Unrequited (26 page)

Careena’s frustrated desire eventually became unbearable. As she drove Sharon home after an afternoon they’d spent together, they fought. She told Sharon she didn’t want to spend time with her anymore. “I said, ‘I can’t take it. This is literally killing me. I am torn into a million pieces.’” After Careena dropped Sharon off, Careena went to dinner with a group of mom friends, several of whom knew what she was going through. She was so distraught that she couldn’t sit still. She announced, “Either I’m going to stay here and make this all about me or I’m going to leave.” They looked at her, not knowing what to say. She went home sobbing and threw herself down on her bed. Her husband came into their bedroom to ask what was wrong. “I hate my life,” she said. “Can I help you?” he asked. She said no.

She knew her marriage had to end—and so did her obsession with Sharon. Careena was beginning to realize they wouldn’t last as a couple. But the impact of the relationship was profound. She and her husband got divorced not long after, and she moved upstate. Her next serious relationship was with a woman. They’ve been together eight years, and they recently got married.

Careena resists the simplicity of calling her obsession with Sharon a “coming out story.” As Careena describes it, the intensity of her feelings made far more of an impact than the fact that Sharon was female. Yet the drama of Careena’s obsessive, impossible love made me think of mid-twentieth-century lesbian pulp fiction. Romantic obsession lured women into same sex affairs, typically with punishing consequences:
protagonists driven by unrequited love to suicide, insanity, or depression. When Patricia Highsmith gave the infatuated heroine of her 1952 novel,
The Price of Salt
, a hopeful ending with her female beloved, she offered an alternative vision of the purpose of romantic obsession: that it could lead you to a braver and more truthful existence, even in the face of oppressive social convention.

Careena’s unrequited love took place in a far less homophobic time, yet it had a similar force. It pushed her out of a life that no longer felt genuine to her. Her obsession brought out a self-centeredness that drove her to distance herself from what made her unhappy—her marriage and her stay-at-home-mom existence—and court a woman who made her feel alive. Careena’s life changed in other ways, too. She had to go back to work after the divorce, and she began to build a career out of the volunteering she’d done during her marriage. “Buying thousand-dollar handbags could never make me as happy as I am now,” she said. “My life is harder now, but the clarity and richness are unparalleled.” Sharon, The Lover Who Never Was, is still a friend. Careena told me she could
telephone Sharon out of the blue and discover they’re both playing the same track on the same CD. Sharon was also “the tool that ended my marriage,” Careena said. “And I certainly couldn’t have reached for a more rocket-red glare tool than that.”

ELEANOR, A FIFTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD
business consultant in Connecticut, arrived at the emotional wake-up call of unrequited love from a very different place. She had a long and satisfying marriage, enviably infused with a spirit of adventure. After her husband retired and she was laid off unexpectedly from her job, they sold their house in Connecticut and went on a cross-country bicycle trip, starting in Key West and ending in St. Stephen, Canada. Not long after they returned home, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She spent the next two years helping him fight the disease. “Then I had to give him space to die,” she said. “I had to not be angry at him that I would be a widow. It was a huge, difficult journey to take.”

After he passed away, she resolved to never let herself love so deeply again. She couldn’t stand the thought of being that vulnerable with someone else. She went back to work full-time. She was fifty-four and raising her two grandchildren. “I didn’t think I’d have another relationship in my life,” she said.

One of her coworkers was a thirty-one-year-old man from India. They were assigned to manage a long-term project. After a year, she realized that she was intensely attracted to him. Her feelings reminded her of the last time she was in unrequited love. She was seventeen and her obsession became self-destructive. “It was like, ‘If you won’t look at me, just stab me,’” she said. “I thought I was going to drive off a fucking cliff.” She became so distraught that she nearly killed herself with a drug overdose. Almost forty years later, as her feelings grew for her colleague, she tried to stifle them. “Here
I am, a year out of being widowed. This just can’t be. I don’t want to have a crush on this guy. This is not an emotional state I want to be in. But that didn’t matter. It became an obsession really quickly.”

