Unrequited (35 page)

167       
 
would move on from these “homosexual attachments” as they grew older:
E. B. Hurlock and E. R. Klein, “Adolescent ‘Crushes,’”
Child Development
5 (1934): 63–80.

167       
 
Nearly every girl has had at least one crush by the age of fourteen:
Ninety-four percent of girls between twelve and fourteen report having had at least one crush. Kimberly D. Hearn, Ph.D.; Lucia F. O’Sullivan, Ph.D.; and Cheryl D. Dudley, M.A., “Assessing Reliability of Early Adolescent Girls’ Reports of Romantic and Sexual Behavior,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
32 (2003): 513–21.

167       
 
far more likely to have a crush than a relationship:
Fifty-six percent of middle-schoolers from four schools in suburban Buffalo had crushes, while 40 percent had an opposite-sex friend and 15 percent of students were in a relationship. Julie C. Bowker et al, “Having and Being an Other-Sex Crush During Early Adolescence,” 363.

168       
 
the crush may transition into a mutual relationship:
Rivka Tuval-Mashiach, Sophie Walsh, Shirley Harel, and Shmuel Shulman, “Romantic Fantasies, Cross-Gender Friendships, and Romantic Experiences in Adolescence,”
Journal of Adolescent Research
23 (2008): 481–82.

168       
 
are linked with lower grades and standardized test scores:
Peggy C. Giordano, Wendy D. Manning, Monica A. Longmore, “Adolescent Romantic Relationships: An Emerging Portrait of Their Nature and Developmental Significance,”
Romance and Sex in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood
, ed. Ann C. Crouter and Alan Booth (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005): 140–41.

168       
 
much less likely than their peers to graduate from high school and enroll in college:
Serious daters go on dates at least once a week and/or have had sex. “Serious daters were much less likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college than were non-daters and moderate daters. While non-daters and moderate daters graduated from high school by the age of 20 at fairly high rates (85
and 86 percent respectively), only 73 percent of serious daters graduated from high school. . . . Similarly, only 59 percent of serious daters had enrolled in college by the last wave of survey data collection, compared to 71 percent of moderate daters and 66 percent of non-daters.” Chung Pham et al, “Evaluating Impacts of Early Adolescent Romance in High School on Academic Outcomes,”
Journal of Applied Economics and Business Research
3 (2013): 18.

168       
 
the greater the probability they will suffer from depression:
Kara Joyner and J. Richard Udry, “You Don’t Bring Me Anything but Down: Adolescent Romance and Depression,”
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
41 (2000): 369–91.

169       
 
dating relationships are their single greatest source of stress:
Wendy D. Manning, Peggy C. Giordano, and Monica A. Longmore, “Adolescent Dating Relationships: Implications for Understanding Adult Intimate Unions,” in
A Multidisciplinary Inquiry into Change and Variation in Intimate Unions
, ed. L. Casper and S. Bianchi, 2008.

176—77
in a 1992 essay on Beatlemania:
Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatlemania: A Sexually Defiant Consumer Subculture?” in
The Subculture Reader
, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 527.

177       
 
which might later be used to humiliate her:
Elizabeth Perle, “THIS Is Why You Should F***ing Love Teenage Girls,”
Huffington Post
, October 24, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/why-i-fing-love-teenage-girls_n_4156383.html.

177       
 
there’s no significant obligation or responsibility:
See Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,”
Psychiatry
19 (1956): 215–29.

177—78       
 
“if you love me / then I’ll never play Halo again”:
Mike Lombardo, “Hey Molly,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENZdTTXrdQ8.

178       
 
apology about his abusive relationship with an admirer:
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, “The Tom Milsom Abuse Scandal and YouTube’s Troubling Cult of Worship,”
The Daily Dot
, March 14, 2014, http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/tom-milsom-underage-sex-scandal/.

