Unrequited (29 page)

Lina sat down in a daze in the airport lounge. She wondered what was going to become of her life. She was depleted emotionally and financially. Then a “beautiful blue-eyed” man sat down three chairs away from her. “That’s when everything changed,” she said.

She started talking to the man, whose name was Oliver. When they got in line to board the plane, they realized that they were
seated next to each other. “What are the chances of that?” she said, and laughed. She made him show her his ticket to prove it. Oliver, an economics researcher, counted the number of seats on the plane and, to her delight, started calculating the odds. They talked all the way home. When she learned that he was twenty years younger than she was, she found it “incomprehensible that there could be such an old soul in a young body.”

As she described how quickly her feelings for him developed—an “immediate, unconditional” love—I feared she was telling a story of replacing one unrealistic love with another. But she assured me there was a critical difference: She didn’t need anything from Oliver.

They kept in touch. She cut her ties to Bartolo. Meeting Oliver “created a new standard” for her. “I asked myself, would I want the kind of relationship I had with Bartolo for my daughter? That’s a simple one. I would not want this for my daughter.”

One day she received a text from Oliver’s roommate. Oliver had been in a motorcycle accident. He was in a coma and might not live. As soon as she could, Lina drove down to Baltimore from her home in upstate New York.

At the hospital, Oliver’s family members, believing he wasn’t going to make it, were coming in to say goodbye. “They were speaking about him in the third person, in the past tense, as if he was already gone,” she said. “Things like: ‘Oliver was so good at the piano, Oliver was this, Oliver was that.’ They were living their greatest fear.”

When she had a moment alone with Oliver, she touched his ears and stroked his cheekbone. She whispered to him, “I haven’t had time to tell you how I feel because I haven’t known you long enough, but I have this difficult-to-explain love for you. I want you to understand there are things for you to do here.”

Lina left the hospital not knowing what was going to happen. But on her drive home, she got a text from his roommate: “He opened his eyes.” A few days later, Oliver was well enough to try to talk his doctors into letting him leave the hospital. She felt her presence had been a part of what saved him.

During his recovery, I asked her, “If he called you tomorrow and said he didn’t want to see you again, would you be okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can feel for him with no boundaries, because I have no expectations.”

Indeed, Lina never had a romance with Oliver. In the two years since his recovery, he has visited her several times. He shares a close bond with her daughter, whom he fondly calls his “niece.” He helps Lina around her house and property and with her writing. “I’m an older woman he trusts,” she said. They’ve tested the boundaries of their friendship; on one visit they fooled around. But she quickly realized their relationship wasn’t meant to be sexual. The very fact that she and Oliver never became a couple and, she feels, probably never could be, has great meaning for her. “Oliver primes me for great love,” she said. “To love, I have to take care of my own emotional life, and he helps me do that.”

One of the easiest ways to deal with unrequited love is to dismiss it as a delusion, a dream that takes us nowhere. I think this is the easy way out. We don’t have to tell ourselves we can’t get anything out of the state of being in love unless it becomes a full-blown romance. As Lina’s story shows, there are many in-between ways of being in love—her feeling for Oliver is more than a friendship, but it’s not a romance, either. For that matter, it’s not unrequited love, but it shows us what unrequited love can be at its best: intense, fruitful
feeling
, without expectations.

Lina’s daughter is a year younger than Clara. As Lina and I spoke in my living room one morning, the two girls played upstairs,
making scary movies on my cell phone. They rushed down to show us what they’d done. On the phone’s small screen, Lina and I watched their serious, horrified faces, their hair Sunday-morning-messy, their costumes a whimsical combination of camouflage and scissored-up Halloween garb. They were in that period of girlhood I remember so well, when imaginary play is all-consuming and a good book can take over the world on weekend afternoons. The idea of romantic love was still fairly incomprehensible to them, but it wouldn’t stay that way much longer.

