Unrequited (5 page)

The day of the conference finally arrived. She went to his talk,
dressed up and nervous. They had made plans to have dinner together. He casually suggested they pick up some takeout at Whole Foods and eat it in Central Park instead of going to a restaurant. He had a meeting at seven o’clock, he explained. This turn distressed Theresa. After the months of waiting, he was barely giving her enough time for a decent date, much less the long romantic evening she’d been hoping for. She tried not to let her feelings show. They ate and talked. She asked him how he was feeling about his mother’s death. “It’s complicated,” he said evasively. They parted ways before his meeting without making any plans for later that night or the next day. She went home in tears.

An email from him arrived at ten. “I’m in bed with my novel,” he wrote. He told her cordially that he had enjoyed seeing her.

Theresa was angry and confused. Who was this man who wanted to relate to her only from afar, through his laptop screen? In her reply, she confronted him: “Are you thinking about this as something romantic or more of a friend?”

His answer: “Friend.” He detailed the reasons why he liked her, as if going through a list of criteria. She was beautiful. She was smart. They were intellectually compatible. He’d had a nice time with her that evening, but when she’d asked him about his mother, he “just wanted to run.”

Theresa puzzled over what had happened. So many signs of promise were there. Others, oddly, weren’t. She gave up on figuring Russell out—sexuality issues? Mother issues? The two intertwined? She would never know. She blamed herself for her own bad judgment, for letting herself get so pulled in by an email exchange. She mentioned a divorcée she knew, a woman with few romantic illusions and a surfeit of dating tips. “She always says, don’t sleep with a man for a few dates. Spend time getting to know him, so you won’t get hurt if it doesn’t work out. That’s what we
had. I never slept with him, but the effect was the same. I still got hurt.”

Theresa had felt the verbal and written exchanges—all the sharing and confiding they’d done—constituted real intimacy, leading up to a deeper connection in person. Now she had to “change her definition of intimacy.” For real intimacy to begin, she decided, a man had to do things for you. He had to deliver his
presence.
“Someone at my office told me, ‘My rule is five emails, and that’s it. If there’s no date, it’s over.’” Theresa was becoming everyone’s poster child for the Single Girl Who Needed Guidance. She was pushing forty and still committing our era’s worst sin: wasting time on yearning.

However much we might enjoy watching Chuck and Blair circle around each other on
Gossip Girl
, smoldering with sexual tension, in real life we contend with contradictory messages about unsatisfied desire. We live in a world with an unprecedented degree of disembodied romantic opportunity. Teens’ first romantic relationships take place largely through texting, far more comfortable than the awkwardness of actually being together. Singles correspond online as a kind of relationship pretest to figure out if they want to invest the money, time, and emotional energy of getting together in person. The MTV series
Catfish
documents what happens when couples who have spent months or years smitten with each other online actually meet in person, with the slogan “Sometimes a little bit of fiction leads to a whole lot of reality.” The program’s hosts shake their heads as they read an email from Jesse, a young woman who wonders whether she should move to Alabama from her parents’ home in Pennsylvania to be with a man she’s corresponded with online for three years, even though so far he has avoided meeting or video chatting with her. “He just seems like the perfect guy for me,” she gushes. Though some
Catfish
couples do find that
their cyberspace love can thrive in the real world, Jesse does not, a fact foreshadowed by the many times the hosts harrumph, “There are so many red flags!”

There seems to be no real excuse for ignoring red flags, or skittishness, or getting lost in your imagination—or for accepting anything less than a partner whose needs neatly and scientifically conform to your own. The same online world that fosters obsessions with distant others also promotes a no-nonsense efficiency in matters of the heart. New romantic prospects can be tailored to our preferences, just like the boots we buy from Zappos, so we should get down to business and find what we want. Even the elusive idea of “chemistry” to describe that inexplicable sexual and emotional pull toward another has turned into a high-tech double entendre on Chemistry.com, an online dating site that uses a personality test (designed by biological anthropologist Helen Fisher) to connect people by personality type and neurochemical compatibility. So many options, and so much technology, should prevent a woman from getting hung up on anyone who is less than enthusiastic about a relationship.

