Unrequited (11 page)

This new view of limerence evolved after Tennov’s death in 2007. Albert Wakin, a psychology professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and a former colleague of Tennov, was granted access to her archives, which were so prodigious that they filed an entire room in her son’s house. What struck Wakin as he sorted through the boxes and files were the letters Tennov had received from readers after the publication of
Love and Limerence.
Many of them detailed stories of enduring and painful obsession. One woman bemoaned the fact that she was fixated on a boyfriend who’d left her ten years before. Another knew she should be happy in her life as a wife and mother, but her life was clouded by persistent thoughts of a man she’d met before her marriage. These situations, Wakin realized, were not romantic and not normal. “These were problem relationships,” he told me.

Wakin has since reconceptualized limerence as pathology, fitting to the era of romantic practicality. It’s often hard to recognize the problem, since limerence and the ardent feeling of new love are a lot alike. You can’t stop thinking about the beloved. You’re euphoric yet insecure, always in need of his attention. Your energy is up. Yet while new love settles down after six to twenty-four months into a calmer, more contented mutual relationship, people with limerence are stuck in this state of
amour fou
, which persists no matter whether the relationship breaks up or never forms at all. Limerence can plague even a relationship that lasts, when one or both partners are perpetually needy, obsessed, and insecure about the partnership—a condition also known as “
relationship obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

Wakin says limerence has features of both OCD and substance addiction. Addicts need more and more of their drug of preference to get high and spend more and more of their time getting it. People with limerence are never satisfied with the attention they get; if they’re not getting any, they can’t stop themselves from seeking it. Both addicts and people with limerence suffer physically and emotionally if they can’t get their fix, and both struggle to kick the habit—or know they should. OCD sufferers live in a state of anxiety and obsession, which is reduced temporarily only by performing a certain behavior—hand washing, for example, to allay invasive worries about germs and disease. The obsessed lover’s worries, in turn, may be briefly assuaged by signs of reassurance, real or imagined, from the beloved, but then the anxiety builds anew. Yet limerence is more than a hybrid of addiction and OCD. The interpersonal factors—what happens between the obsessed lover and the object of her desire—can make limerence more extreme and more complex. “Limerence can likely become the strongest kind of OCD and addiction that can be felt,” Wakin
told me. “Although alcohol and gambling can consume you, casinos and liquor don’t have a life of their own. They don’t remind you that they are still alive. They don’t make you wonder what they’re doing when they’re not paying attention to you. So when you’re obsessed with another living person, the obsession is even stronger.”

Wakin would like to see limerence become an entry in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
DSM
), the professional bible used by clinicians and psychiatrists to diagnose psychiatric illnesses (and by insurance companies as a basis for claims coding). The process of getting something new into the
DSM
is long and complicated, and Wakin is just getting started on
building a body of research. But his nascent mission has gone quietly viral among brokenhearted Web surfers and has attracted considerable media attention. Every time his work is mentioned in the media, he fields a fresh onslaught of emails and calls from people who tell him that reading about his research
gave them a shock of recognition.

Wakin’s work is an outgrowth of mounting scientific evidence of the similarities among love, addiction, and OCD. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who studies romantic love, says that “romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and
a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.” Fisher and her colleagues have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see how blood flows through the brain of people who are passionately in love and people who’ve been rejected by someone they’re still in love with. When the subjects looked at photographs of their beloved, one of the areas where blood flow increased was the ventral tegmental area (VTA), causing it to glow on the fMRI scan—an indication that a region of the brain is becoming more active. Located in the “reptilian core” of the brain, the VTA generates the neurotransmitter dopamine, a
natural stimulant that gives you energy, focus, feelings of euphoria, and, most important, that yen to seek out a particular beloved. The VTA also becomes active when people use cocaine—an indication that the expression “lover’s high” is grounded in a very real physical phenomenon.

So when you’re in passionate love, whether reciprocated or not, you truly are in a state of craving. What makes matters more intense is that being in love causes a decline in the levels of another neurotransmitter, serotonin, which is involved in regulating aggression, mood, and anxiety. A study by the Italian psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti uncovered a striking similarity between people with OCD and people in love.
Both groups had serotonin levels 40 percent lower than the control group. While couples in the tumult of romance can find refuge in the soothing effects of oxytocin—the so called “cuddle chemical”—and vasopressin—believed to foster attachment—the unrequited lover can’t catch a break from anxious obsession.

What all this means, according to Fisher and her research team, is that passionate love is fundamentally a drive meant to propel us toward the reward of attachment with a specific mate. When we’re deprived of that reward, our neurochemistry keeps pushing us to get it back in a phenomenon known as “frustration attraction.” After romantic rejection, blood flow increases not only to the VTA, but also to brain areas related to deep emotional attachment, addictive behavior, and physical pain. We become even more enamored. Our longing for contact worsens. We literally hurt. And we try to figure out what happened. Areas of the forebrain region, associated with responding to gains and losses, lit up on the fMRI scans. This suggests that bereft lovers mull over how the rejection occurred and
what they can do to get back the rejecter, the source of the love fix.

OBSESSIVE LOVE’S KINSHIP
with addiction and OCD influences how we perceive human passion. There’s nothing transcendent about a system neurochemically out of wack. Science journalism in the era of romantic practicality regularly feasts on stories about the boom-and-bust neurology of love, with headlines such as “
New Love: A Short Shelf Life” and “
Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss.” We need to love more sanely, argues psychiatrist Frank Tallis, and
not overvalue passion and romance. He’s one of the many thinkers who extol the satisfaction rates among couples in arranged marriages, which
rival or exceed those of couples in marriages of choice—the takeaway message being that our own faulty hearts aren’t very good guides to marital success. In her book
Marry Him!
, Lori Gottlieb advises women not to hold out for Mr. Right and instead seek out “Mr. Good Enough.” She questions the notion that you need “great chemistry” for real love to develop. Chemistry, she points out, causes you to ignore work, compulsively check your email, and act foolishly—and often doesn’t lead to anything lasting. Susan Cheever, who wrote a book exploring her long-term misguided obsession with a hard-drinking journalist, admonishes the tendency to reflexively celebrate love under any circumstances. Why should our friends and family be happy for us to be obsessed with a person when they would be horrified if we were so enslaved to gin, meth, or overeating?

