Unrequited (10 page)

In the nineteenth century, romantic obsession took on a dual identity. It was seen as both a form of lovesickness and glorified as
a spiritual and creative force. The French physician Jean-Étienne Esquirol saw romantic obsession as a form of monomania, a condition in which the sufferer focuses exhaustively and exclusively on one thing. Though monomania in a clinical context was considered a “partial insanity,” it was also associated with art, learning, and great achievement. The expert with a single focus was a lauded figure, replacing the older ideal of the Renaissance man or woman who had a variety of skills and a wide breadth of knowledge. Professional specialists—doctors, composers, scientists, novelists—became more valued than generalists. The monomaniac, then, might end up in an asylum, or he might end up making a great discovery or creating a superlative work of art. The blurry distinction between the productive obsessive and the ruined one was an endless source of fascination in the Romantic era, played out most prominently in the character of Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist obsessed with bringing life to the dead.

Obsessive love was its own kind of expertise, a quest to shape one’s life entirely around a beloved. It offered the possibility of transformed consciousness and mystical oneness to the Romantics, who were intrigued by the altered mind-states that intense feeling, dreams, and madness could bring. The suffering that lovesickness entailed only gave it more credibility. Fictional female characters—chief among them Catherine in
Wuthering Height
s—swept up in this “partial insanity” fascinated readers. Lovesickness could be painfully glorious, a badge of honor rather than a label of shame.

Yet for the real women of the nineteenth century, the lovesickness diagnosis remained an oppressive one. The myth that women did not feel sexual desire still held sway in the public imagination.
Women who were attracted to other women were unnatural “inverts.” Women who were romantically obsessed, sexually voracious, or both were physical aberrations. One sure sign of a
woman’s “amativeness,” according to the emerging science of phrenology, was a larger than normal cerebellum, the area of the brain located above the nape of the neck. Gynecologists believed uterine disease (a catch-all phrase used to describe cramps, mood swings, headaches, and other “disorders of the womb”) caused erotomania, Esquirol’s term for fervent romantic obsession.

The labels, however, obscured what may have been a much more important symptom: women’s discontent with their limited opportunities in love and life. Mary Sidgwick Benson was engaged at twelve and married at eighteen to the man who would become the archbishop of Canterbury. As she raised her infamously trying brood of children, she guiltily suffered unrequited longings, which she called “swarmings,” for other women. Later in her life, she came to believe her feelings were not deviant urges but, rather, “gifts from God” that she could and did act on. Her “lovesickness,” then, drew her out of the heterosexual mandate and religious strictures that stifled her. Lucy Tait, her female lover, eventually moved in with the Benson family and became an accepted member of the household. After the archbishop died in 1896,
Tait took his place in the marital bed.

Isabella Robinson’s lovesickness did not have as happy an outcome. In one of the first cases heard
under the 1857 law that made divorce feasible for England’s middle class, her husband, Henry, sued her after he discovered her private diaries. The volumes described in detail her passion for Edward Lane, a young married doctor and family friend, and several furtive intimate encounters they had. Henry attempted to use the diaries to prove Isabella’s infidelity; her attorneys argued that the entries were the result of delusions caused by uterine disease, not evidence of an actual affair. As Kate Summerscale details in
Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady
, Isabella reluctantly accepted
the defense strategy because it was the only way she could save the career and reputation of her beloved Lane, who vehemently denied any indiscretion. Though she wanted to be rid of her husband, a divorce would turn her into an impoverished pariah, a fate she wanted to avoid.

