Unrequited (25 page)

There are less edgy expressions of unrequited longing pretty much everywhere. At any given moment, you can find an unwanted woman who makes art out of lost love at an open-mike night, or in a community poetry workshop, or in the Top 40 rotation on the radio.

WE HAVE FAMILIAR
ways of describing what happens when people make use of frustrated love. There’s the Freudian idea of sublimation, the deflecting of sexual desire into higher pursuits. We may
simply say the unwanted woman has finally found the right distraction, following the “Stay busy!” admonition so common in women’s magazine articles about Getting Over Him. Yet these explanations don’t really take into account the
devotional
aspect of what unrequited love can inspire. Wollstonecraft traveled and wrote not in spite of Imlay, not to forget Imlay, but because of Imlay. In her precarious state, if she could not see these pursuits as being for him, she probably would not have taken them on. Kraus has said that Dick “gave me someone to write to,” the mystery of his silence impelling her work.

What is it about the state of romantic obsession that induces some unrequited lovers to action and creation? Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroaesthetics at University College London and a pioneer in the modern study of visual perception, asserts that creativity is a fundamental human response to the frustrations of love. We carry within us an inherited universal ideal of passionate love as an experience of union; love stories, mythology, and philosophy from both Western and non-Western cultures
portray the desire of two lovers to merge into one being. The neurochemistry of passionate love makes us feel that this ideal is within our grasp. The release of dopamine in the reward center of the brain causes euphoria and exhilaration. Activity in the amygdala, where the fear response is generated, quiets down, promoting feelings of bravery. There’s less blood flow to areas of the brain associated with judgment and negative emotions. The self, so emboldened and accepting, is readied to give itself over, as these changes in the brain weaken the divide between self and other,
reinforcing the concept of union in love.

But a true merging exists only as an imagined ideal. Human experience will always fall short. Even in a loving sexual relationship, partners are confined to their separate selves. Several recent
studies indicate that the release of dopamine is as connected to desire—the expectation of reward—as it is to the feeling of receiving the rewards of love and sex. The reward of physical and emotional intimacy leads to longing for more. The climax, as Zeki puts it, immediately becomes an anticlimax.

The impossibility of fully experiencing romantic oneness with another gives the unrequited lover a strange advantage when it comes to creativity. “Be gone from me! Love for you so engages me that I have no time for you,” Majnun reprimands his beloved, Layla, in the renowned Persian fable. Her presence disrupts his created fantasy of their perfect love, expressed through the poetry he writes in the sand. He can invest all he wants in his creation; it draws him closer to the ideal than Layla—who was married off to another—ever could.

Creativity, as Zeki puts it, is a way of coping with the melancholy of unsatisfied yearning for unity. Creativity can step in as a way to respond to the gap between the “unity in love” concept and reality. Creative effort—exerted by the business manager, the child building a sand castle, the painter, the poet—engages the brain in a struggle similar to the struggle to love. Both involve the reward system, the brain’s quest for satisfaction. Both the lover and the artist have the challenge of creating something real out of a concept in their heads. Both will, more often than not, find that reality falls short. Both will try again and again to figure out how to “get it right.” Just as I once strategized and restrategized ways into B.’s heart—coy distance and waiting? insistent confrontation?—I will rewrite this paragraph many times.

The magnitude of feeling varies, of course; my diligence in crafting this paragraph is only a quiet echo of my diligence in the pursuit of B. But the fundamental similarities in the processes of creativity and passionate love matter. They are both a form of
emotional currency. We ponder to what extent one pursuit can be exchanged for another. Hence our long-standing intrigue with the virgin authoress, a stock figure of nineteenth-century literary history. She makes herself a nun in the Church of Art, living her life without mutual romantic love. The shadow of unrequited love frequently hangs over her, creating mysteries: Who was the man behind Jane Austen’s insights into romance—Tom Lefroy or Dr. Samuel Blackall? Who gave rise to Emily Dickinson’s heartsick verse—Reverend Charles Wadsworth, her mentor and correspondent?
Her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert?