When obsession besets the unrequited lover, it seems even more pathological. The unwanted woman is running on empty, with no substantial evidence that her love is going anywhere. Wakin told me that it’s usually not appropriate to diagnose limerence until the relationship in question has lasted at least six months, the point when heady preoccupation begins to give way to a more predictable and stable connection. “But sometimes I have someone tell
me, ‘I’ve met someone and I’m on an emotional roller coaster and they hardly know I exist’—and we can look at that as a problem from the beginning,” he said.

When I first began to understand the neurochemistry of passionate love, I took great comfort in the idea that what had happened to me might be a distinct disorder with a scientific explanation. I
had
felt addicted and out of control. Throughout my twenties, I suffered bouts of clinical depression, several of them related to the end of a relationship. Had I reached for B., then, like a junkie going for her fix? The science seemed fairly neutral, not a tool of oppression, like older ideas of lovesickness. And the emergence of the limerence as a diagnosis is accompanied by the possibility of more promising cures. Wakin advises obsessed lovers to pursue cognitive behavioral therapy, a treatment that helps them change their perceptions about their beloved. Antidepressants, he tells them, can be an effective approach as well. Samara, who contacted Wakin at the suggestion of her therapist, started taking a low dose of the antidepressant Lexapro, which, along with therapy, helped her move on. She still thought of Jim, but by the time he walked down the aisle with Wonder Woman, Samara was no longer obsessed. She could compartmentalize her feelings enough to concentrate at work and go out with friends. She presented her story as one of empowerment through diagnosis and treatment,
a significant contrast to the historical examples I’ve related.

Using an elixir to blunt the power of obsessive love seems somehow inevitable. If we’re turning increasingly to Ambien to help us sleep, Adderall to help us concentrate, and Wellbutrin to ward off anxiety and depression, why not a pill for off-the-rails desire? Advances in neuroscience and pharmacology seem very likely to lead to a variety of “
chemical breakup” remedies to treat problematic passions. Although I don’t question Samara’s decision to turn to
therapy and medication, the comfort I took in her story of overcoming limerence was shadowed by the issues that arise with our contemporary pharmaceutical toolbox and the mounting number of diagnoses that justify our reliance on it. We medicate jumpy children so they can endure elementary school classrooms that require them to sit still for most of the day. Leaders of an Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish community compel psychiatrists to prescribe medication to help teens and married couples comply with
strict rules on masturbation and sexual intercourse. And some secular folk admit to taking
antidepressants in order to endure their spouses and preserve their marriages.

The issue is more intricate than that, of course. Plenty of parents testify that the right attention-calibrating drugs have saved their children from serious behavior and learning problems. Chronic depression that goes untreated is ruinous, whether it besets a spouse or someone dealing with the blow of rejection. And romantic obsession and stalking can be features of serious, less common psychiatric disorders that need medical attention: borderline personality disorder, psychopathy, and erotomania, whose
sufferers are under the delusion that someone else, usually of a higher social status, is in love with them.

But as lovesickness reemerges as a diagnosis with a potentially vast applicability, we need to ask the same question prompted by other increasingly widespread disorders. The meds may help ease the devastating pain of rejection in situations when the anguish doesn’t seem to cease. Yet serotonin-regulating drugs also may diminish people’s ability to feel deep human attachment and sexual desire,
forces that spur reproduction and make the human experience richer, albeit more challenging and complex. If the use of these pharmaceuticals is too vast and too indiscriminate, we risk zombifying our love life, if we bother to have one.

Medication obscures another key question behind the strife of unrequited love: Is the problem just with the patient, or is it also in the conditions of her life?

Samara told me that after she felt better, she started going out with an attorney. They had a great first date and dated a lot over the next two months. When an essay she wrote about her limerence diagnosis was published in a popular women’s magazine, she felt confident enough with him to tell him about it. When he stopped calling not long after, she had no idea whether the article had scared him away or if he’d been put off by a recent weekend trip that hadn’t gone as well as she’d expected. She was disappointed but not distraught. She had been careful, she told me, not to “give myself to him,” as she felt she’d done with Jim. She had no regrets. It was part of who she was to write openly about her life. She sounded wise and cautious, enviably self-possessed.

But her story is shadowed by that nagging doubt: Did her brave and public confession of her distress undermine her in the new guy’s mind, even though she’d clearly bounced back? Did her story suggest to him that at some point she might be more fragile, more high-maintenance? Or was he just feeling like it was time to move on? The no-guarantees attitude of romance today has its own way of being oppressive, permitting lovers a mincing fickleness. The cost-benefit analysis relationship formation has become an extreme sport. As one of the female characters in Adelle Waldman’s novel,
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
, puts it, “Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you.
It’s a meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability.” Lexapro and therapy helped prevent Samara from taking disappointment too much to heart. Perhaps these remedies serve another purpose: to make the unwanted woman a more
resilient, lower-maintenance, less-likely-to-put-up-a-fuss citizen of the Dating Industrial Complex. Maybe this is the new “place” that women, with their independence and economic self-sufficiency in a world of romantic uncertainty, are supposed to occupy.