I know that secure love and care now will help my daughter weather the storm later, hopefully with the same strong sense of self that she carries into her current friendships. I’ve also come to believe that our society as a whole could do a better job raising children to have healthy romantic relationships. We have a great deal at stake in learning to love. Good relationships are a major factor in quality of life, mortality rates, and happiness. Yet we leave courtship—the way relationships begin—largely in “the vast realm of cultural mystery,” said Brian Spitzberg, a communication professor at San Diego State University and a leading researcher on obsessive romantic pursuit. “We don’t teach it in school. It’s not seen as an appropriate area of instruction. We allow people to learn it through trial and error, an extremely inefficient way of learning. There are all sorts of ambiguities in the process. We lose track of the bigger picture of what makes better relationships because we’re trying to decode all the signals. We’re trying to figure out how the other person feels and regulate our own emotions.”

A quality relationship ed program won’t eliminate unrequited love—and I wouldn’t want to eliminate it completely, given the beneficial role played by certain kinds of unrequited love in our lives. But if we can teach kids about sex in high school classrooms, is it so outlandish to propose that we also teach them about the
human tendency to get romantically obsessed, what it might mean, and how to handle it with dignity? Can’t we teach them about ways to cope with unrequited attraction and obsession—and how, when they’re ready, to let it go?

From the time Clara was quite small, I’ve found opportunities to talk about love and relationships, bringing in what I’ve discovered in the process of writing this book. When Clara was a kindergartener, she loved
Peanuts
, a comic strip that is all about unrequited love. Charlie Brown once famously bemoaned, “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.” The strip links its characters in chains of unreturned adoration. Peppermint Patty loves Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown loves the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sally loves Linus, who loves his teacher, Miss Othmar. Lucy loves Schroeder, who wants nothing more than to play Beethoven on his toy piano.

In one of the comic strips, Lucy leans on the piano, asking Schroeder to tell her she’s beautiful. When he doesn’t, she announces, “If I go out of your life, it will become empty, and all your practicing will be as pursuing the wind.” Without lifting his gaze from the piano, he replies, “Try me!”

But Lucy doesn’t leave. She kicks the piano, believing the instrument to be her rival, the only thing standing in the way of Schroeder’s love. When that doesn’t do much, she flings the piano into the “dreaded kite-eating tree,” which chomps the instrument to dust.

When Clara burst out laughing, I didn’t try to stifle her glee. It’s a comic, after all. But I didn’t want the menace of the situation to go unnoticed, so I said, “It’s really mean, what Lucy did. Schroeder loved his piano.” Lucy is a lot more than an unwanted girl who went too far: She’s authoritative, smart, and enterprising, with a lemonade-stand-style “psychiatrist help” booth advertising a nickel
a session. It’s significant that the strip combines these qualities with her inclination to be rude and manipulative, suggesting that female ambition and the capacity for emotional violation go hand in hand. But this was something, I told myself, that I could bring up when Clara was older, if the opportunity arose. In that moment, the idea of “mean,” which any five-year-old can understand, would be enough. Clara nodded. “Read some more,” she said, eager, as always, to find something else that would make her giggle.

As Clara approaches adolescence, I’ve shared bits of my own story of obsession, in greatly watered-down form, as a cautionary tale—though she insists she doesn’t need it. “I’m not going to get obsessed with a boy like you did, Mommy,” she’s told me pointedly, more than once. She may indeed be right. If she’s not, I hope I can be helpful—though I’m well aware of the tendency of kids to ignore their parents’ advice (even if they’ve authored a book about the subject!) or hide what they’re going through. For now, I have to believe that keeping the unrequited love awareness campaign going in a casual and open way just might do some good.

MY FIRST THANK-YOU GOES TO MY EDITOR
, Gail Winston, whose keen insights and suggestions were fundamental throughout. She pushed me when I need to be pushed, in all the right ways. I also thank my agent, Henry Dunow, who recognized the promise of this project early on and offered abundant sage advice on how to turn it into a book. Dan Jones, the editor of the “Modern Love” column of
The New York Times
, helped me see back in 2006 that strong reactions to unrequited love are common and very human. My editing sessions with him were great therapy, which he graciously didn’t charge me a dime for.

