Unrequited (17 page)

In turn, the other person may feel used. “They are unwittingly involved in a process the narcissist is using to feel okay in the world,” Ettensohn said. “The narcissist’s behavior cries out, ‘Complete me!’” The unrequited lover overlooks her impact as she martyrs herself to love. She is in such pain that she can’t reckon with the consequences of what she’s doing. When the unwanted woman cries “I can’t help it,” she abandons her free will and her judgment, fundamental aspects of her humanity.

WHEN TILLIE, A
retail buyer in northern Virginia, Googled Martin, she was fifty-one and hadn’t dated since her painful divorce thirteen years before. She was too hurt by the end of her marriage and too busy raising her three children as a single mother. The idea of Martin, her ex-boyfriend from twenty-five years ago, simply “insisted itself” one day, for what felt like no particular reason. She discovered his blog. He had recently posted an article about losing his longtime job at a radio station in Colorado. It was the same job he’d had when they were together. She found out from earlier postings that he’d had a minor stroke the year before.

She hadn’t planned on rekindling anything. She was worried about him and emailed him through his blog to find out whether he was okay. He wasn’t. He called later that day to tell her that he had just gotten biopsy results back. He had a malignant lung tumor.

What followed that phone call was, as Tillie described it, three and a half months of romantic emails and long-distance conversations. She visited him once. She slept at a friend’s home and spent her days with Martin. They took long drives on the scenic roads near his home and talked endlessly. They remained chaste, but the visit felt emotionally intimate. She is an observant Christian, and they spent a lot of time discussing spirituality. As his health continued to falter, she urged him closer to God and convinced him to reconnect with an estranged sister. He sent her roses on her birthday. She held out hope that he would recover and want a serious relationship with her. “Everyone wanted it to work out,” she said. “It would have been a fairy tale.”

But then the fairy tale went off-script. Martin had been doing well on chemotherapy, but the treatments started to wear him down. His breathing sounded labored. He told her he had gotten too weak to cook an egg. He still called her every day, but he sounded less patient. He made surly remarks to her. “I was feeling rejected,” Tillie said. She tentatively asked if he thought they should take a break from the phone calls. He said yes and hung up on her. “We never spoke again,” she said.

After that conversation, Tillie entered the masochistic zone. She pleaded with Martin not to cut her off. She left several messages on his phone. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “My stomach hurt. I said, ‘Please call me, I feel ill!’”

He responded by email. She was crazy, he wrote, and he couldn’t deal with her anymore. “I was trying to respect him, but I
couldn’t handle the hope of a future with someone and then have it snatched away,” she said. “I felt such a sense of worth with him. I felt sick when that was yanked away.”

A crisis counselor to whom she reached out through a twenty-four-hour mental-health hotline reassured her that her grief was justified, given how suddenly Martin had pulled away. However understandable her emotions, it’s important to look closely at her reaction and the nature of her love for Martin. The distance between them and the additional limits of his illness left a lot of room for her fantasy to grow. All she had was his voice on the phone and a regular stream of emails to feed her ideas about how perfect they would be together. At first they both benefited. He needed her support. She got a lot out of being supportive. The relationship gave her an outlet for her strengths: her insight and her compassion. As so many unrequited lovers do, she tied up the prospect of a more serious relationship with a critical life goal: ending her long years of loneliness and single-mother martyrdom. Initially, her love seemed to be headed to that starry future. Even if their romance were curtailed by his death, she would be his final love, a grace in his last days.

When Martin cut off contact with her, he disrupted that fantasy. “To come that close to the dream of my heart and have it taken away from me was overwhelming,” Tillie said. As she was swept up in the protest response of the newly abandoned, she lost perspective. Her “sick feeling” took precedence over his worsening cancer, as if her life were ending, too. She described the end of their relationship in fatal terms: “To open up to someone again and have him kill you was hard.” She was swept up in what Meloy calls the “sense of entitlement” that can emerge from fantasies about the beloved.