She knew there was little chance that they could be together. She was white and older than he was, a double taboo in Indian culture. An affair might jeopardize their jobs. Their work relationship, meanwhile, thrived. They had a similar management style: aggressive, fast-paced, not always strict about the rules. She relished his soft-spoken manner and his youthful energy. She was gratified by how comfortable he seemed with her assertiveness.

She realized that instead of feeling devastated over the impossibility of her love, she was enjoying it. Her obsession began to feel like a pleasurable game. “Around him, I’d puff up and slow down my talking,” she said. “I would be calmer. I wanted to take it slow. I wanted to be completely present to the sexual energy. At this point in my life, I thought, ‘I’m going to wallow in this.’”

Sometimes she felt distraught over her crush, but she found she didn’t have much time to wallow in self-pity. Her grandchildren kept her busy when she wasn’t at work. When she did have time alone, she fought down the impulse to jump in her car and find him. She knew where he lived and where he hung out with his friends. But she didn’t want to act like she had at seventeen. She would let herself occasionally flirt with him on work outings, but that was all.

One afternoon as they were preparing for a presentation, he told Eleanor that he was getting a promotion that would take him back to India. She had known this day would come, but she was devastated. She waited two days, then told him they needed to talk. They sat down in a conference room. “This isn’t about how you feel or your response,” she said. “This is about what I need to say. I will regret it if I don’t say it.”

She carefully told him how she felt. He took a deep breath and told her he didn’t want to hurt her. She assured him that she needed nothing from him. “You don’t have responsibility for my heartbreak,” she said. “This is what my heart has done. I didn’t think I could feel this way again after losing my husband, and it’s really good for me to know I can go to this place with someone.” She knew she couldn’t think about love as something she could avoid for the rest of her life. She was capable of getting close to someone else. She wanted another relationship, even if it wasn’t with him.

He received her confession calmly. He told her he would never forget her. As she suspected, he had nothing more to give her—no confession of mutual desire, no eleventh-hour fling. A few nights later, they went out to dinner, and their rapport was still there. They parted as friends.

WHAT STRIKES ME
about Eleanor is how determined she was not to fall prey to her unrequited love. She couldn’t control her feelings, but she could control how she acted in response to them—and let them move her to a new understanding of what her future could bring. “I have thrown myself off the ledge before, and I decided I wasn’t going to do it this time,” she said. “What I have to hold on to now is much more important to me than if I had actually gone to bed with him.”

Eleanor’s story shows that the unwanted woman can use what she’s going through for a larger purpose. She can know what she wants isn’t possible. She can fantasize, knowing that her fantasies will never be real. She can experience love without real expectations—and with a Don Quixote freedom to do what she needs to do with the feeling. Clinical psychologist Jill Weber, the author of
Having Sex, Wanting Intimacy: Why Women Settle for
One-Sided Relationships
, says women may be drawn to unrequited love in times of transition. “They are trying to figure something out,” she said. “They’re not ready for commitment, but this allows them to feel desire at a distance without risking rejection. It’s what the self needs to do.” As in the preadolescent and teen years, unrequited love can be a necessary phase for an adult, helping her learn—or relearn—how to love within the relative safety of a one-sided attraction.

The key for Eleanor was adult-size restraint, which seems anathema to passion. She put rules around her obsession and, within those rules, found pleasure and insight. Social psychologist Sharon Brehm has observed a similar phenomenon in religious traditions, which place ecstatic spiritual love “within the context of a disciplined life of devotion.” The sixteenth-century nun Teresa of Ávila wrote of mood swings that went from euphoria to despair to blank exhaustion as she experienced love for an unknowable God. She felt mystical moments of union, “like rain falling from the heavens into a river,” as well as times of panic when she could not feel as close to God as she wanted. All this took place within a life of strict discipline, untenable to most of us. But there is something important in the combination of order and disorder that characterized Teresa of Ávila’s ecstasy—and, in a thoroughly contemporary and a-religious manner, Eleanor’s approach to her crush. Eleanor worked with her passion and let it teach her. We don’t have to become nuns. We don’t have to stifle all feeling. But we may need to learn, as individuals and as a culture, ways to honor passion by confining and using it instead of letting it diminish us.

