Unrequited (30 page)

    4       
 
there is no clear evidence that one sex is more vulnerable to it than the other:
Baumeister and Wotman’s research in
Breaking Hearts
indicated that women were somewhat more likely to be in the rejecter role than the aspiring-lover role. Dorothy Tennov’s research in
Love and Limerence
showed that more women than men reported they either “have been very depressed about a love affair” or thought they would “never get over” a broken relationship. See Baumeister and Wotman,
Breaking Hearts
, 12, and Dorothy Tennov,
Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love
(Lanham, MD: Scarborough House, 1999).

    4       
 
The median age of marriage is rising:
According to U.S. census data the median age of first marriage in 2010 was twenty-six for women and twenty-eight for men. In 1950, it was twenty for women and twenty-two for men. See “Median Age of First Marriage by Sex: 1890–2010,” U.S. Decennial Census (1890–2000), http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/marriage/data/acs/ElliottetalPAA2012figs.pdf.

    4       
 
at last count, just 51 percent of adults eighteen and older are married:
In 1960, 72 percent of adults age eighteen and older were married. By 2010, 51 percent were. See “Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married—a Record Low,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/.

    5       
 
Face the fact that he’s “just not that into you” and forget about him ASAP:
“You’re going to have to feel the pain, you’re going to have to go through it, and then you’re going to have to get over it” is the one-sentence prescription for moving on at the end of
He’s Just Not That Into You,
a book that goes into great detail about how to tell when a man is behaving in a way that indicates there’s no hope for a relationship. Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo,
He’s Just Not That Into You
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 152.

    6       
 
the couple married:
Sarah Lacy,
Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
(New York: Gotham, 2009), 162.

    6       
 
the expression has endured as slang for jealous exes and overzealous aspiring lovers
: Some examples from Twitter: “She’s going to find your bunny and boil it sister!”; “I’m sorry I trophied your twittercrush. Please don’t boil my bunny.” Accessed January 24, 2014, from a word search of “bunny boil” on www.twitter.com.

    6       
 
Alex—the “most hated woman in America,” according to one tabloid cover:
Susan Faludi,
Backlash
(New York: Crown, 1991), 117.

    7       
 
wrapped in oilskin next to his heart:
The nineteenth-century explorer Henry Morton Stanley carried a photograph of his beloved, a seventeen-year-old American named Alice Pike, in such a fashion on a three-year expedition to explore the great lakes of central Africa. He named the boat he used
Lady Alice.
In love letters, he called her “my dream, my stay, my hope, and my beacon” and believed she would marry him. He returned to civilization only to learn from his publisher that she had gotten married to another man. Yet the idea of Alice had sustained him through bouts of disease, near starvation, confrontations with cannibals, and other hazards. His story is an example of the power of distraction—what Stanley called “self-forgetfulness”—to foster willpower. Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 160–61.

    7       
 
led to the passage of anti-stalking laws throughout the country:
Robert John Bardo, a nineteen-year-old unemployed fast-food worker, carried a publicity photo of Rebecca Schaeffer everywhere, called her agent several times, and sent her fan mail. He killed her after getting her address from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. That same year (1989), five Orange County, California, women were killed in a six-week period by former husbands or boyfriends after courts had issued restraining orders against the men to prevent harassment. California enacted the nation’s first anti-stalking law in 1990. By the mid-1990s,
all the other states had followed suit. See Robert N. Miller, “Stalk Talk: A First Look at Anti-Stalking Legislation,”
Washington and Lee Law Review
50 (1991): 1,303–04.

    8       
 
because men should be protecting women from harm:
Richard B. Felson, “Chivalry,”
Violence and Gender Reexamined
(Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2002).

    9       
 
Women are far more likely to be the
victims
of stalking than the perpetrators:
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey reports that one in six women (16.2 percent) and one in nineteen men (5.2 percent) in the United States have experienced stalking victimization at some point during their lifetime. Stalking victimization was defined as “a pattern of harassing or threatening tactics used by a perpetrator that is both unwanted and causes fear or safety concerns in the victim,” similar to the definition used in most state anti-stalking statutes. Two thirds of the female victims (66.2 percent) reported stalking by a current or former intimate partner, and nearly one quarter (24 percent) reported stalking by an acquaintance. Approximately four out of ten male stalking victims (41.4 percent) reported they had been stalked by an intimate partner, and 40 percent had been stalked by an acquaintance. The NIPSV is an ongoing, nationally representative random-digit dial-telephone survey that gathers information about sexual violence, stalking, and intimate-partner violence among English- and Spanish-speaking women and men in the United States. The survey is conducted by the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, with the support of the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Defense. M. C. Black et al,
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report
(Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 29–33, http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf.

    9       
 
more than one out of ten stalkers is female:
In a study of 1,005 stalking cases gathered from law enforcement, prosecutorial, and entertainment corporate security files, 14.2 percent were female. Six percent of the sample were “prior intimate stalkers,” the category most relevant to this book. Stalking behavior was defined as “two or more
unwanted contacts by a subject toward a target that created a reasonable fear in that target.” Two other community-based studies of stalking victimization found that 12 to 13 percent of stalkers were female. J. Reid Meloy, Kris Mohandie, and Mila Green. “The Female Stalker,”
Behavioral Sciences and the Law
29 (March/April 2011): 240–54.

    9       
 
“obsessive relational intrusion” (ORI):
For an extensive discussion of ORI, see Brian H. Spitzberg and William R. Cupach, “What Mad Pursuit?: Obsessive Relational Intrusion and Stalking Related Phenomena,”
Aggression and Violent Behavior
8 (2003): 345–75.

