Unrequited (28 page)

For self-control to work, she said, women need to “suffer out” their pain instead of contacting the beloved in an effort to get rid of it. When your beloved doesn’t respond to you, that in itself is a real loss. It doesn’t matter how long the relationship lasted or whether there was ever a “real” relationship. You need to allow yourself to mourn, just as anyone who has lost someone important needs to mourn. She tells women to expect to go through stages much like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described in her famous 1969 book,
On Death and Dying
: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They will need similar forms of support: friends they can confide in, creative outlets, structured time, physical exercise. If you need to express your feelings, Findling suggests you write the beloved a letter. Just don’t send it.

Some women, however, are released from obsession precisely
because
they had a chance to communicate what they felt to their beloved. Carolyn, the young woman who was obsessed with her art school classmate, found solace after she gave him a diary of her feelings. Sonya, the design researcher, struggled with her feelings after months of mixed signals and disappointments. She had never overtly pursued her beloved. She had never told him how much she cared about him and how much he had angered her. Once she carefully confessed to him, the last traces of her obsession went away. The difference between the unwanted woman who needs to stop connecting and the one who needs to connect lies in her degree of self-control and her level of expectation. Carolyn and Sonya reached out after they had stopped hoping for love or, for that matter, any particular response. They needed to unburden themselves of what they were feeling, and they did so with
dignity. Los Angeles clinical psychologist Jennifer Taitz cautioned that though this approach can be helpful for some people, it’s risky. “It can backfire and trigger a mini-relapse,” she said. “The thing that I say to people is: ‘Do you want to be right or live a good life?’”

Over a year after my obsession with B. subsided, I went back to Pittsburgh for a visit. My friends and I drove around the city on a Saturday night, looking for a place to have coffee. Every favorite haunt was too crowded or closed. We decided to go to the Squirrel Hill café in my old neighborhood, where B. and I had spent a lot of time. I had wanted to avoid it, but the longer we searched for a suitable place, the more inevitable it seemed. Indeed, when we walked in, B. was sitting at a table near the door with a group of my favorite students from my last year teaching in Pittsburgh. After I caught up with my students, I invited B. to sit with me at another table. I told him I was working in radio again and living in Woodstock with Bill. B. said he had been wondering where I went. He knew I left town because he stopped hearing me on the radio on Saturday mornings. It was nice to be the one who disappeared mysteriously, leaving him guessing, I thought.

We talked about what had gone on between us. He said he was still trying to figure out why he acted the way he did. I said I regretted what I had become. It wasn’t like me to be a crazed stalker, I said wryly.

We smiled at each other. I experienced a faint reprise of the old attraction, though I knew I wouldn’t act on it. I felt self-possessed again, the way I did when we were classmates, when I was mildly attracted to him but hadn’t given him any power over me. I’d made my comeback from the wreck I’d been. I was building a good, sane life without him. Facing him from that vantage point gave me some of the thrill of what I might call revenge, but none of the consequences.

And so I return to the question that launched this book: Why
did I
ever
give him all that power? Why did I get so obsessed? My outsize reaction to being unwanted didn’t, as far as I can determine, stem from an early psychological wound or malfunction of attachment. What sent me into the psychological and neurochemical maelstrom I’ve detailed in these pages was nothing that exceptional: I was lost. I’d suffered a breakup of a serious relationship—a major predictor of unwanted pursuit. I’d had several bouts of anxiety and depression since my teens and was desperate to avoid another one. My teaching job was temporary, my radio job part-time, and my writing was in a post–graduate school no-man’s-land. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my career. Several of my closest friends were leaving Pittsburgh, getting married, having children, or moving in with someone. Both my siblings had growing families. I had lived in five different states during my twenties, moving with a kind of erratic determination between going to school and radio jobs. I was weary of starting over yet again and of being on my own.

My life illustrated the downside of what social scientists now call extended adolescence. Delaying family and a settled profession—the markers of “adult life”—has its freedoms and pleasures. But such a prolonged period of uncertainty (exacerbated by an economy that increasingly feeds off of part-time, contract, and internship labor, none of which requite workers’ longings for commitment) can also engender despair. I felt lonely and ashamed. Despite my heartfelt efforts in work and love, nothing I did seemed to amount to much. None of these challenges—all common and very human—were insurmountable. But their combined force made me vulnerable when I drew close to B., a man who at first saw me as I so badly wanted to see myself: smart, desirable, strong.

MEETING MY HUSBAND
so soon after B. cut me off gave me what I was chasing so hard: the self-esteem that comes from being wanted by a good man, followed by love, marriage, and a family. I don’t want this to sound smug or easy. Early in my relationship with Bill, I returned to therapy to help myself become more emotionally self-reliant. However supportive Bill was, I was dealing with many of the same life challenges I had before I met him, and I had to realize that he wasn’t responsible for fixing them all. For our love to endure, I had to shake off the illusion that his attention was going to take care of my well-being as I sorted my life out. As a girl who came of age in the era of
The Cinderella Complex
, I had never bought into the idea that a man should provide for all my material needs. Yet until this turning point in my life, the myth persisted that a partner would provide completely for my emotional security.

My relationship with Bill meant I skipped a very difficult stage endured by many people coping with unrequited love: walking into the future without a partner. But that doesn’t have to mean walking into the future without love. The role of good love in easing a failed obsession isn’t limited to replacement romances. Caroline Hostetler, a behavioral neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University, studies the impact of social attachment on addictive disorders. She takes issue with researchers who maintain that because the neural processes of love, social attachment, and addiction have so much in common,
the same pharmacological treatments for addiction might apply to people suffering from the loss of love. This line of thinking, she says, misses a crucial point: Social attachments are necessary to our welfare, whereas drugs and alcohol are not. The fact that both social attachments and substance abuse trigger reward systems suggests that quality relationships of all sorts can neurologically “compete” with substance
addiction. “Maybe social relationships can be the more powerful addiction,” she says.

