Unrequited (34 page)

121       
 
(Shipman and Oefelein are now married . . . ):
http://www.adventurewrite.com/about.html.

123       
 
“let-down period after the tremendous high of flying in space”:
Andrea Lucia, “Letters Paint a Different Picture of Nowak,” http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7118214.

123       
 
She was one of the rare ones who made it:
Except where otherwise noted, my account of Lisa Nowak comes from two sources: S. C. Gwynne, “Lust in Space,”
Texas Monthly
, May 2007, 126–219; and Dianne Fanning,
Out There: The In-Depth Story of the Astronaut Love Triangle Case That Shocked America
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).

124       
 
flooded with feeling:
Cupach and Spitzberg,
The Dark Side of Relationship Pursuit
, 105.

124       
 
lost her grip on reality:
Brizendine’s quote is from C. W. Nevius, “When Love Goes Wrong—a Bizarre Mission,”
The San Francisco Chronicle
, February 7, 2007, A1. Nowak ended up with a plea bargain that sentenced her to two days of time served and a year’s probation. Her lawyer had planned to use an insanity defense in court on the basis of a psychiatrist’s assessment that diagnosed bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, and insomnia. Paul Siegel, an assistant professor of psychology at Purchase College, told
The Atlantic
that Nowak showed elements of antisocial personality disorder, which entails “disturbed patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that come to the surface especially in relationships.” People with this disorder often behave normally in everyday life but can be triggered by jealousy or other factors that reveal an instability underneath. See Ford Vox, “Lisa Nowak: Space Oddity,”
Thealtantic.com
, February 17, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/02/lisa-nowak-space-oddity/71383/.

125       
 
triggering the urge to retaliate:
Forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy said it was significant that Nowak was not pursuing the person
she was obsessed with. “If you can shift your fury toward a third object, you can preserve the fantasy toward the object you’re pursuing. It’s called triangulation. If you can blame a third party, you can still fantasize the other person loves you and wants to be with you. You can retain that special belief. You can believe the third party is interfering with that relationship.” Telephone interview with Meloy, 2014.

127       
 
the redirection of feelings from a prior relationship:
Leonard H. Kapelovitz called transference “the inappropriate repetition in the present of a relationship that was important in a person’s childhood.” See Leonard H. Kapelovitz,
To Love and to Work: A Demonstration and Discussion of Psychotherapy
(Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 1977), 66. Transference was described first by Freud as an important process in psychoanalysis. The patient would experience transference with the analyst, who in turn could help her understand her feelings. Freud wrote: “The patient sees in [the analyst] the return, the reincarnation, of some important figure out of childhood or past, and consequently transfers on to him feelings and reactions which undoubtedly applied to this prototype.” See Sigmund Freud,
An Outline of Psychoanalysis
(London: Hogarth Press, 1938), 125–26.

127       
 
lack of empathy for others:
“Narcissistic Personality Disorder Symptoms,” http://psychcentral.com/disorders/narcissistic-personality-disorder-symptoms/.

131       
 
with the book open to the passage detailing his death:
Daniel Goleman, “Pattern of Death: Copycat Suicides Among Youth,”
The New York Times
, March 18, 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/18/nyregion/pattern-of-death-copycat-suicides-among-youths.html.

132       
 
losing him was portrayed as a reason to end her life:
Barbara T. Gates, “Suicidal Women: Fact or Fiction?” in
Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories, a Victorian Web Book
, http://www.victorianweb.org/books/suicide/07.html. “The Suicide” is published in
Forget Me Not: A Christmas and New Year’s Present
, edited by Frederic Shoberl (London: R. Ackermann, 1827), 204–06.

132       
 
quoting a Bible passage from Corinthians:
1 Corinthians 5:9–13: “But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one.”

134       
loss of love is a common factor:
Suicide.org, a nonprofit suicide prevention organization, lists “the breakup of a relationship” as a cause of depression and states that “untreated depression is the number one cause for suicide.” See Keven Caruso, “Suicide Causes,” http://www.suicide.org/suicide-causes.html. A small study of suicide notes in India shows that a “disturbed love affair” was cited as a cause in 25 percent of the forty suicide notes analyzed. Manjeet S. Bhatia, Satish Verma, O. P. Murty, “Suicide Notes: Psychological and Clinical Profile,”
International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine
(2006): 36, 163–70.

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no single life event can be pinpointed as the only trigger for suicide:
Sonia Kutcher Chehil,
Suicide Risk Management: A Manual for Mental Health Professionals
, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley), 7.

139       
 
the other reads it as a buildup to romance:
Baumeister and Wotman,
Breaking Hearts
.

146       
 
women are three times more likely than men to have been stalked:
According to the NIPSV survey, 16.2 percent of women and 5.2 percent of men in the United States have experienced stalking victimization at some point in their lifetime. An estimated 10.7 percent of women and 2.1 percent of men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime. Michele C. Black et al,
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report
, 2011, 1-2.

146       
 
believe that they or someone in their life would be harmed or killed as a result:
Ibid., 2.

146       
 
the gender disparity markedly diminishes:
“Research identifying men as the primary, and potentially more dangerous, perpetrators of stalking has not been without its exceptions. As noted above, gender differences fade in college sample studies of unwanted pursuit behavior. In fact, in two studies with U.S. college students it was suggested that female perpetrators of unwanted pursuit engage in more mild aggressive stalking behaviors than men. . . . Another study . . . also found women engaged in more moderate levels of stalking behavior than men, and no gender differences were found
for severe stalking behavior.” Amy E. Lyndon et al, “An Introduction to Issues of Gender in Stalking Research,”
Sex Roles
66 (2012): 304.

