseph impressed her as exceptionally charismatic. “All the eyes in the room gravitate toward him,” she said. “He wants everyone’s attention and thrives on it.” Yet when they were one-on-one, he listened intently. They had a similar sense of humor, both silly and cutting. What was missing with her French fiancé, that sense of common interests, was there right away with Joseph.

In the two years Sylvia and Joseph were together, though, he was never fully hers. At times she was certain he was gay. The first
several times they tried to have sex, he couldn’t keep an erection. He told her that once, in college, he’d taken Ecstasy and fooled around with a man. He dwelled on her physical descriptions of her past male lovers. She watched him let men hit on him, and he would flirt back. Sylvia was also tormented by his furtive pull toward other women. She discovered he’d lied about where he was on a Saturday night so he could go out with a girl he once slept with. He took several trips overseas to visit other women and never invited her. She was sure he had affairs. By the end of their relationship, she said, he never seemed to tell the truth. “He would lie about what was in a drawer in his apartment,” she said.

When they split up, their mutual friends flocked around Joseph, who avoided her and portrayed her as the bitter one. “All my friends dumped me except this one girl,” she said.

She went to dinner with the remaining friend. Sylvia drank too much wine and found she couldn’t stop herself from venting her anger. “I was trying to explain why this guy was so awful and why I’d felt so betrayed,” she said. “The more incidents I described to her, the more the bad stuff kept piling up.”

In the wake of the breakup, she had been calling Joseph a lot, trying to learn the reasons he lied and kept her at an emotional distance. Their conversations often escalated into arguments. He never gave her satisfying answers. At dinner with her friend, she called again to berate him. He hung up on her. She kept calling back. “I knew I was going to a bad place,” she said. “I told my friend, ‘This isn’t good. I’ve got to go home, chill out, watch a movie, and get back to myself.’”

At home, nothing helped. No matter what movie she watched, she saw manipulation. Even
Young Guns II
, a 1980s Brat Pack Western that always cheered her up, couldn’t distract her. “I tried to read a book. No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop feeling
blindingly angry. I thought, I wasn’t going to get rid of my anger until I dumped it on the person who deserved it.”

Around two a.m., she took a cab to Joseph’s apartment and knocked on his door to wake him up. She demanded he listen to her. She collapsed into a chair, half sitting on a note pad he’d left there. She looked at what he’d written. “There was this big long emotional letter to this girl he’d known earlier in his life,” she said. “He hadn’t been in touch with her for five years, but then he was writing about how he wanted to visit her in California. It was only three weeks after we’d broken up. It put me over the edge. He had no pity, no regret, no shame for all of this horrible stuff that he had done to me.”

She yelled at him to tell her the truth about himself. She slapped him in the face. “Don’t do that,” he said. He threatened to call the police. “Go ahead,” she retorted.

When the police arrived, she was crying so hard that she couldn’t answer their questions. Joseph told them he didn’t want them to arrest her. He just wanted her to leave. An officer guided her by the shoulders into the squad car to take her home.

The radio was set to a lite FM station playing a love song. “How could you play a song like that?” she protested. “Can’t you see how terrible this is?” The police officer told her he wanted to cover up the sound of her weeping and she should calm down.

“You don’t understand,” she protested. “He cheated on me, and
I’m
the one who gets arrested!”

“At least you got a pop in before you had to leave,” he chided her.

That night wasn’t the last time Sylvia felt intense anger at Joseph. But it was the last time she confronted him about it. “I would think back to that night and say, ‘That’s not you. Try to let the past be past.’” Her determination to get some kind of justice for herself didn’t get her anywhere. She was never going to learn the truth
about Joseph’s life. He was never going to acknowledge the pain he’d caused her.

When Sylvia thinks back to the confrontation with Joseph, she is struck by the rage she felt at her powerlessness. His withdrawal sent her back to some all too familiar childhood feelings. “I grew up with difficult parents, and I often felt my emotional needs weren’t met by them,” she said. When Joseph first came into her life, he gave her more support than she’d ever known. “He put on this show of ‘I want to make you the happiest woman in the world,’” she said. “It was the first time someone worked so hard to make me think he would meet my needs, and then he turned into a shape-shifter. He shut off like a steel trap.”

She remembers vividly a moment, in the heat of their argument, when she saw herself reflected back through his eyes. “I was that crazy psycho bitch that every man imagines lives inside of every woman,” she said.

THE “CRAZY PSYCHO BITCH”
haunts many of us as we contend with rejection. The primal frustration we feel gives us little real power to get love back, or to get a satisfying explanation of what went wrong. Yet the Psycho Bitch continues to protest, refusing to let her beloved get away with ambivalence, bad behavior, and the emotional blow of abandonment. She has the determination of a heroine, but she goes too far. Her disturbing persistence is a distortion of the Protestant work ethic/equal opportunity ideal: If you try hard enough, you can get what you really want. The Psycho Bitch embodies both the fierceness and the shame of being a woman who can’t accept rejection and move on.

