Unrequited (13 page)

In Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
, wearing men’s clothes allowed the street urchin Éponine to join her beloved, Marius, at the barricades, where she took a fatal bullet for him. Éponine’s cross-dressing foreshadowed the real-life masculine disguises donned by Hugo’s own daughter Adèle as she sought out the object of her obsession, the British soldier Albert Pinson. Perhaps she purposely copied the tactics of Éponine, who, unlike the character in the Broadway musical, was portrayed as unseemly and conniving until
her redemptive self-sacrifice for Marius, a student revolutionary. Adèle’s obsession started when she was twenty-six and propelled her to follow Pinson to Halifax and then Barbados. At age
forty-one, she returned to her parents, her expression blank and her conversation limited to exchanges with the voices in her head. Hugo placed her in an expensive asylum outside of Paris,
where she would live for the rest of her life. He visited Adèle in the company of his longtime mistress, whose own daughter was buried nearby. “We went together to Saint-Mandé,” Hugo wrote. “She goes to see her daughter in the cemetery, alas!, and I go to see mine.”

It’s crucial to consider Adèle’s life before her obsession took hold. As a young woman, she was beautiful and intense. She chafed at the protectiveness of her father, who was known to the world as a model parent, yet at home maintained an unbending authority. She was musically gifted. She performed her piano compositions in public to some acclaim, and a visiting composer urged her to publish her music. Hugo derided his daughter’s talent and considered her playing a distraction to his work. He didn’t want her to do much else, either. He protested his wife’s efforts to take Adèle on a trip abroad so she could get away from the boredom of life in Guernsey, the remote British island where the family lived in exile from the time she was a teenager. He also despised Adèle’s idol, the feminist writer George Sand. Hugo called Sand “a dangerous model” and disdained her ideas about equal rights for women.

Yet Adèle was greatly influenced by Sand’s writings, in particular her arguments against marriage. When, early in their courtship, Pinson asked Adèle to marry him, she turned him down, as she’d done with four other suitors. Then she changed her mind. She tried to get Pinson back, only to discover that his affections had waned. Her unrequited love for him would define the rest of her life. In the pages of her diary, she expressed her love in terms that reflected the self-absorbed privilege of unilateral desire: her effort to assert her selfhood through the idea of her beloved. “You are . . . a man of the past who loves a woman of the future,” she wrote. “I
love you as the sculptor loves the clay.” After he was transferred to Halifax, she hatched a plan to follow him there, a bold move for a single woman, even at thirty-two. She had a lot at stake. Her pursuit of Pinson was about much more than winning his love; it was about escaping her father’s grip and seizing control over her own destiny. She wrote of her intentions in her diary:

Adèle’s goal of remaking herself on her own terms became enmeshed with her desire to win a man who no longer cared for her. She made the voyage to Halifax, where Pinson was stationed, and pursued him there for the next six years. Her landlady wrote to her brother that she often went out at night dressed in men’s evening wear, searching for Pinson. Though Éponine may have been on her mind, Adèle likely took her cues from Sand, whose male pseudonym and attire helped her access male privilege; she could move about Paris more freely and
enter places otherwise forbidden to women. For Adèle to go after what she wanted in life and in love demanded a manly guise that would allow her to venture out into the dark streets to try to win back her beloved. This costume, so integral to her tragic story, was immortalized by François Truffaut, who included a scene of Adèle, played by the young Isabelle
Adjani, in a black top hat and suit in his 1975 film based on Adèle’s life,
L’Histoire d’Adèle H
.

IN MOST OF
the Western world today, women don’t need male clothing to travel unescorted, and they earn their money by “honest toil” alongside men. Yet our culture still sees as not quite female the woman who takes the initiative in the quest for love. She’s somehow manly, a behavioral cross-dresser, like the horny she-to-he of Hippocrates’s imagination. And like Adèle Hugo, she’s doomed to fail. In psychologist Tracy McMillan’s 2012 best seller
Why You’re Not Married . . . Yet: The Straight Talk You Need to Get the Relationship You Deserve,
reason #9 (after #7, “You Hate Yourself,” and #8, “You’re a Liar”) is “You’re a Dude.” She advises women to stop thinking that women’s equality means they can act like men in the dating game. Her cautionary tale is a woman named Valerie, who is “too deep in her Masculine” and fools herself by thinking that “women fought for the right to be equal, and that means acting just like men in every area of life.” Valerie dares to strike up conversations with men, call and text them, and ask for dates. “After a decade of dating ‘equally’
she is in a long-term relationship with exactly
none
of the men she has pursued!” McMillan gloats.

I can’t weigh in on whether McMillan is right. This isn’t a book of dating advice. Though if you’ve ever sat around and talked with long-term couples about how their relationships started, you’ll likely find plenty that didn’t follow the “let the guy be the pursuer” formula. Finding mutual love often works very differently from the unilateral pursue-and-persuade mission that men are supposedly programmed to conduct. It’s more likely to be a gradual exchange and interpretation of signals of interest, part of the “reconnaissance dance” of figuring out if you want to be together.
Anyone, female or male, who comes on too strong risks turning off the other person and being perceived as needy or aggressive—but the pop-psychology cautionary tales for these “high-maintenance” types almost invariably have a female protagonist.

All Valerie seems like is a gal who doesn’t hesitate to make the first move, not a desperate stalker. And she isn’t alone.
Straight women say they initiate about 40 percent of their relationships. When you break down courtship into distinct behaviors, the research shows that men and women pursue relationships at similar rates and act in similar ways. A 2005 study of undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh reveals that almost all women and men use what psychologists call repeated “approach behaviors”—sending messages, doing favors, starting conversations, asking for dates—when they’re trying to get someone interested in them or trying to win back a partner after a relationship ends. Most men and women engage in what the study calls “surveillance”: They hang out in places where their beloveds are likely to be, pass by their homes, join the same activities, and try to
tease information out of mutual friends about their prospects of success.