Tillie told me that after a few days, she gave up and stopped
calling him. But she held out hope that he would get better and reconnect. He sent her two curt emails informing her of his worsening condition. A few months later, Martin’s ex-wife told Tillie that he was dead. At his funeral, a friend of his told Tillie how important she was to him after he got his diagnosis, and this news gave her some peace. “I couldn’t let him go until he died,” she said. “After that, there was no possibility that he was going to call me.”

IN THE LITERARY
realm, self-sacrifice in its most extreme form—suicide—seems the ultimate expression of unrequited love. The publication in 1774 of Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, the story of a man who kills himself over his obsession with a woman who marries someone else, caused a rash of copycat suicides. Some of the men who killed themselves were found dressed like Werther, or
with the book open to the passage detailing his death. Germaine de Staël’s 1802 epistolary novel,
Delphine
, overtly presents its protagonist as a female Werther, grappling with an
amour-passion
that is suffocated by the social priorities of the day. Delphine takes poison when she finds out the fiery Spaniard she loves is sentenced to death for his association with the old regime in revolutionary-era France. This kind of plot line comes from the Romantic era’s lionization of extreme states of feeling and political heroism. Suicide is imagined as a mystical release from social oppression and romantic disappointment.

The fascination over suicides caused by unrequited love became a full-blown cliché in the Victorian era. Stories of pining suicidal women were common in broadsheets and annuals. They were figures of pity, victims of men who had more status, power, or strength than they did. In “The Suicide,” a poem in a holiday annual, Ida, abandoned by her beloved in favor of a wealthier bride, walks into the sea to drown herself: “A plunge was heard—a dying groan /
—A bubble in the moonbeam shone.” The trope of the suicidal unwanted woman, which persisted despite the fact that women had a lower suicide rate than men, reinforced the idea of the emotionally dependent woman. If a man was to be a woman’s main reason for living,
losing him was portrayed as a reason to end her life. These stories also served as cautionary tales, since the economic and political reality of the time was that many women couldn’t live much of a life without a man. Unless they came from substantial privilege, they’d risk drowning in poverty and social stigma.

This risk is much diminished today. Yet even in the era of romantic practicality, there’s plenty of intrigue with the idea that suicide is the supreme gesture of lovelorn recklessness. I’ve listened to a car full of tween girls belting out Bruno Mars’s “Grenade,” a pop song about catching an explosive and diving in front of a train for the sake of a hard-hearted beloved. When I asked them about it, all of them agreed vehemently that this sort of behavior was “stupid.” No one will develop self-destructive urges just because a tune on the radio makes it sound catchy. But the song and those suicide narratives of yore do tap into something real. If the unwanted woman gets mired in the delusion that her beloved’s attention is the only thing that validates her, the lack of it could send her into a precariously fragile state.

CAROLYN, TWENTY-FOUR, CAME
from a conservative Christian family in western Pennsylvania. As she entered adulthood, she fell away from the religion and started to come out as a lesbian. Two of her siblings refused to eat with her,
quoting a Bible passage from Corinthians that admonishes the faithful not to take meals with unbelievers. Another sibling stopped talking to her. She lived in fear that her parents supported her only out of a sense of Christian
duty to see her through college. Once she earned her degree, she worried, they would disown her.

At college, she found herself in a completely different world. She studied film and animation at an elite art school in New England. Most of her fellow students struck her as snobbish, unwilling to be friendly because she was slightly older. In class discussion, she perceived them as competitively pretentious. One afternoon during a break in her directing class, she exchanged exasperated glances with Gus, a classmate. “It was like, ‘Oh, please, we have to go back in and face those people.’” He seemed a kindred spirit and her heart jumped.

They became friends and worked on films together. The last day of class, everyone presented a final project. She was startled to see that Gus’s film was full of references to her life. He knew she loved 1980s music and YouTube videos of owls, and she often complained to him that she had a terrible memory. The film featured a female character in an owl mask, dancing to 1980s music. Later in the film, Gus’s character, speaking off-screen, asks the dancer, “Do you remember we did this?” She replies, “I don’t remember what you’re talking about.”