For the many voyeuristic followers of the Robinson divorce case, the idea that Isabella was sick to the point of delusion offered a kind of solace as the institution of divorce unsettled British society. Women whose romantic obsessions took them, at least in their minds, outside the bonds of marriage were ill. Yet however much her unrequited love for Edward Lane made her suffer, Isabella privately insisted that the real problem was not medical. She was unhappy in her marriage but had no real options outside of it. She described her husband, a businessman who traveled frequently, as an “unpoetic soul” with a mean spirit. She was an intellectually curious and well-read woman who questioned religious authority and toyed with the then-radical ideas of atheism and evolutionism. She scribbled her illicit feelings for Dr. Lane in the pages of her diary, a volume meant to be private. But she also saw her passion as a force that exposed the limitations of her marriage. Lane, as she depicted him, cared deeply about her well-being, shared ideas with her, and listened attentively. In a different world, she would be free to pursue a better, more mutual relationship instead of being trapped in an oppressive marriage. In her diary, she pleaded for understanding from her imagined audience: “You see my inmost soul. You must despise and hate me,” she wrote. “Do you also pause to pity?”

The medicalized Isabellas of the nineteenth century have since been overshadowed by the fictional heroines of romantic love, whose martyred longing represented an enviable emotional peak experience.
Wuthering Heights
has been remade into film no fewer than five times,
Jane Eyre
at least eighteen. The obsessive
love narratives of romanticism, written with a level of detail that is itself obsessive, raised the bar on our expectations for love in the twentieth century, which were in turn amplified by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Obsessive passion may be difficult and ultimately tragic, but its story is too compelling to be a mere cautionary tale. Romanticism presented a lasting emotional dare: How intense can you be? How powerfully can you love? Romantic obsession was no longer pathological. Love was
supposed
to consume and complete us. These ideas coincided with Western society’s increasing skepticism about the existence of God and the reasons for ritual devotion. Love became our new religion, the target of our spiritual hunger,
the place where we sought ecstasy, contentment, and awe. Obsessive love was as close as we could get to enlightenment, particularly as old mating systems—arranged marriages, formal dating rituals, rules of sexual conduct—fell away.

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov’s 1979 bestseller
Love and Limerence
reflected these shifts. She criticized the psychologists and sociologists of her time for failing to fully acknowledge passionate love. The professional consensus then emphasized morality and rationality in love relationships; possessive, needy, unrequited, or irrational attachments were “masquerades,” an immature state of dependency that was not really love. Tennov argued that passionate, obsessive love—what she called limerence—was a distinct yet common form of love, not an abnormality. She used written accounts and interviews with her research subjects, many of them her students at the University of Bridgeport, to demonstrate that
the wild state the Romantic era so venerated was, for many people, a real phenomenon in relationships and crushes.

As I look back on how these ideas played out in my life before I got married, it all feels very twentieth-century. As a teenager and young adult in the 1980s and ’90s, I fell in love a lot. The doped-up
headiness of the experience
did
feel like a kind of transcendence. Any effort to stop myself from love, even when it was impractical or showed signs of being wrong for me, seemed like the denial of a fundamental right. When I wasn’t in love, I was deeply lonely, beset by existential doubts: What if I never found love again? What if I died alone? So the motivation to seek love, however painful it might end up, usually outweighed the incentive to stay single. At times, though, I grew weary of taking all the bumps and pushed myself to be more independent. For a while I even tried to be more religiously observant, in part as an effort to find a surrogate for the faulty cycle of falling in and out of love.

As the century drew to a close, the era of romantic practicality was dawning. Obsessive unrequited love became not a grasping for transcendence but a sign of weakness. Women should stay cool and distant in the mating game. Romantic disappointment and obsessive love became problems women needed to stifle, as efficiently as possible, in the Machiavellian search for a mate. In 1998, the year of my obsession, I could have been a case study for everything a single woman was
not
supposed to do. My mate-finding strategy was focused on a man who wasn’t available, yet I made myself available to him without conditions. I wasn’t willing to get back in the game and consider other men. I was chasing much too hard. I was exactly the kind of woman the Dating Industrial Complex lampooned.

