Unrequited (16 page)

Unrequited love, as we’ve seen, often revolves around what we imagine the beloved to be and how loving him makes us see the world in new ways. The revelatory potential of unrequited love lies in our ability to step back and recognize what is motivating our yearning. When the unwanted woman loses herself to unrequited love, she can’t separate herself from her fantasies about the beloved and their future together. In this state, the love means everything to her, and seems to merit every effort, no matter how hurtful or self-destructive. This can seem like martyrdom. She feels she’s doing it all for him. But this state of abjection is a profoundly
narcissistic one. It’s all about her and her investment in the fantasy of love that she has created.

NOTHING ILLUSTRATES THIS
state more vividly than the saga of astronaut Lisa Nowak. Nowak had a three-year extramarital affair with William Oefelein, an astronaut colleague. The romance ended when he informed her in a crowded NASA gym that he’d fallen in love with another woman. Three weeks later, Nowak drove nine hundred miles from Houston to Orlando, wearing an adult diaper so she wouldn’t have to stop to urinate. Then she donned a dark wig and a trench coat and followed Oefelein’s new girlfriend, Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, through a parking garage. When Shipman refused to talk to her, Nowak attacked her with pepper spray.

And so Nowak became the “astro-nut,” driven crazy by “lust in space,” inspiring one-liners such as this one by Jay Leno: “She went to court yesterday and was released on her own incontinence.” The media merrymaking reflected an all too common reaction to female stalking. Laughing is a way to shake off how frightening it is, a way to feel in control when faced with the prospect of a woman gone haywire.

Nowak’s stalking
was
scary, and it could have been worse—just before she was arrested, she was seen stuffing in the trash a bag containing a loaded BB gun. She was carrying a four-inch buck knife and a steel mallet. The attack traumatized Shipman, who pleaded for a restraining order and testified in court about living in a constant state of fear.
(Shipman and Oefelein are now married and running a freelance writing and photography business in Alaska.) The incident also put NASA under intense scrutiny. How could a woman so emotionally unstable not only have been sent into space the year before—but also be slated to be the voice of Mission Control for the next scheduled shuttle flight?

The fact is that before the breakup with Oefelein, Nowak showed little indication of being out of control. She had spent most of her career proving herself worthy of being chosen for a space mission, juggling long days and rigorous training regimens with raising three children. Earlier in her career, she applied six times to get in to the navy’s test pilot school. One reason she kept being denied was that her legs didn’t meet the minimum length requirement. She challenged the policy, which disproportionately affected women, and finally got in. After she was chosen to become an astronaut, she had to respond to reporters who queried her about daring to aspire to space travel when she had kids at home. “Anything you do is risky,” she calmly told them. In 2003, not long after she found out she was scheduled for an upcoming space mission, the
Columbia
exploded, killing her best friend, Laurel Clark, and the rest of the crew. Nowak buried her own sense of loss—and her rising fears about meeting the same fate—by throwing her energy into helping Clark’s family through their grief. The mission she was scheduled for was canceled as NASA tried to figure out what went wrong. During this acutely stressful time, Nowak’s affair with Oefelein began.

When Nowak did go on the 2006
Discovery
mission, her role required the utmost in focus. She was one of two “robo-chicks” assigned to operate the controls of the robotic arm that would allow the crew to examine the underside of the spacecraft for damage. One moment of inattention and the arm could swing wildly in the weightlessness of space, endangering the shuttle and its crew. She did her job well, and the
Discovery
’s successful mission provided the world with more proof that NASA had bounced back from the
Columbia
disaster. After the
Discovery
landed, Nowak toured elementary schools; made a triumphant appearance at her alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy; and sat for an interview with
Ladies’ Home Journal
. She was slated to be on the cover of the May 2007 issue celebrating motherhood.