B. HAD NOT ANSWERED HIS PHONE IN
days. One morning I tried him from my office at school.

“Phillips,” he said as soon as he heard my voice, “I’m cutting you off. We can never speak again.” He hung up.

I canceled my classes for the rest of the day. I went back to my apartment and got into bed. I felt weak and had a fever. The next morning, I vomited. Immediately after, I felt, if not normal, that I could glimpse normalcy. My temperature went back down. I was no longer possessed. I was shaken and alone. I had failed, but I could move forward.

That twenty-four-hour flu was my exorcism.
The demon was gone. The end of my obsession began with the words “we can never speak again
.
” B. ended all possibility. He had never done that before.

I was ready. At long last, I had to accept the repeated rejections, the girlfriend he couldn’t bring himself to leave, the simple fact that after six months of strenuous effort, we still weren’t together. Dorothy Tennov would have
called what I went through
starvation—
the lack of consistent attention and caring from B., on top of all the accumulated evidence that a relationship wasn’t going to happen. After that final phone call, I no longer had anything to feed my hopes. A couple of weeks later, I left Pittsburgh for a while. The trip, planned before my obsession began, was fortuitous. I needed to wake up with a couple hundred miles between us instead of a few blocks.

Finding distance, in real miles or metaphorical ones, can be crucial to ending romantic obsession. Maria, the woman obsessed with a man who worked at a sporting-goods store a few miles south of her home, stopped driving by the store. Even the sight of it, she knew, would retrigger her attraction, making her miserable. She did all her errands in the other direction.

A CONCLUSIVE REJECTION
that ends all contact, as heartless as it might seem, is a blessing for the unwanted woman whose obsession has become compulsive, demoralizing, or destructive. Ambivalence and mixed messages are her curse. So are the intermittent positive rewards of sex, affection, friendship, and other kinds of attention. When people confide in me that they are being aggressively pursued, I tell them the story of my final phone call with B. I urge them to be as unequivocal as he finally was. When unrequited love gets out of hand, the moral dilemma of the beloved boils down to this: Rejection is mercy.

There are limits to this idea. Plenty of aspiring lovers persist beyond an unequivocal no. And plenty of beloveds won’t or can’t be so clear. The unwanted woman who wants to stop being consumed by unrequited love may need another way out, a way that isn’t dependent on what the beloved does.

How, then, does romantic obsession end?

Just as there are many ways to be in obsessive love, there are many ways to get out of it, though common themes and larger lessons do emerge. Most of the women in this book (including me) didn’t follow any one particular strategy or program. Some found solace in support groups. Some got professional help, an option people whose obsession is limiting their ability to function or spurring them to destructive behavior should seek. Rest assured, with rare exceptions, unrequited love does end.

ONE OF THE
legs that unrequited love stands on is the importance of the beloved—all the goals and dreams you’ve imbued him with. The goals and dreams don’t have to end, but their association with the beloved does. Renowned physician Ibn Sina realized this back in the tenth century, when he prescribed refuting the lovesick patient’s idealized notions as “nothing but a delusion” and pointing out the beloved’s character flaws. Take the magic away. Unlink the goals, dissolve the crystals. He also advised strenuous distractions: hunting, intellectual debates, and other physically and mentally challenging activities.

Ibn Sina’s remedy, as psychologist Frank Tallis points out, is echoed today in
a number of therapeutic approaches rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT helps people identify and change the beliefs that direct self-destructive and self-defeating thoughts and actions. If you believe the beloved is the only man on earth who can give you the love you need and you
must
be
with him, you’ll continue to behave accordingly. CBT prompts the patient to challenge the strength of the belief: How, for example, could your beloved be the only man who can give you the love you need if he doesn’t text you back? How could he be fulfilling his long-ago promise to spend his life with you if he won’t even agree to let you see him?