Unrequited (4 page)

Women, therefore, should keep their mouths shut about what they were feeling.
On Love
advised women to remain modest, withholding, and mysterious. These behaviors, Stendhal assured, would trigger the male imagination, and that was the important thing. Modesty was the “mother of love” and the source of
what he perceived as a woman’s ultimate power: to inspire a torrent of male feeling. A woman’s yearning may be as strong as a man’s, but
Stendhal did not believe she should reveal it to anyone other than her closest confidantes.

And so we see a frustratingly familiar caution take shape: Woman, hold back, no matter what the tumult is in your heart. It isn’t your place to court and persuade. You may call for your rights—except in matters of romantic pursuit. The deliciousness of unsatisfied desire, at least for the stricken male, depends on your reticence. A woman openly taking on the quest to win her beloved’s heart means such missions, and all they inspire, are no longer exclusively the right of men. The main mantra of
The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
, the 1995 book that spawned the self-help literature division of today’s Dating Industrial Complex, is little more than an airbrushed, soulless descendent of Stendhal’s promotion of female modesty. The book and its many spin-offs preach that a woman must never initiate a romance with a man; instead, she should cultivate an air of coy evasiveness to fire up his primitive need to pursue. We may sniff that
The Rules
is outdated and discredited (after her divorce, one of the authors sued her cosmetic dentist, blaming him for ruining her smile and hence her otherwise
Rules
-solid marriage;
she has since remarried). But
the main arguments, repackaged every few years through sequels and updates, have had remarkable staying power: Don’t initiate phone calls, emails, dates, or sex, at least for the first several months. Don’t agree to a Saturday-night date the first few times he asks you out—it makes you seem too available.

It still seems to hold true that many women buy into a clear double standard when it comes to finding love. One of the women I interviewed had spent her twenties and early thirties in steady, long-term relationships she described as egalitarian. Then she moved to a new city and, for the first time in her adult life, entered
the dating scene. “It took me a while to get it,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to be the one asking for a date or even choosing the restaurant. And that’s how it works.”

Though the unwanted woman can certainly playact this sort of passivity, the experience of romantic obsession is not fundamentally modest. It entails a near-perpetual state of self-absorption:
I want
, no matter what I actually do (or don’t do) to get what I want. That selfishness is exactly what permits those torrents of feeling, the brilliance of perception Stendhal described. It makes possible the privilege of unrequited love: the assertion of the self through the idea of the beloved.

UNREQUITED LOVE SHOOK
Diane’s
world when she was a twenty-one-year-old art student and, as the Human League song goes, working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. At the time, she was entangled in an on-again, off-again relationship with Jeff, a possessive and moody bad boy. He angrily confronted any man he saw her talking to and hunted her down if she didn’t come home when she said she would. She’d get frustrated and break up with him, only to return to him later because she couldn’t shake the attraction. “He was a fiery guy, and I couldn’t get away from the flame,” she said.

Then she fell into a Stendhalian swoon over Roberto, a Mexican busboy. They had exchanged only a few words, most of them having to do with clearing tables. He had a regal bearing. His face, with its strong Indian cheekbones, looked noble yet sweet. He was reserved and industrious. She thought she caught him looking at her with interest.

On the basis of little more than that, she began to feel they were destined for a great romance. She had no interest then in marriage, but she daydreamed that she and Roberto might move in together one day and build what she vaguely envisioned as a “nice life.” What they needed first, though, was a common language. Once she could communicate how perfect they would be together, she was certain, he would love her back.

Roberto, remote and exotic, had become Diane’s beloved, glittering as brightly as a branch from Stendhal’s salt mines. Suddenly, she saw the potential to renew her surroundings and her life. She covered her living room in 1920s wallpaper patterned with huge white magnolias. She planted zinnias in her yard. The dirt was hard, anemic, and full of nails, which she weeded out as she dug. She stuck the seeds in swirling rows of polka dots, like a painting. As the flowers pushed their way up through the dirt, she worked her way through a Spanish primer. Sometimes after work she’d get up the nerve to perch on a barstool, swig a shot of tequila, and practice her Spanish vocabulary on the bartender. She stayed away from Jeff. “I remember throwing the phone down the stairs and saying, ‘Don’t talk to me!’” she said. “Roberto gave me a place to put my affection that wasn’t Jeff.”

By the end of the summer, she had a scrappy patch of zinnias in her yard that thrilled her. And she had learned enough Spanish to ask Roberto out.

They went to an amusement park. They rode the Ferris wheel and ate corn dogs on a stick, flashing lights and garish colors all around them. With the conversation constrained by shyness and Diane’s halting textbook Spanish, the evening was an exceptionally awkward version of the First Date. After wandering around for a while, they sat down on a bench, and Diane summoned up the nerve to do what she’d set out to do. She told Roberto she was crazy about him.

He explained to her carefully that his plan was to go back to Mexico, select a wife from his hometown, and bring her back to America. Under no condition would he ever have a relationship with a
Norteamericana.

“You don’t want to even try to get to know each other better?” she pressed.

He told her no, that wouldn’t be fair. Their date was over. A few weeks later, Diane took another waitressing job. It was too painful to keep seeing him every day.