After Nowak’s February arrest, several of her NASA colleagues felt, along with the shock of what she’d done, the loss of a valued colleague. Laurel Clark’s widower, Dr. Jon Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon, became one of several NASA colleagues who expressed support for Nowak. He described her as having been “wonderful” and “nurturing” in his family’s time of grief. In a letter to the Florida judge deciding Nowak’s case, Clark said that astronauts could be vulnerable to depression from a “
let-down period after the tremendous high of flying in space.” Nowak’s downfall was a collective loss. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
cover was canned before the issue went to press. That über working mom at the pinnacle of human achievement was gone. And she had been
ours—
a product of our space program, our tax dollars, our progress on getting women into the most demanding and competitive professions, and our ongoing impractical desire to watch our fellow human beings go beyond the earth’s gravitational pull.

The scandalous titillation of Nowak’s ruin obscured the importance of these losses and how very sad her downfall was. The morning of her arrest, Nowak sat in the Orlando police department, utterly bewildered. She repeatedly insisted that what she had done wasn’t normal for her. She was a good woman, a woman of accomplishment. “How could this be happening to me?” she asked. As exceptional as Nowak’s life was, her bafflement is something any woman who has ever lost herself to unrequited love can relate to.

When Nowak was six, she watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon and knew she wanted to become an astronaut. So many children have this dream. They look at the glittering dome of the night sky and want to
be there
.
She was one of the rare ones who made it. And then she fell, hard and fast, from the stars.

WHY DOES OBSESSIVE
love have this power? Its neurochemistry gives us some basic insight: The addictive, reward-seeking mechanism of passionate love becomes more extreme. The unrequited lover is like a junkie, willing to do anything for a fix. She is
flooded with feeling: fear, anger, guilt, shame, jealousy, and sadness. She has a goal she can’t achieve. It hurts her, frustrates her, pisses her off. Nowak also saw a clear obstacle to her love: another woman. Dr. Louann Brizendine, the director of the Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, has commented that while it’s normal to have rageful, jealous fantasies of hurting your rival, Nowak took the additional step of acting on them. Brizendine saw in Nowak’s behavior signs that she was in a “fixed delusional state”—in which a clearly false belief (in this case, something along the lines of “If I attack my rival, I will get my lover back”) seems indisputably true. Nowak was functioning normally in every other area of her life, yet
lost her grip on reality—and self-control—when it came to coping with Oefelein’s rejection. Other psychologists have speculated that Nowak had a personality disorder, which means that even though she functioned normally in everyday life, jealousy may have exposed disturbed patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior underneath her hyper-achiever surface.

I would do anything for you
. In mutual love, this line shimmers. With its connotation of self-sacrifice, the phrase seems a romantically extreme expression of commitment. But in unrequited love, the object—the “you”—doesn’t want the commitment. So the expression becomes suspect, raising the question: What exactly is it that you’re sacrificing yourself for?

The answer may lie in the complex dynamics of narcissism. The martyred unrequited lover sacrifices herself
to herself—
the
self she believes will emerge from her beloved’s attention, the noble creature trapped inside the suffering beast. The normal sort of narcissism that can emerge in passionate new love becomes entrenched and “highly emotionally charged,” said forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy. “You feel like you have a right to pursue this person, and you see yourself as different from other people. The greater your self-absorption, the less empathy you feel for others.” This can be the beginning of a dangerous path, as Nowak’s story shows: a “pathology of narcissism,” in which the obsessed lover becomes acutely sensitive to rejection and feels shamed and humiliated by it,
triggering the urge to retaliate.

AMBER, A THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD
aspiring actress in New Jersey, was in the Hudson County Correctional Facility on a drug conviction when she met Roy. The other women in her cell would get up on the sink and talk to men through an air vent. They urged Amber to try it herself. The man on the other side had a deep, raspy voice and spoke slowly. “I loved his voice,” she said. “It sent chills through my spine.”

They talked through the night. They discovered they were from the same neighborhood in Jersey City and knew a lot of the same people. Three days later, she saw a guy outside in the courtyard, doing triangle push-ups. He had dark skin, short hair, and a slim, muscular body. She found out it was Roy.