“There are expectations that women are the passive recipients of male courtship behaviors,” said Stacey L. Williams, a psychology professor at East Tennessee State University and the lead author of the study. “Our societal expectations and norms in that way are not really true. The stereotypes don’t hold up.”

Three additional large-scale studies on how people react to rejection confirm that
women engage in pursuit behaviors at similar rates to men. The range of behaviors studied—from asking someone out to harassment—means that these findings are not necessarily cause for celebration. The question of when pursuit goes overboard is a critical one and a central concern of this book, but I’ll set the issue aside for a moment to underscore the basic
disparity revealed by these studies: The ideal of the male pursuer/female pursued is very, very far from reality.

Why, then, does the courtship double standard have so much staying power? The notion that men are the natural chasers in the mating game is rooted in the “parental investment theory” of evolutionary psychology. Because of their biology, men and women put vastly different levels of investment into perpetuating their genes. Men don’t have to spend much time and energy on reproduction. But they do have to compete for a scarcer pool of female mates—scarcer not because there are fewer females but because women are available for reproduction less often than men. Women can add to the species only one long pregnancy at a time, while men can “spread their seed” with far greater frequency. That makes men the pursuers, hardwired to court and chase. By extension, women are the choosers, evaluating mate prospects on the basis of the resources they might provide to them and their offspring. A woman needs to assess whether a man will stick around to make sure she and their spawn will have food, shelter, and other resources during the high-need times of pregnancy, birth, infancy, and early childhood.

This baseline theory is reiterated in various watered-down forms in the rhetoric of the Dating Industrial Complex. A woman is supposed to play the chooser by refraining from taking the initiative in romance, thus providing the impression that she is of “high value” or a “prize,”
while a man thrives on competition and “the thrill of the chase.” These tactics, which advise an almost Victorian-era level of self-control (relationship expert Matthew Hussey goes so far as to advocate for a modern version of the “white handkerchief approach”—the hanky-dropping tactic Victorian women used to let a man know of her interest), may certainly be useful. Men are authorized to go after what they want. Even if they have to submit
to the boss lady at work, at the bar they can play the ego-gratifying roles of the bold hunter or calculating “pickup artist.” The anesthetized narratives of advice books portray both genders in a winning light, if they follow the protocol: The boy gets to “get” the girl. The girl is encouraged to feel like the one who’s in control all along by being quietly confident in her passive Feminine self. Whether this pose gives her genuine power, though, is called into question by the experiences of women such as Maria, who followed her mother’s advice to “let them come to you”—and ended up feeling that she had no real choice in her life partner.

When the male pursuer/female pursued model is effective, it’s not because the roles bring us back to our essential male and female mating selves. In the animal world, females in a number of mammal species are the mating pursuers. This is the case with rats and several primate species: orangutans, bonobos, and several kinds of monkeys, including rhesus monkeys, which are genetically so close to us that they served as stand-ins
to see if humans could survive trips to the moon. As journalist Daniel Bergner points out in
What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
, these creatures don’t contend with any cultural messages about how the sexes should and shouldn’t behave—which raises the question of whether the “male pursuer” mandate is biologically or socially constructed.

Even evolutionary psychology allows that gender roles in mating are flexible, meant to respond to stress and change, to ecological and biological realities. Glenn Geher, my colleague at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is an evolutionary psychology professor and the co-author of
Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love.
He explained that the female urge to pursue is more likely to kick in when the reproductive tables are turned. Her position as chooser
weakens as she ages and her fertility declines—the so-called cougar phenomenon. “There’s probably a tipping point when females stop having an upper hand in mating,” he said. Correspondingly, even fertile younger women may be more likely to chase in situations where there aren’t many men. Both scenarios—women looking for mates later in their reproductive lives and majority-female environments—are increasingly common, particularly for educated women and men. The average age of a first-time mother is rising.
Women outnumber men on college campuses nationwide.

Taking into account environmental and situational variables, then, romantic pursuit becomes less about what men and women fundamentally are (or should be) and more about a way of responding to a real or perceived condition of mate scarcity. It seems no coincidence that for college women, becoming more professionally successful is also connected to diminished mating prospects; enhancing your own ability to provide is another way of taking charge when the competition for mates and their resources goes up. Yet while we’ve come to accept female determination in the work world, female perseverance still rankles in matters of love.

NO MATTER WHAT
the environmental factors are, the proclivity to get hung up on a particular someone is vital to the survival of our species. Romantic obsession and pursuit are adaptations for both men and women in the mating game. We focus exclusively on one person because it fosters pair bonds, which help us raise offspring successfully. “It takes a long time to go through a pregnancy and take care of a child,” said social psychologist Arthur Aron. “Having both parents helps the child survive. If our ancestors didn’t have a strong motivation to bond and connect, we might not be here as a species.” So what drives us to jealousy and pursuit is integrally
linked to the forces that create us and make us thrive, even though, like many fundamental human motivations, the drive to bond, as Aron put it, “can run awry.”

ANGELA, A TRANSLATOR
in her mid-forties, met Heinrich at a rundown hostel in Augsburg while she was spending a year teaching in Germany. She was twenty-five, and he was about to turn thirty. “He had these piercing blue eyes,” she said. “I remember not being able to look at him because his gaze was so bright.”