Like many writers, I wrote this book while juggling a full-time job and family life. I am grateful to Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and
Jentel for concentrated periods of time to focus on my writing. With the volume turned down on the rest of my life, I could nurture this project with patience and clarity. I also thank my employer, SUNY New Paltz, for supporting
Unrequited
through a pre-tenure fellowship leave and a research and creative projects grant. My students at New Paltz kept me connected to the fast-changing world of social media and the trials of young people in the mating game. They cheered me on and eagerly followed my progress, which meant so much to me. I thank student assistants Beth Curran and Lauren Scrudato for their help with transcribing and research.

I received mentoring and encouragement from Melanie Thernstrom, Kenneth Wapner, and Gail Bradney. I cherish the conversations about unrequited love that I had with Emily Bauman, Jaime Karnes, Elizabeth Thompson, Andrew Gebert, Gabrielle Euvino, and many others whose scholarship and wisdom enriched my thought process. I thank Colette Dowling; Alisa Pearson; Sonia Shah; Faith Gimzek; my sister, Kira Copperman; and my parents, Arthur and Barbara Phillips, for reading and commenting on chapters and drafts. I also thank my brother, Marc Phillips, for his humor and support.

Laney Salisbury read and critiqued excerpts, drafts, and ramblings over the years it took to write this book. More important, she reassured me, with the compassion and understanding that can come only from a fellow writer, when I became too overwrought about writing and life in general. She and Beth Reicheld gave me steady moral support and friendship, as did my SUNY New Paltz colleagues Patricia Sullivan, Howie Good, and Gregg Bray.

I thank my husband, Bill Mead, who has championed this project from its beginnings. And why wouldn’t he? He’s the noble gentleman who showed me what good love was—and he still does. As an artist, he understands the necessity of perseverance and
focus. The house he built for our family includes a spacious office for me with a lovely view, the best place I could imagine to write this book.

I thank our daughter, Clara Mead, whose self-confidence and verve inspire me daily.

Finally, I thank the women and men who generously granted me in-depth interviews for this book. I am honored that you shared my belief that your stories will help others as they work through the challenges of unrequited love.

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.

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I surveyed more than 260 women online:
The online survey was launched on May 1, 2010. Results were retrieved on March 19, 2014, at which point the survey had 261 complete responses. I have used the survey during the writing of
Unrequited
not as a scientific measure of women’s experiences of unrequited love but as a way to get a general sense of the range of women’s experiences. I also used it to find women to interview. The survey was anonymous, but respondents had the option to give their contact information so they could be contacted for an interview. See http://www.lisaaphillips.com/survey/index.php?sid=24932&lang=en.

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to hurt the person who’s rejecting them:
In a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study ten women and men who had recently been rejected by a partner but reported they were still “intensely in love,” all participants responded that they thought about their rejecter more than 85 percent of the time. The participants also reported “signs of lack of emotional control,” including inappropriate phoning, writing, or emailing; pleading to get back together; long bouts of crying; drinking too much; and/or “making dramatic entrances and exits into the rejecter’s home, place of work or social space” to express their feelings. Helen E. Fisher, Lucy L. Brown, Arthur Aron, Greg Strong, and Debra Mashek, “Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems
Associated with Rejection in Love,”
Journal of Neurophysiology
104 (2010): 51–52.

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93 percent of respondents had been rejected by someone they passionately loved:
Roy F. Baumeister and Sara R. Wotman surveyed upper-level college students about the frequency of their experiences of unrequited love. They found that by their early twenties, nearly everyone has had at least one experience on each side of unrequited love. Only one person out of every twenty said they had never had an unrequited-love experience. Roy F. Baumeister and Sara R. Wotman,
Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love
(New York: Guilford Press, 1992).