After she got out of jail, she visited him regularly and sent him money, “doing everything a woman was supposed to do.” The day he was released, nearly a year after their first conversation through the vent, she waited eagerly for him to arrive. She sat on her porch late into the night, but he didn’t show up. He rang the doorbell at eight the next morning. They slept together, an experience she described as “having sex, not making love”—as if all the affection
he’d expressed while he was behind bars had never existed. He left soon after to go back to his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his daughter. “He was blowing me off,” she said. “I couldn’t believe how he made me feel after all the time I’d put into this.” She had been sober for over a year but went out drinking that night.

In the ten years since, Roy has bounced in and out of jail, on and off heroin, and in and out of the relationship with his daughter’s mother. None of this has stopped Amber from loving him. Her obsession with him has turned her life into an emotional version of the
Groundhog Day
movie. Every day she hopes he will change and be fully hers. When Roy is incarcerated, Amber is his only regular visitor. She writes him long letters every night, sends him money, and pays for his cell phone. Behind bars, Roy is expressive and warm. He promises to treat her right. But when he is released, instead of running into her arms, he starts using drugs again and pushes her away. She hangs on. Eventually, he’s back in prison and the cycle of hope and disappointment begins again.

Amber knows she’s living for the fantasy of a loving life with Roy, but she can’t let it go. Her experiences in the here and now are not truly real or important, because Roy isn’t with her. Her life is on hold.

Three years ago, Amber started living with another man. But whenever Roy is sprung and wants to be with her, she’ll kick the man out or insist that Roy sleep on their couch. She loves her live-in boyfriend, “but I’m not in love with him. I told him to leave a billion times. I know my heart’s not there for him
.
I told him to get someone who’s there a hundred percent. What I want at the end of the day is Roy, the one I’m in love with. We are supposed to be together.”

UNREQUITED LOVE CAN
keep the unwanted woman in a “frozen state,” said Suzanne Lachmann, a New York–based clinical
psychologist. “How can she evolve or grow when her validation comes from a beloved who gives her so little?” Her hunger for attention is often rooted in her past. An unavailable father, for example, can lead a woman to fall for an unavailable guy later. It’s a phenomenon that psychoanalysis calls transference—
the redirection of feelings from a prior relationship, usually in childhood, onto a new person. “The reason you are doing it is out of a desperate hope for that person to repair that rupture within you,” Lachmann said. At the same time, women who have sunk deeply in an unrequited obsession “don’t feel deserving of reciprocity. They are so used to fighting for love that they blow up the meaning of even the slightest acknowledgment. In their lives, they didn’t learn to want more, and they haven’t had more.”

However unsatisfying this frozen state is, it may seem more appealing than the alternative: facing what life is like without the dream of the man who’s supposed to be yours. “The person can feel better when focused on the fantasy rather than stepping back and seeing the reality of a blighted life that’s sad, lonesome, and full of loss,” J. Reid Meloy said. “The hard work of mourning is avoided through obsessive thinking.”

When obsessions become painful and entrenched, and the unwanted woman can’t control the pull to be with her rejecting beloved, she enters what psychotherapist Rhonda Findling calls “the masochistic zone.” Love becomes suffering. “You will do anything to keep the connection,” she said. “You will sell your soul out, your pride.”

Life in the masochistic zone doesn’t seem anything like narcissism. The popular understanding of the term is that it entails vanity and selfishness. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is characterized by grandiosity, an overwhelming need for admiration, and a
lack of empathy for others. Psychologist Mark Ettensohn says this
diagnosis captures only “half of the picture of narcissism.” There’s also “the flip side, which can include vulnerability, shame, fear of dependency, and a proclivity for feeling used, discarded, unimportant, and misunderstood. These are just as essential to narcissism as other traits.” What both kinds of narcissism have in common is the tendency to use other people to fulfill parts of the self. When people with narcissism “feel like something is missing inside, they will look for it in another person, someone they idealize,” he said. “And in the narcissist’s mind, that person is experienced as an extension of the self. When that person disappoints the narcissist or fails to meet his or her expectations, the narcissist may savagely devalue the person they formerly idealized.”