178       
manipulating underage girls into sending him sexually explicit photos and videos:
“YouTube ‘Star,’ 25, Jailed for Exchanging Explicit Images with Underage Female Fans,”
Daily Mail
, March 1, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2570619/New-York-musician-YouTube-star-25-imprisoned-five-years-exchanging-explicit-images-underage-female-fans.html.

179       
 
a push back against the manufactured conventions of teen sexuality:
Rachel Monroe, “The Killer Crush: The Horror of Teen Girls, From Columbiners to Beliebers,”
The Awl
, October 5, 2012, http://www.theawl.com/2012/10/the-killer-crush-from-columbiners-to-beliebers.

181       
 
The movie wasn’t distributed far beyond the film-festival circuit:
Dear Lemon Lima
opened at one theater in Los Angeles. Yoonessi said she canceled a scheduled screening in Brooklyn because it was at a movie theater with a bar, where children were not allowed, and she considered the movie a “family film.” The film was available for a while on Netflix and, at this writing, is available on Hulu. The film has had some international distribution. Telephone interview with Suzi Yoonessi on December 14, 2013.

183       
 
Legally Blonde,
itself a fable about turning romantic rejection into empowerment:
Elle, the girlie and seemingly frivolous main character, is dumped by her boyfriend, who is about to start at Harvard Law School. She gains admission to the program in the hope of winning him back. She loses interest in the boyfriend and becomes a brilliant law student.

185       
 
some kind of transcendent “union of the soul” relationship:
Clare R. Goldfarb, “Female Friendship: An Alternative to Marriage and the Family in Henry James’s Fiction?”
Colby Quarterly
26 (1990), http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2804&context=cq.

188       
 
“changed my life for the better”:
In response to the multiple-choice question “How did your most significant experience of unrequited
love affect your life?,” 32.10 percent of the women who filled out my online survey responded, “It changed my life for the better.” Forty percent responded, “It changed my life for the worse,” and 14 percent responded, “It did not really change my life.” See http://www.lisaaphillips.com/survey/index.php?sid=24932&lang=en.

188       
 
“the lover is forced to notice what is missing”:
Jacqueline Wright, “Bittersweet Eros,” Jung Society of Atlanta newsletter, Fall 2004, http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/fall04-bittersweet-eros.pdf.

189       
 
yearning, longing, or regret for “that which is elsewhere”:
Page du Bois,
Sappho Is Burning
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 29.

189       
 
“I am and dead—or almost / I seem to me”:
Anne Carson,
Eros the Bittersweet
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 13.

189       
 
and enjoy being inspired:
Aron et al, “Motivations for Unreciprocated Love,” 787.

190       
 
should last only as long as the feeling of love:
Wollstonecraft and Imlay came together, agreeing on theories about “the importance of freedom and immorality of maintaining a tie once feeling had ceased to sanction it.” Claire Tomalin,
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
(New York: Signet Classic, 1974), 179.

191       
 
she wrote from Paris in 1795:
Janet Todd, ed.,
A Wollstonecraft Anthology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 242.

192       
 
followed by reassurances that she was overcoming the pain:
After spotting a wild pansy called Heart’s Ease on the shores of Sweden, she wrote, “a cruel remembrance suffused my eyes, but it passed away like an April shower.” Ibid., 147.

192       
 
discredit Wollstonecraft’s feminism (as some modern critics have done):
See Susan Eilenberg, “Forget That I Exist,”
London Review of Books
, November 20, 2000, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n23/susan-eilenberg/forget-that-i-exist.

192       
 
the “creature of feeling and imagination”:
Todd, ed.,
A Wollstonecraft Anthology
, 185.

192       
 
“keep me no longer in suspense!—Let me see you once more!”:
Ibid., 253.

193       
“We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel”:
Ibid., 168.

193       
 
that might have silenced her forever:
My description of Wollstonecraft’s relationship with Imlay and its impact on her work is based on Claire Tomalin’s
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
(1974) and Janet Todd’s
A Wollstonecraft Anthology.
Additional resources include Christina Nehring’s account of Wollstonecraft’s life in
A Vindication of Love
, 176–92.