    9       
 
that causes the target to fear for his or her safety:
See Reid J. Meloy, ed.,
The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives
(San Diego: Academic Press, 1998), 2.

  10       
 
They’re perceived as responsible for being stalked:
Stefanie Ashton Wigman, “Male Victims of Former-Intimate Stalking: A Selected Review,”
International Journal of Men’s Health
8 (2009): 108–12.

  11       
 
“Alec is a sicko. Everyone knows it”:
Tom Hays, “Genevieve Sabourin, Canadian Actress Accused of Stalking Alec Baldwin, Arrested in Manhattan,”
Huffington Post
, November 27, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/genevieve-sabourin_n_2203706.html.

  12       
 
“made me into a fighter”:
Neil Strauss, “The Broken Heart and Violent Fantasies of Lady Gaga,”
Rolling Stone
, July 8, 2010, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-broken-heart-and-violent-fantasies-of-lady-gaga-20100708.

  16       
 
they are clearly meant for each other:
Several readers of the 1905 best seller
The House of Mirth
protested the novel’s ending because they thought Lawrence should have married (and thus saved) Lily. According to a story in
The Detroit News
, one fan reprimanded Wharton on the street for Lily Bart’s suicide. Amy L. Blair, “Misreading
The House of Mirth
,”
American Literature
, 76 (March 2004): 149–75.

  17       
 
In ancient Egypt:
The hieroglyphic sign for love was a hoe, a mouth, and a man with a hand in his mouth. M. Abdel-Kader Hatem,
Life in Ancient Egypt
(Los Angeles: Gateway Publishers, 1976).

  19       
 
suffer the misery of rejection:
A poem by the twelfth-century French troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn ends in the fashion typical of the time: “I go away, wretched, I know not where / I will withdraw from singing and renounce it / And I hide myself from joy and love.”

  19       
 
see her naked body without touching it:
Diane Ackerman,
A Natural History of Love
(New York: Random House, 1994), 48–54.

  19       
 
Courtly love gave the knight a higher purpose in life:
“Because courtly love was extramarital, it was an accomplishment based on the desire to control the impatience of instinct, on the successful passing of a series of initiatory tests and finally on the discovery, thanks to the
dame
, of the lady, or a world of spiritual values.” Danielle Jacquart, Claude Thomasett, and Matthew Adamson,
Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 95.

  20       
 
sublimated his desire into prowess on the battlefield:
Barbara Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
(New York: Random House, 1987), 66–68.

  20       
 
ascended with her to heaven:
Quotations are from Dante Alighieri,
La Vita Nuova
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004).

  20       
 
many love sonnets he would compose in her honor:
Ibid.
,
5
.

  21       
 
He preferred instead to write “words of praise”:
Dante recounts a conversation with “a group of ladies, who were aware of my feelings.” They press him to explain “What is the point of your love for your lady since you are unable to endure her presence?” He explains that because Beatrice no longer greets him when she sees him, he has decided to “place his joy in something which cannot fail me,” which he explains as “words which praise my lady”—his poetry. Ibid.
,
24.

  21       
 
“The gaze is not upon the woman:
R. Howard Bloch,
Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 149.

  21       
 
more than a means to gain property and perpetuate a bloodline:
“Women’s status improved, less for her own sake than as the inspirer of male glory, a higher function than being merely a sexual object, a breeder of children, or a conveyor of property.” See Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror
, 67.

  22       
 
she arranges for her funeral barge to greet him:
MaryLynn Saul, “Courtly Love and Patriarchal Marriage Practice in Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
” in
Fifteenth-Century Studies
24 (1998): 55–56.

  22       
 
He had a reputation for being sexually impotent:
Matthew Josephson, in his biography of Stendhal, recounts an evening in Paris in 1921 when Stendhal went to a brothel with friends for an encounter with a prostitute whose beauty was celebrated. Consumed with love for Mathilde Dembowski, he was too sad to go through with the act, and his friends mocked him.
Stendhal or The Pursuit of Happiness
(New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1946), 268–69.

  22       
 
the protagonists in his novels:
When the protagonist of
Lucien Leuwen
rides under the window of the beautiful Mme. de Chasteller, he falls off his horse; Fabrizio in
The Charterhouse of Parma
struggles with his attraction to his aunt Gina, who loves him passionately.

  23       
 
“the deep sorrow caused me by my defeats”:
Stendhal,
The Life of Henry Brulard,
trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), 5.

  24       
 
“Everything is new, everything is alive:
Stendhal,
On Love
, trans. Philip Sidney Woolf and Cecil N. Sidney Woolf (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1853), 201.

  24       
 
“The girl is a fool; the man a tragic hero”:
Christina Nehring,
A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century
(New York: Harper, 2009), 24–25.

  24       
 
what he perceived as a woman’s ultimate power:
“Should not a woman’s true pride reside in the power of the feelings she inspired?” Stendhal,
On Love
, 71.

  25       
 
she has since remarried:
Ellen Fein separated from her first husband in 2000, just as
The Rules for Marriage: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work
was being shipped to bookstores. She tried to sue her cosmetic dentist for ruining her teeth and her marriage. She remarried in 2008. She told
The New York Times
that she’d found her new husband by following
The Rules
. See Lois Smith Brady, “Vows: Ellen Fein and Lance Houpt,”
The New York Times
, August 10, 2008, ST13.