On its surface, Diane’s story is about failure: her wasted time and energy on a fantasy that came to nothing. That summer she’d lived her life for a chimera, a man whose face told her stories she had few means of verifying. The only thing she was right about was that Roberto did turn out to be noble—too noble to start a relationship with her, a woman he could not have a future with. But consider what happened to Diane during her summer of unsatisfied desire. The crystallized Roberto became a repository of possibility, the gatekeeper to what Chekhov called a “new and glorious life.” While this life didn’t come to pass, something else did. Diane seized the privilege of unrequited love: to view the world and herself anew, and to assert herself through the idea of a distant love. She could see her rundown apartment and gritty yard as a canvas full of potential. She could learn a new language.

In the short term, she told me, her efforts were laughable. She was thrilled when the zinnias came up, but “they looked like crap.” And her first real conversation in Spanish ended in heartbreak.

But in the long term, Diane’s summer of unrequited love changed her in deeper ways. “It began my sense of the way that you plan for life. You do one thing now so that something else happens later. But you don’t really know where it will take you.” Her careful plans that summer did lead her in new directions. In her career as
a professional artist and educator, she’s made use of her Spanish in several photography projects she’s done with Mexican families in the Yucatán. And though she went back to Jeff for a while, Roberto remained a symbolic antidote to the “irrational and powerful” attraction she felt for Jeff. Roberto “wasn’t needy. He wasn’t calling me, dogging me, distracting me from my schoolwork. He seemed self-contained, safe,” she said. “I’m sure it was also safe that he had no interest in me whatsoever!” Eventually, she shook off her pull to Jeff enough to move to New York and leave him for good.

Certainly Diane exoticized Roberto. His remote otherness was fuel for her fantasies. The less she knew about him, the more she could imagine him into being—and reimagine herself. But doesn’t the beginning of love often work this way—with a longing to get closer to someone we barely know, someone we see as full of mystery? Even when we know the person better, or when it’s someone culturally more like ourselves, we have to endure plenty of unanswered questions: In love, what will he be like? What will
I
become? We use the unknown other to feed a dream of our own self. The beloved represents the blissfully perfect existence the aspiring lover wishes to have—what forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy calls a “narcissistic linking fantasy,” a common element in the passionate beginnings of love: “You feel like you’ve never felt this way before, that this is the most special relationship, that you share an idealized sense of a future together.”

In the first swell of attraction, we are all unrequited lovers, uncertain whether our feelings will be returned. In this uncertainty, we give tremendous power to the beloved. Our feeling for him unifies our lives, defines us, infuses our view of the world. Our passion
organizes our lives, thoughts, and actions. We’re preoccupied with the question: Do you love me? The stakes in the answer are very high. Social psychologist Sharon Brehm calls passionate love
a force that gives us the capacity to imagine
a “future state of perfect happiness.” When we dream of uniting with our beloved, we dream of an emotional utopia. We dream that love will complete us. In Plato’s
Symposium
, one of our oldest written explorations of the nature of love, Aristophanes proposed that primeval man was once round, with four hands and four feet. But these early beings misbehaved, and Zeus punished them for their impudence by cutting them in two and sending the pieces off separately into the ether. Thus did life’s quest become a reunion with the missing other half—a dream of oneness through love that emerges in some form
across world cultures and religions. Unsatisfied desire allows us to imagine we have found the one who will make us whole, because we haven’t yet tested the fit. The
not yet
relationship becomes strangely comfortable, at least compared to the risk of finding out your beloved’s half-self won’t conform to your own.

THERESA MET RUSSELL
, another academic, when she was thirty-seven, on a Qantas flight out of Sydney. She was returning home to New York City after months of teaching overseas. She collapsed into her seat next to him. He had his head buried in a book. The flight was delayed. As the plane rolled from one position to another on the tarmac, seemingly aimlessly, he lifted his head and said in his broad Australian accent, “I think we’re going to drive there.”

That began an eight-hour nonstop conversation. They discussed their research and their jobs. Even though they were in different fields, they’d read many of the same thinkers. When they decided it was time to go to sleep, he offered her his shoulder to rest her head on. She was flattered but demurred. She was too excited to sleep. “I thought, ‘I’ve waited my whole life to meet somebody I could have this kind of verbal connection with,’” she said.

He lived three hours away from her, which seemed to her a not
insurmountable obstacle. They began an email correspondence. Their emails were long and detailed. They shared thoughts on books, movies, and what was going on in their lives. “It reminded me of the sorts of letters back when people wrote letters,” she said. “It had a pen-pal quality with a romantic underlay.”

At first she had no expectations. The emails, though enjoyable, were sporadic. She dated another man for a few months. That December, Russell wrote to tell her he would be coming to New York the following April to speak at a conference. “It would be great to see you again,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll look better. I’m sure I had drool all over my face on the plane.”

The email triggered something in Theresa. “He wouldn’t care how he looked if he weren’t interested, I thought. And then it was like a cascade of feeling on my part. I got hooked into that zone of obsessing about him. He was the one I thought about every night.”

The pace of the emails picked up. He sent her his photo and asked for hers. At times the emails were playful and fun. At times they were what Theresa described as “soul-baring.” He wrote her long, heartfelt descriptions of his conflicted feelings about his mother, who was dying. Yet he made no plans to see Theresa before the conference, still a couple of months away. When she showed one of his emails to her roommate, she said disdainfully, “Look, he’s not coming down to see you. He’s just playing with you.”

Theresa nodded, although her roommate’s dismissiveness didn’t seem quite fair. She had tried once to arrange a visit to see him, and it hadn’t panned out. She hesitated to ask again, fearing she’d scare him away. Between the distance and the emails, she figured she would have time to let the relationship build. Their correspondence only seemed to get more personal; after his mother passed away, he sent Theresa the eulogy he delivered at the funeral.