These spinsters seem to have made a bargain with Eros: Strike me with your arrow, and I will make art instead of love. This sort of deal frees them to dwell on the imagined perfection of ideal love instead of mutual love’s faulty lived reality. In this way they are like Dante and Werther, yet the spinster artist has even more at stake. Mutual love almost inevitably led to domesticity, and babies, and far less time and space for a creative mind. The unwanted woman, historically, was a freer woman. We still contend with this legacy. The pop singer Adele wrote the Grammy-award winning “Someone Like You” and the rest of her smash-hit album
21
in response to the end of a “rubbish relationship.” When she fell in love again and got pregnant, she offered a satisfying resolution to her woe. One of my daughter’s friends, at age nine, proclaimed exuberantly: “Adele has a new boyfriend and she’s going to have a baby and she’ll never be sad again!” (Her mother sagely warned her that life has no such guarantees.) There was one immediate drawback to Adele’s happy ending: less of her music. Adele announced that she would need to take a break from touring for several years—leaning out, we might call it—to help her new domesticity survive. “
If I am constantly working, my relationships fail,” she said.

The misery of imperfect love, Zeki writes, “generates splendors
in its turn” with the brain’s capacity to “turn that discontent into creative achievement.” Based on existing brain scan research on how people respond to art, Zeki surmised that the creative process likely involves the orbital-frontal cortex,
thought to be related to emotion and reward in decision-making. As the brain lights on a work of art that it considers beautiful, blood flow steps up in this area, causing a feeling of satisfaction; a decrease in blood flow is a sign of dissatisfaction. Similar fluctuations, Zeki discovered, occurred in the caudate nucleus,
found near the center of the brain. The caudate nucleus also activates in response to passionate love; it’s the place that integrates more complex thoughts and emotions from different brain regions with the
primal, dopamine-fueled rush of desire. The neural maps of our reactions to beauty and to love, then, literally overlap.

The common ground in the processes of love, rejection, and creativity suggests it isn’t a very far leap, physiologically speaking, from the pursuit of love to the pursuit of art, particularly for the unrequited lover, who is left empty-handed and unoccupied as the reward of reciprocated love escapes her. One recent study shows that for people who have a high need to feel unique (a common characteristic of artists and innovators), social rejection causes them to score higher on tests of creativity. The
outsider identity, which rejection reinforces, nurtures their ability to innovate.

Famed dancer Isadora Duncan insisted that love and art were inextricable, and that she spent her life always “madly in love.” As a young dancer living in France, she suffered a double whammy of romantic rejection. She arranged a dinner with champagne and roses for a man she adored, only to watch him rush off in a panic from the romantic scene. She turned in consolation to another suitor, who thrilled her by checking them in to a hotel room under the assumed names of a married couple. Finally, she thought in
ecstasy, she would know what love was. But the man backed away, evidently fearful about taking her virginity, and sent her home in a cab. “This last shock,” she wrote in her 1927 autobiography
My Life
, “had a decided effect on my emotional nature, turning all its force toward my Art
which gave me the joys which Love withheld.”

Her connection to dance became more profound. She would stand for hours with her hands folded between her breasts, covering what she came to believe was “the central spring of all movement” in the body. She would develop her highly influential school of dance based on this idea. It was a marked departure from the predominant theory that movement had to stem from the base of the spine—a concept that Duncan said yielded “a mechanical movement not worthy of the soul.” The image of Duncan standing in such profound focus and discovery says much about the potential for creativity to arise out of unrequited love. Even if artistic perfection can be as elusive as perfect love, the cycle of reward seeking, dissatisfaction, and satisfaction in making art depends on what the unwanted woman can accomplish herself—not how the beloved responds to her.

THE STORIES OF
great artists, I realize, set the bar high. I know from my own experience that the shift from one reward system to another is no magic bullet. There’s no recipe for turning the energy of longing into something productive, only examples showing us that it’s possible. The euphoric beginning of my obsession, when winning B.’s love seemed possible, did inspire me to write. But after a few months, I was too distracted to work. It was not until after my obsession ended that I could sit down at a desk again. Even then I had to be hours away from him, at an artists’ colony in another state where my sole obligation was to write. I wasn’t writing
for him, and I wasn’t writing particularly well. But I was glad to have some focus back.