Of course, it’s much easier to point out the solution to the unwanted woman’s problem than to ask what’s so compelling about the
not yet
relationship. What Theresa told me was that the emails she received from Russell spurred her imagination, just as reading always had. “I lived in books when I was a kid,” she said. “I have an excessive capacity to take fantasy over reality, to like the world of images and books and ideas more than the real world.”

When we’re caught up in unsatisfied desire, we can write the story of our love and, for a time, control it. This is fundamentally a creative act, often full of pleasure at first. We can be self-centered in a way that’s impossible in mutual love. The situation is emotionally risky, because it’s all about yearning to be together—yet being
together means facing reality, which will probably fall short of the self-centered fantasy. But does that mean the fantasy has no meaning or purpose?

Longing may seem too complicated, too painful, too much of an anathema to accept in our instant-gratification, fix-it culture of Yahoo! answers and five-second movie downloads. Yet longing insists itself anyway. “Do you love me?” isn’t the only question it asks.

“
I AM ALWAYS
in unrequited love,” Katherine told me over her cell phone from her Massachusetts suburb. It was a weekend morning. Because she’d wanted to be out of earshot of her husband and two kids, she was in her car, parked in front of a café, drinking a cup of take-out coffee as it rained outside. The image brought to mind a clandestine meeting with a paramour. However, she was alone, and it was only her thoughts that were taboo.

Katherine, who is bisexual and in her late forties, is a well-respected educator. Her work and its impact on students, many of them from underprivileged backgrounds, truly matter to her; she is thorough and treats people with warmth and encouragement. She described to me highlights from the lineup of obsessive loves in her life: a boy who had a huge crush on her throughout high school and then backed away when she realized in her twenties that she’d finally fallen for him; the rakish coworker; the mother she came to know while their kids were in the same playgroup; the colleague she worked closely with. The unrequited loves start out as friendships and deepen quickly. “I love the process of getting to know another human being. You learn about their lives and have them learning about yours,” she said. “It’s a generative process. It teaches me things about my life. At that point, it’s mutual. I connect with someone who wants to connect with me.”

Inevitably, she begins to need more. She moves into a place,
emotionally, where the people she’s hooked on don’t go. When she was in love with the mother, she wrote a note thanking her for her friendship. “I wasn’t speaking sexually, but I made it clear the bond I felt was very strong,” she remembered. “I think it threatened her. She didn’t want to be that honest with me. And that was the moment when she began to pull back.” Katherine calls that moment, which has happened with all her unrequited loves, The Withdrawal. The friendship doesn’t end, but the air around it changes. The boundaries become clear and painful, thwarting the earlier exuberance. She tends to choose people who won’t reciprocate.

She always tells her husband about her crushes, even though she knows it’s difficult for him to hear. He doesn’t try to stop her feelings or prevent her from being with the unrequited loves, though he may set limits—no nighttime phone calls, for example—if he feels her attention is drifting too often from the family. He makes sure to make friends with her beloveds. “If these people are not part of his life, they have to become a part,” she said.

Her husband is a man Katherine has known for over twenty years. After nine years of somewhat rocky dating, interrupted by breakups and long separations, they married and had children. After all they’ve been through, she has faith that they will continue to love and support each other. “I have a sense of being loved for who I am in a way I’ve never felt with any of these other people,” she said.

When I asked her why, with a husband she loves, she keeps opening herself up to these cycles of love and hurt and unsatisfied desire, she said it might be because of her father, whose love she never felt secure in.