193       
 
the passionate expressiveness that would distinguish
Jane Eyre
and
Villette
:
Lucasta Miller,
The Brontë Myth
(New York: Knopf, 2001), 124.

193       
 
a book that stunned its original audience with its emotional frankness:
Ibid., 14–16.

194       
 
A nine-year-old girl wonders why, if the email author says he loves Calle, is he leaving her?:
Henry Samuel, “Conceptual Artist Dumped by Email Gets Revenge on Ex-love,”
The Telegraph
, April 25, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1903952/Conceptual-artist-dumped-by-email-gets-revenge-on-ex-lover.html.

194       
 
sue her for invasion of privacy, then changed his mind:
Giovanni Intra, “a Fusion of Gossip and Theory,” http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/index/intra/intra11-13-97.asp.

195       
 
portray the desire of two lovers to merge into one being:
Western tradition has from Plato’s symposium the tale of the two missing halves reuniting. The Persian poet Rumi tells us that “lovers do not find each other; they are in each other.” This concept can have a spiritual dimension, with devotional writings that are indistinguishable from love poetry, as in the lavishly sensual Song of Songs. It doesn’t matter, Zeki argues, whether we can say for sure whether the Song of Songs is about desire for God or for another human. What matters is that the brain concept of ideal love is so lofty that it counts for both divine and profane love. Zeki,
Splendors and Miseries of the Brain
, location 2762.

195       
 
reinforcing the concept of union in love:
Ibid., location 2349-2393.

197       
 
Her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert?:
Steven Cramer, “Emily Dickinson, ‘I cannot live with You,’”
The Atlantic
, April 14, 1999, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/soundings/dickinson.htm.

197       
 
“If I am constantly working, my relationships fail”:
Mark Jefferies, “The Real Adele,”
The Mirror
, February 15, 2012,
http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/the-real-adele-grammy-sensation-talks-685087, and James Montgomery, “Adele Says
21
Has People Thinking ‘I’m Sort of a Manic-Depressive,’”
MTV News
, February 18, 2011, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1658345/adele-21.jhtml.

198       
 
thought to be related to emotion and reward in decision-making:
Zeki,
Splendors and Miseries of the Brain
, location 1085.

198       
 
found near the center of the brain:
T. Ishizu and Semir Zeki, “Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty,” PLoS ONE 6 (2011), http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021852.

198       
 
primal, dopamine-fueled rush of desire:
Brain scan studies of love-struck men and women, conducted by Lucy Brown, Helen Fisher, and colleagues, showed activity (increased blood flow, as detected on an fMRI scan) in the Ventral Tegmental Area, as discussed in chapter three, and the Caudate Nucleus. “Ventral Tegmental Area and Caudate Nucleus,” Brain Maps LLC, accessed July 7, 2014, http://theanatomyoflove.com/the-results/the-brains-reward-system/ventral-tegmental-area/.

198       
 
outsider identity, which rejection reinforces, nurtures their ability to innovate:
Art Markman, “Ulterior Motives,”
Psychology Today
, August 16, 2013, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201308/does-rejection-make-you-creative.

199       
 
“which gave me the joys which Love withheld”:
Isadora Duncan,
My Life
(New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), ebook at http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/duncani-mylife/duncani-mylife-00-h-dir/duncani-mylife-00-h.html.

203       
 
protagonists driven by unrequited love to suicide, insanity, or depression:
Joke Hermes, “Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction,”
Feminist Review
42 (1992): 49–66.

209       
 
called what I went through
starvation:
“Limerence for a particular LO does cease under one of the following conditions:
consummation—
in which the bliss of reciprocation is gradually either blended
into a lasting love or replaced by less positive feelings;
starvation—
in which even limerent sensitivity to signs of hope is useless against the onslaught of evidence that LO does not return the limerence;
transformation—
in which limerence is transferred to a new LO.” Tennov,
Love and Limerence
, 255.