Carolyn didn’t say a word during the discussion that followed. “But then I was like, ‘He knows what he did,’” she said. “He made this person based off of me to show me how much he loves me. I convinced myself of that.” She was euphoric.

She spent hours on social media, reading every tweet and status update he posted. She read all his “likes” and “favorites.” She posted as much as she dared on his Facebook wall, messaged him ideas and links, and sent out tweets in hopes that he would respond. “I would obsess over what I was going to say to him to make sure it was perfect,” she said. “I felt this terror that I was going
to say something wrong. I wasn’t messaging him constantly, but I spent a lot of time figuring out what I was going to say. I’d be lying in bed, taking a shower, getting coffee, and thinking about what I should post next.”

She wanted him to see that she was different, so he would want to be with her. What exactly she desired was hard to define. She knew he was also gay. “It was another thing we had in common,” she said. Sometimes she would fantasize about kissing him, though she didn’t want to sleep with him. Her focus was on his eyes, his face, and his words, not his body. “I fantasized about us living together and having a close intimate relationship, but not a sexual relationship. I would be his one true friend. Other people could have sex with him, but we would always be together,” she said. “I wanted him to be a part of my family, a family that I would make.”

Carolyn spun a dire web of meaning around Gus. She wanted him to be family because her own family was rejecting her—but he couldn’t offer her that closeness. When he didn’t respond to the ideas she emailed and texted, she was devastated. She stopped looking for traffic before she crossed the street. She drove to the ocean and, just like the tragic heroine of “The Suicide,” walked into the frigid water; a sandbar prevented her from going out too far. Another time, she got drunk and walked to an abandoned drawbridge on the outskirts of the city in the middle of the night. The bridge had been stuck in the open position since it went out of use in the 1970s. She climbed to the top of the open bridge and walked on the narrow ledge, high above the river. She told herself she was daring fate. If she fell, that meant she was supposed to die.

The myth that fictions such as
Werther
and “The Suicide” perpetuate is that romantic rejection alone leads to suicidal behavior. Though the
loss of love is a common factor, a central principle of mental-health risk management is that untreated depression is the
main cause, and
no single life event can be pinpointed as the only trigger for suicide. Carolyn’s self-destructive impulses were at the center of many risk factors: She was socially isolated and had a tenuous connection to her family. She was impulsive and sensitive and struggled with depression. She was drinking. And she took Gus’s silences as a rejection of who she was.

Finally, Carolyn found a way to express what she was feeling instead of using it against herself. At the end of the school year, she offered to drive Gus to the airport. They met for breakfast beforehand, and she gave him a diary full of love poems. “I had to do something,” she said. “My feelings were driving me crazy. It had been this secret. I thought that if he was aware of how I felt, then I could deal with it.” She didn’t see him at all over the summer. When they saw each other at school, he didn’t say anything about the diary. Instead of being devastated, she realized at last that the relationship she dreamed of wasn’t going to happen. She was no longer consumed with provoking responses from him, and the drawbridge no longer called to her.

Carolyn and I first spoke about a year after her obsession ended. I followed up with her three years later. She was living in Colorado, far from her western Pennsylvania hometown, but she told me that her relationship with her parents had improved. They hadn’t disowned her, as she had feared. We talked about how her obsession with Gus had changed her approach to relationships. She said she now handles rejection in a much more stable way. She’s learned to be wary when someone makes her feel the way she first felt with Gus—elated and suddenly confident. “I take a step back and think, ‘Why do I feel like that?’” she said. “I try to talk to the person and learn more about them.” The process she described seemed to be about breaking down that initial powerful narcissistic fantasy. The person she’s attracted to, she
now realized, won’t complete her—and with her more reflective approach, she might be able to see that person more clearly.