There was another possible reason, a more existential one. “It’s about the reality of our aloneness,” she told me. “Ultimately, we all die alone. And at heart I’m a lonely person in the sense that even
though I surround myself with lots of people and friends, I recognize that I’m alone, and that sense of isolation is hard for me.” She spoke of the way her marriage—any relationship, for that matter—is like a Venn diagram of two overlapping circles. The marriage is the center. There are things she and her husband share and things they keep separate. “I get to keep intact who I am, and he gets to keep intact who he is, yet we connect, so it works,” she said. “But there’s a part of me that craves nothing but the unity, nothing but the whole. Nothing separate. Nothing off limits, nothing spoken but the truth.”

Katherine’s perpetual cycles of unrequited love seem an exercise in frustration. Her crushes never give her the experience of the unity she yearns for; they only bring her craving to the surface. As for many unrequited lovers, her fixation on her beloveds is about a need inside her—a need to stay in touch with the dream of perfect unity with another. When I told Katherine’s story to a friend, she countered, “That’s the kind of fantasy that my therapist would say was completely unrealistic and neurotic, and there’s nothing good about it.” This view is understandable and common. But it ignores the value of the emotional honesty of allowing yourself to feel love, even when it can’t be returned. I admired Katherine for not pretending the pain of aloneness didn’t exist—an angst most of us try to keep buried. Katherine wasn’t shut down, huddled into her marriage as if it were the
be-all and end-all of intimacy and addressed all of her emotional needs.

EVEN THOUGH STENDHAL
didn’t have women like Katherine in mind when he wrote
On Love
(he surely would have found her expressiveness immodest), his words allow us to distinguish what Katherine and other aspiring lovers do from the banal yet inevitable criticisms: How could she do that to her poor husband? Why
would she put herself through all that? For Stendahl, the sweet spot of passionate love was in the quest. He had more faith in the vector of desire than in the consummation of it. When you walk up to the home of your beloved, he maintained, you don’t really want the door to open. Face-to-face with your beloved, you might notice signs of your eventual defeat. You might say something stupid. Anything you do to try to let your beloved know how you feel takes you “away from
the enchanted gardens of the imagination,” he wrote.

I was a woman who walked up—or rather sneaked in—to the home of my beloved and knocked on the door until it opened. The enchanted gardens of the imagination weren’t enough for me. I had to keep trying to turn my failure around, precisely because I perceived my position as the unwanted woman as failure. I didn’t have to see it that way. I didn’t have to give in to impatience. What Stendhal’s words, and the stories of Diane, Theresa, and Katherine, suggest is that unsatisfied desire—those distracted, bittersweet days of seeing your beloved glitter with
not yet—
are worth something, even if they result in nothing. In the days of unsatisfied desire, we
did
feel more alive as we explored our new place for ourselves in the world through our desire for another. We planted zinnias, we opened up about our lives, and we daydreamed of an emotional utopia. We lived inside the suspense of “Do you love me?” and the myriad other questions that passion brings forth, questions about fear, aloneness, possibility, and what it means to be human.

The problems come only when we refuse to hear the answers.

AT THE END OF THE SUMMER IN WHICH
I fell in love with B., he did not break up with his girlfriend. After he came back from the debut of the Amelia Earhart play, he stopped by my apartment to tell me. We sat at my kitchen table, and I asked him if he still wanted to end the relationship.

“Yes,” he said. “But she didn’t. We still know where it’s heading. We were not . . . We were barely intimate.”

“That’s strange,” I said. “The least you could have done was fucked her.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I started to
chatter. “I know you haven’t made any promises to me. But I—” B. knelt in front of me with a resolved look in his eyes. I wanted to turn my head away. I thought he was going to tell me he had to stop seeing me.

He kissed me instead. We kissed for a long time, there in the kitchen and then in my bedroom. I wanted to believe the kissing was the end of the waiting. It felt like that at first, intense and suggestive. We held each other tightly. I wanted to go further than kissing, but he stopped me and left.

He came back a few days later for dinner. He was quiet, and whatever conversation I could generate felt awkward. After we ate, he told me he was tired and wanted to go home.