There are reasons why the Psycho Bitch surges forth. Sylvia had lost the man she thought would provide the love and care she always yearned for and didn’t get as a child. Her protest response
was sharpened by frustration at how withholding Joseph could be, along with the evolutionary challenge of jealousy; his attention and resources went elsewhere. Neurobiologically, when people realize that a reward—love, sex, drugs—isn’t going to happen,
the brain’s network for rage, which is closely connected to areas in the prefrontal cortex that assess and expect rewards, is triggered. Unfulfilled expectations can make us furious and aggressive; animals denied an expected pleasure will bite or attack.

Mark Ettensohn, a Sacramento-based psychologist, says that overwhelming stress and anger can cause otherwise stable people to temporarily lose control. “Ideally, we develop a broad range of ways of dealing with adversity, and we can move fluidly between them and choose the right tool for the right situation,” he said. “When life throws us a series of curveballs, those defenses can be overwhelmed. You can fall back into a more primal way of dealing with the world.”

Sylvia’s story brings up what’s troubling about explaining romantic pursuit. Chasing may be an unconscious urge inherent to the perpetuation of the species, but we also have to acknowledge what happens when pursuit goes awry and becomes intrusive. The urge to protest rejection and run after love may be just as innate to women as it is to men. But that means that women have to contend with the implications of chasing too hard. Sylvia was standing, as I had stood, right on The Line, where objection blurs confusingly with violation.

THE LOWEST POINT OF MY OBSESSION
began when B. put aside the baseball bat and let me into his apartment. I told him I was too distraught to leave his side. He relented. We took a long walk on the wooded trail of Frick Park. It was right before Thanksgiving and the park was nearly deserted. From time to time I would stop him and put my arms around him, trying to break through his reserve, but it was like embracing a statue. He wouldn’t hold me, and he wouldn’t look into my eyes.

In the late afternoon, we ended up in my apartment. He let me touch him, and he touched me back. At first what we were doing felt
optimistic, as if it could bring us to something healthy and right, freeing him from his confusion and me from my obsession. But then a sense of despair came between us. Was he with me only because I had begged him to be? He didn’t want to enter me. Half-undressed, we gave each other orgasms. The intimacy was not a victory. It was an empty room, a mountaintop with no view, a holy grail made out of tinfoil. It was barren and sad.

He told me he had to return to his apartment and pack. He was catching a train the next morning to Washington, D.C., where he would spend Thanksgiving with his girlfriend and her family. Stunned, I watched him go.

The next morning, I went downtown alone to rent a white Kia. Several times during the eight-hour drive to my family Thanksgiving in Connecticut, I pulled off the highway to call B. from pay phones. I left long messages explaining why we should be together. I begged him to call me, to see me, to let the relationship that was supposed to happen between us finally begin. End it with her, I urged his voicemail.

I could barely speak to my family over the holiday. I buried myself in the work I’d gotten behind on, sneaking away from time to time to leave more messages. I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know what direction my life would go if he were not in it. I kept calling even though the words I spoke began to sound ugly, not because I threatened him—I never did—but because I was so needy. My future seemed incomprehensible. My pride was gone. Every message embarrassed me. I wanted to take back the words as they emerged. I think I said as much, awkwardly, on one of the messages. If he loved me back, I knew, I would be different, my power and my allure restored. But that wasn’t happening.

I seemed to have sacrificed my entire being to an impossible love.

MANY OF THE
women I’ve surveyed and interviewed about unrequited love testify to this dark shift when they became someone they couldn’t recognize. They neglected their work. They isolated themselves. They ate too much or too little. They smoked, drank, took drugs, cut themselves, and engaged in other risk-taking behaviors.
More than half of the women in my online survey said they felt like they were losing their mind. “It ate up years of my life and energy,” wrote a thirty-five-year-old public health administrator from New Mexico. “My life had become sad and small due to my obsession.” A forty-three-year-old student recounted, “I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I almost failed my courses. I broke my husband’s heart.” Talia Witkowski, a Los Angeles–based psychologist, described herself in her teens and twenties as a kind of serial unrequited lover. She once traveled to Shanghai to be with a man she’d had a fling with, even though he warned her that he was seeing someone else and didn’t want her to visit. She spent the trip in a depressed funk and drank heavily. Her obsessions felt “like slavery, like I’d been overcome by a kind of monster,” she said. “Nothing mattered but having the person return my love. I became extremely manipulative, compromised my integrity and morals, just to get him to have sex with me. There was no pleasure in it.”