What my unrequited love inspired, in the end, was not an accomplishment but a change within myself. As I recovered, I made a resolution. “You can’t want anyone who isn’t good to you,” I decided, with the corollary that I had to be able to be good to that person in turn. It was an embarrassingly simple formula, one that I hope my abundantly confident daughter will follow instinctually. If I’d had that rule with B., nothing would have gone past the first indication that he was too confused about his girlfriend to treat me well. I don’t know if I would have stopped loving him or prevented myself from becoming obsessed. But I would have kept my respect and sense of self-control. I would have had much less to regret.

With this much needed resolution, my life took a turn that, in retrospect, feels miraculous. Just weeks after B. told me we could never speak again, I met the man who would become my husband. I was very lucky, scoring my life partner on the rebound. I often wonder how I would have fared if I hadn’t met Bill. Yet as we slowly built our relationship, my new understanding of myself, and what love should entail, made a difference. I had a standard to go by. I did not want to be the woman who chased too hard again. I needed to make what I had gone through worth something, at least to myself. Later, as I started to deepen my investigation of unrequited love, I met other women who felt that the force of romantic obsession pushed them to change for the better and see their lives anew. The disruptiveness of their unrequited love was in retrospect essential. Their obsession pushed them to where they needed to be.

CAREENA IS A
woman who commands notice. She is tall and curvy and always has on the highest heels in the room, giving her an Amazonian presence. She works in public relations and has a digital
Rolodex gilded with celebrities she can convince to do her bidding, often for charity causes; they find her brazenness and Sarah Silverman sense of humor irresistible.

When her son was young, life was a lot quieter. She was restless in her “cushy stay-at-home-mom life.” She spent a lot of time shopping and working out at the gym. Her husband of fifteen years had a high-powered advertising job and came home each night preoccupied with work. He wasn’t paying much attention to her, and she pointedly told him so. He made an effort—flowers here, compliments there—but he also said he didn’t have much time for her. He was too busy making the money she was spending, he explained.

“I’m a pretty tough cookie, and that wasn’t going to cut it,” she said. “Looking back on it, I probably should have said, ‘We should go to couples therapy or look at this with a mediator.’ But I didn’t do that. Instead, what I did was look across my gym one day and see this very attractive, interesting woman.”

“Who is that?” she asked her trainer.

“That,” he said, “is trouble.”

Careena had never been attracted to women before. “No fooling around, no crushes, no masturbation fantasies where women creep into it. I liked men and sex with men.” But there was Sharon, a graduate student ten years younger than she was. Careena walked up, introduced herself, and said, “I have to tell you, I find you captivating. Would you like to have lunch?” She gave Sharon her number and waited with mad impatience the two days it took for her to call. When they met for lunch, one of the first things Careena said was “I’m just going to tell you right away, I’m wildly attracted to you. I don’t know why. I know nothing about you. I want to know why I’m attracted to you. I want you to tell me more about yourself.”

During Careena’s six-month obsession, she and Sharon spent days together while Careena’s son was at school. Careena
often hired afternoon babysitters so they could be with each other longer. They emailed and texted constantly whenever they were apart. They got matching tattoos. Careena wanted badly to sleep with Sharon. They were affectionate and spent a weekend alone together, sharing the same bed. But Sharon refused to have sex with her. “She was very clear about that,” Careena said. “She said, ‘There’s no way I’m getting involved with a married mother of a child. I’m not going to be your little gay experiment.’”

Careena didn’t hide what she was doing from her husband, and he didn’t ask her to stop seeing Sharon. “Maybe why she’s so important to you is something you need to think about,” he said. “I won’t stand in your way, but I don’t really like the person you’re becoming around this.” He knew Careena was losing interest in him and pursuing love with someone else. “The intensity was unlike anything that I have ever experienced in my entire life, ever, ever,” she said. “I’ve seen pictures of myself from that time. I’m sparkling. I’m wearing pajamas sitting around someone else’s house, and I’m absolutely glowing in the dark.”