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other forms of relationship violence and abuse:
Though crime statistics show that women are usually the victims of relationship aggression and men the perpetrators, community samples indicate that women perpetrate a significant number of both “low-risk” and more serious acts of violence against male partners. As with stalking, the gender disparity fades significantly. See John Archer, “Sex Differences in Physically Aggressive Acts Between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-analystic Review,”
Aggression and Violent Behavior
7 (2002), 339.

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compared to about a quarter of men:
Stacey L. Williams and Irene Hanson Frieze’s courtship behavior study at the University of Pittsburgh showed that rival percentages of men and women used surveillance behaviors (96 percent of men and 99 percent of women) and mild aggression (27 percent of men and 22 percent of women) during courtship. Mild aggression included trying to scare the person, making threats, verbal abuse, and physical harm (both “slight” and “more than slight”). After breakups, women were about as likely as men to use intimidation (26 percent of men and 25 percent of women) and somewhat more likely to use mild aggression (23 percent of men versus 32 percent of women). See Williams and Frieze, “Courtship Behaviors,” 248–57. Leila Dutton’s 2006 research on post-breakup pursuit showed that female pursuers were more likely to monitor their targets and more likely to physically hurt them. See Dutton, “Predicting Unwanted Pursuit,” 575.

147       
 
the rate of women who stole or damaged property was twice the rate of men:
In an analysis of three large studies of college students and unwanted relationship pursuit tactics, 12 percent of women reported they stole or damaged possessions compared to 6 percent of men. Eleven percent of women reporting doing physical harm, compared to 4 percent of men. Brian H. Spitzberg and William R. Cupach, “What Mad Pursuit? Obsessive Relational Instruction and Stalking Related Phenomena,”
Aggressive and Violent Behavior
8 (2003), 355.

147       
Female pursuers were just as likely as male pursuers to resort to severe violence, such as kicking and choking:
An Australian study published in
Sex Roles
in 2012 found that 28.8 percent of women who used repeated unwanted pursuit behaviors resorted to moderate violence such as slapping and grabbing, a rate approximately double that of male stalkers (15.5 percent). There was no significant gender difference in the rates of severe violence such as choking and kicking (16.9 percent of the males and 19.4 percent of the females). See Thompson, “Are Female Stalkers More Violent Than Male Stalkers?” 357. Even when stricter legal definitions of stalking are used, rates of violence among female stalkers have been comparable to that among males, and there is no evidence that the violence is any less serious or harmful when it’s committed by female stalkers. See Meloy and Boyd, “Female Stalkers and Their Victims,” 217.

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a sociocultural attitude that is more disapproving of male violence against women than female violence against men:
The study presented various scenarios to male and female relationship pursuers and found that they were more likely to see female violence against men as justified under certain circumstances than male violence against women. See Thompson, “Are Female Stalkers More Violent Than Male Stalkers?,” 357–60.

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suffer from anxiety and shifts in their attitudes and personality:
Wigman, “Male Victims of Former-Intimate Stalking: A Selected Review,”
International Journal of Men’s Health
8 (2009): 111–13.

152       
 
yet may be considered laughable when the roles are reversed:
Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, “Gender and Stalking: Current Intersections and Future Directions,”
Sex Roles
66 (2012): 421.

154       
 
“they should be ready to have a sexual experience with any woman, at any time”:
Ibid., 421.

154       
 
female stalkers are not seen as being as much cause for concern as male stalkers:
Wigman, “Male Victims of Former Intimate Stalking,” 109–10.

154       
 
rejecting a woman’s love is, in the pagan world, a “sin against nature”:
James Lasdun,
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 213.

156       
“accidentally (and dangerously) lead on a paranoid fantasist”:
John Colapinto, “What Has He Done? On James Lasdun’s Memoir,” Page-Turner blog, April 11, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/04/what-has-he-done-on-james-lasduns-memoir.html.

156       
 
“like Humbert Humbert, more complicit than innocent”:
Jessica Freeman-Slade, “Like a Woman Scorned: On James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have,” http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/like-a-woman-scorned-on-james-lasduns-give-me-everything-you-have.html.

156       
 
“while she remains alone, her novel unpublished, clearly very ill”:
Nick Richardson, “Internet-Enabled,”
London Review of Books
, April 25, 2013, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n08/nick-richardson/internet-enabled.

156       
 
approaching his story with “an almost total lack of self-irony”:
Jenny Turner, “Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked—review,”
The Guardian
, February 7, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/07/give-me-everything-you-have-review.

159       
 
because society doesn’t take female-on-male stalking seriously:
Langhinrichsen-Rohling, “Gender and Stalking,” 422.

159       
 
more than 81 percent of the orders issued for male victims are violated, along with about 69 percent of the orders issued for female victims:
Christopher T. Benitez, M.D., Dale E. McNiel, Ph.D, and Renée L. Binder, M.D., “Do Protection Orders Protect?,”
Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatric Law
38 (2010): 376–85.

164       
 
“Part of Your World” is what’s called the “I wish” song:
“Promised Land,”
This American Life
, originally aired on February 20, 2004, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/259/transcript.

164       
 
marriageable young men and women might jostle against each other and meet:
See Julie C. Bowker, Sarah V. Spencer, Katelyn K. Thomas, and Elizabeth A. Gyoerkoe, “Having and Being an Other-Sex Crush During Early Adolescence,”
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
111 (2012): 629.

166       
the distance he has said he wants:
Katie D. Anderson, “Teen Texting: The Ruin of Romance,”
Huffington Post
, October 13, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katie-d-anderson.