Around the same time, researchers began to gain unprecedented insight into the neurochemistry of love and attachment, and how pharmaceuticals might ease the impact of rejection. The idea of lovesickness gradually reemerged, with more empirical ammunition than ever before. Historically speaking, it hadn’t been gone all that long.

SAMARA, A THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD
legal assistant and writer, is in many ways a romantic. She is expert at the Old World art of letter writing and, for a time, ran a small business penning wedding vows and mash notes for others. The night before she moved to Philadelphia from New York City, she met Jim. They hit it off, and she bemoaned the fact that she’d come across such a great guy just as she was leaving town. He didn’t seem to care that she would be living in another city. He wanted to see her again.

The weekends they spent together felt passionate and intimate. However, Samara soon realized Jim didn’t mind the long-distance nature of their relationship because he had other women in his life. Yet the way he was when he was with her, she believed, suggested she was becoming more important to him. He took her to his office Christmas party and introduced her to his friends. She kept hoping he would choose to be with her exclusively. But he didn’t.

Weeks would go by when she wouldn’t hear from him. She grew increasingly preoccupied by these silences, scheming about when she might dare get in touch with him without seeming too intrusive. She spent a lot of time with her friends musing over his behavior. Once, after she told a friend how relieved she was to spend time with him after he’d been incommunicado for a while, the friend snapped at her: “You shouldn’t see him anymore.”

“But he apologized,” Samara protested, and began to describe how tender their makeup had been.

“He apologized because he wanted to get laid,” the friend said flatly.

Samara decided that she would keep quiet about the relationship. No matter how attentive Jim could be at times, he kept insisting he “didn’t want a girlfriend.” She didn’t want her friends to know what she was putting up with. She was so caught up in what was increasingly becoming a one-sided relationship that she
was unable to think of much else. Her mental state swung from one extreme to another. She fantasized about running into him at a moment when she was looking and feeling so great that he couldn’t resist her. They’d start over and he would finally be hers. Then she would think about how much his behavior hurt her, and she would sink into a depression.

The situation became so distressing that Samara gathered the courage to cut off all communication. A few months later, she was in New York and ran into Jim at a Halloween party. He was with a woman dressed in a form-fitting Wonder Woman costume. She hated seeing him with someone else, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that he wasn’t the commitment type. Wonder Woman was merely his latest conquest, and the couple would one day part ways, too. “I thought if I can’t have him, no one can,” Samara told me. “He was a fire that can’t be contained.”

Samara dated someone else for a while. After they broke up, her thoughts returned to Jim. She emailed him, thinking he might be up for one more whirlwind weekend together. He wrote back to decline. He and Wonder Woman were engaged.

Samara’s story is something of a parable for every woman who ever believed her beloved is an incurable Lothario
,
or somehow psychologically broken, incapable of loving any woman in a lasting and real way. Such emotional cripples exist, but too often the reality is that he hasn’t met his match yet, a woman whose powers of attraction seem, to the unwanted woman, nothing short of superheroic.

For Samara, the realization that she would never be that woman magnified and darkened her obsession with Jim. She was so distraught that she woke up every morning with dry heaves and felt a pressure “like a hippopotamus on my chest.” She could not stop crying. She couldn’t eat or work. She didn’t understand
why her reaction was so extreme, far beyond what she would consider a normal response to unrequited love. She had a happy childhood. She is very close to her family, particularly her father, whom she describes as steady and committed, “the opposite” of Jim. The only thing that seemed to be wrong with her was that her heart was broken, and it was taking over her life. “I was so embarrassed,” she said.

She went to a therapist, who told her she likely had a disorder she’d never heard of: limerence. Whereas Dorothy Tennov used the term in the 1970s to describe what she saw as the normal, though difficult, condition of being in passionate love, Samara’s therapist used it in a distinctly different way. Limerence still meant the involuntary state of being in love and experiencing an overwhelming and preoccupying need to have those feelings returned. But it was no longer considered a “normal human experience” in the way Tennov described it. Instead, limerence described a disorder.