The obsessed lover is caught in a bind when her quest for attachment to the beloved becomes unhealthy and compulsive. Seeking other human connections—supportive family and friends, therapy groups, community—can help give her addiction to him some healthy neurochemical competition.

MELISSA, A FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD
office manager, was in an obsessive, on-again, off-again affair with Gordon for three years. Two months after they got together, she found out that he was seeing another woman. He described it as a temporary relationship. Then Melissa found out he had been with her for two years and owned a house with her. The news tore Melissa up. She spent months crying and writing letters to him that she never sent. The only comfort she could find seemed to be with him. Their affair resumed. “I should have run, but I didn’t,” she said.

At first they spent every weekend together, fishing on his boat. Melissa loved the peacefulness of being out on the water with him and having him all to herself. When his girlfriend found out what was going on, Gordon told Melissa that she didn’t mind. Melissa started to, though. “He could have her and me, too, and I felt cheated,” she said. “I began to lose my confidence and self-respect.” Even though she tried to stop seeing Gordon, she let the affair drag out for four years. “I just turned into a dead person. I wasn’t doing anything but living for him and going to work so I could survive.”

Then she felt the pull of a different kind of attachment. Her brother, who lived in Florida and suffered from schizophrenia and advancing dementia, was dying. She decided to leave Tennessee to
be with him and her sister, who lived nearby and would help with his care. “That became my priority,” she said. “I knew my relationship wasn’t giving anything to me anymore, and I knew if I didn’t leave, I’d be stuck indefinitely in the twilight zone, doing the same thing over and over again. I didn’t want to leave, but I just felt I had to. I couldn’t go on.”

She sold her house and left the state. “I knew I could do this thing—move away and leave him and care for my brother,” she said. “I could be the winner a little bit.” For the next two years, she was swept up in her brother’s needs. He required constant care. “He was always after attention from doctors, nurses, me,” she said. “I could never stop to rest or relax.” Although it was exhausting, it broke her tie to Gordon. “I focused on my brother rather than myself and how sad and lonely I felt.” The move, which brought her closer to other family members, made her feel more confident and stable. All she had to do was look at her brother, who needed her so much. Everything she’d been through with Gordon felt “a little silly” in comparison. This renewed human connection could sustain her as she finally gained distance from Gordon.

Psychologists call heartbreak “social pain.” Rejection hurts so much because we’ve lost a social connection. Social pain is an adaptation. Our ancestors needed other people to protect themselves from wild animals, hostile tribes, and the elements. To be excluded from a community was a life-threatening proposition, so the strife of being rejected had to push people to respond as they would to a physical injury: They had to do something to repair it. Social pain and physical pain involve similar areas of the brain and cause similar reactions—weeping, screaming, seeking help.
The caring presence of other people helps alleviate hurt feelings
and
physical pain; several studies show that higher levels of social support are associated with lower levels of pain in labor, after surgery, and in people
suffering from chronic pain and heart disease. Melissa could, in today’s terms, “take care of herself”—she’d been on her own for years. But what helped ease the blow of rejection was reconnecting with her siblings. They needed her, and she needed them.

Loved ones and other forms of social attachment are crucial, helping us fend off all manner of challenges to our ability to thrive. In a society where more people live alone than ever before, it’s easy to forget that closeness to others isn’t a luxury, something to seek out when we don’t have anything else to do. It’s tempting to live out too much of our social lives online, at the expense of real-life human contact. If we isolate ourselves, we risk being all the more vulnerable when someone walks into our lives and triggers all that unsatisfied need.

Yet there is no question that social attachments to family and friends are very different from romantic love. Even the best strategies for ending romantic obsession can feel very much like paces to put yourself through, emotional homework: necessary but not nearly as exciting as what we left behind. They’re meant to help us stop suffering. But they can seem to require us to stop living so large, so unrealistically. We must become
sensible.
The pull of unrequited love can stem from a longing for transcendence, a need to experience great, impractical feeling. So for some of us, moving beyond obsession may entail finding something or someone with a similar ineffable power.

Lina, an Italian-language specialist and forty-six-year-old single mother, expressed this idea perfectly in a bit of woodsy folklore: “They say the antidote grows right next to the poison.”

Lina is exactly the kind of person I’m talking about. She does need to live large, whether by investigating the intricacies of Italian etymology or immersing herself in a new and enchanting friendship. She has a sharp, analytical mind and a mystical emotional
sensibility guided by moments of synchronicity. Her daughter was conceived with a man she had spent a passionate night with in a lightning storm. He lived in Greece and saw his daughter only sporadically. Lina cherished her daughter, but raising her alone was difficult. She had little money and little help; her parents had died when she was in her twenties.

She met Bartolo through a mutual friend when he was visiting from Italy. They connected immediately over their mutual interest in languages, “geeking out” over etymology and the connections among Italian, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. They soon discovered that they were born on the same day, three hours apart, which Lina took as a sign that “there was something bigger at work”—they were meant to be together. She nursed that feeling for two years, despite the fact that Bartolo disappointed her again and again. When she and her daughter visited him in Italy, he became jealous of the four-year-old girl and kicked them out of his home. On a trip to Romania, he abandoned her after a disagreement and sent a text to let her know where he’d moved her luggage. They got together again in Mexico. Finally, Lina said, everything felt “perfect, a honeymoon.” Then his attention wandered to a Venetian woman they’d met in a restaurant. At the end of the trip, when he put Lina on a bus to the airport instead of driving her there, she knew he planned to seek the woman out. Lina’s love for Bartolo, she realized, left her in a “constant state of longing.” It had to come to an end.