Unrequited (12 page)

ANTIDEPRESSANTS DIDN’T PREVENT
Alice, a thirty-nine-year-old woman in Southern California, from becoming romantically obsessed. She’s been on SSRIs for years, part of a regimen for treating her bipolar disorder. She gave up her profession as a university administrator because the waves of mania and depression made it difficult for her to hold down a job. She spent most of her time alone. Her husband, a corporate executive, worked long days, then went to the gym for a couple of hours, intent on maintaining his weight loss. When Alice eloped with him when they were in college, he weighed three hundred pounds and had been fat since childhood. His size didn’t matter to her. He was a stable, loving force in her life, someone who helped her flee the chaos of her teens. Her father was out of work and she had been expected to help care for her five younger siblings. She acted out instead, causing so much trouble that she was kicked out of two different schools.

Alice and her husband had a good sex life at first. But as her bipolar disorder worsened and he lost weight, he became less interested in making love to her. He was critical of her body—she’d put on some weight because her medication slowed down her thyroid—and he was preoccupied with maintaining his own. “Losing weight changed him a lot,” Alice said. “Whatever that took mentally is affecting whatever it takes to let go and have sex. He was more sensual and free when he was fat.”

He was also intensely protective of her. He came to seem more like a parent than a spouse. When I interviewed Alice, she told me he hadn’t kissed her deeply in ten years. “He’s just into this thing
where he’s my guardian,” she said. “He calls me ‘little girl.’ He buys me whimsical presents.”

A year after Alice stopped working, she told her husband that she wanted to take classes at the local community college. He agreed but insisted that she enroll in only one course at a time. She chose a basic drawing class. Slater, the teacher, was an artist her own age. The first week, he gave her a big smile when it was her turn to introduce herself. “It was like a lightning bolt,” she said. “I never knew that even existed, the love-at-first-sight kind of thing.”

Thus began what Alice described as an intensely sexual flirtation. She baked banana bread and cookies for Slater. After she told him she liked the David Bowie song he’d played during class, Slater played more of Bowie’s music. He brushed up against her when he was looking at her drawings. A group of students in the class moved their desks to get a better view of the flirtation. Every class, there were lots of “tiny subtle things” that passed between them. He teased her a lot, and she welcomed his playfulness; her husband was introverted and more serious. Alice knew Slater was also married, and she told herself that perhaps he saw her as a safe way to express himself sexually without consequences.

Her feelings built. She sought him out online. She went to ratemyprofessors.com and gave him a rave review with a red chili pepper—a sign that a student finds a professor intellectually-slash-sexually “hot.” She went on an art website where he kept a page of his work and commented extensively on it. She used a pseudonym, then alluded to things she’d done or said in class to let on who she really was. He responded, thanking her avatar and complimenting her for her ability to write about art.

Her thoughts were most intense at night, after she shut down her laptop and got into bed with her husband, who insisted that she end her day when he did. “He feels he has to watch over me,”
she said. “He’s scared of the bipolar, and he tries to control me. We joke that I’m this rag doll he takes to bed with him.” After her husband fell asleep, Alice would lie awake and think of Slater. She composed letters to him in her head. Her flirtation, though it remained platonic, felt like her only sex life, she told me more than once during our conversation. “It was this whole sexual intellectual high,” she said. “I hadn’t interacted like that for a long time. It was exhilarating and intense.”

After the semester ended, Alice went to an opening of a show of Slater’s work. She lied to her husband about where she was going. At the show, Slater asked her to take his class the following semester. The way he asked felt sweet and romantic to Alice. When she got into bed with her husband that night, she burst into tears. She confessed that she’d lied about where she had been. Then she told him the more important truth: She was in love with her art teacher.

Her husband was furious. He told her he wanted a divorce. The prospect that their marriage might be ending threw Alice into confusion. She had dreamed of living on her own. She had mused that maybe one day Slater would leave his wife to be with her. But she was terrified of being without her husband. She called Slater and pleaded with him to make her stop feeling what she was feeling. “Block me from your email, block me from your number,” she begged. Slater protested that he didn’t know how to do that—and insisted there was nothing to stop. He was just being friendly, he explained. “I’m committed to my wife,” he said.

Alice and her husband didn’t break up. The threat of divorce sent her spiraling into depression. Her husband was there to take care of her, just as he always had been. She didn’t sign up for another class with Slater.

At times Alice sees her obsession with Slater as pure chemistry, lovesickness linked to her bipolar disorder. Her feelings were “part
of a rising hypomania,” a high-energy state that drove her to write the long commentaries online about his art and to believe that his feelings were equally avid. In reality, she barely knew him. “He’s an outline of a human man, and it’s static inside,” she said.

But her romantic obsession, like Isabella Robinson’s, allowed her to look beyond the confines of the circumscribed life she and her husband had created to protect her from stress and keep her bipolar condition under control. Her feelings about Slater, she told me, were a projection of a part of herself. “He’s an artist,” she told me. “I’m jealous of him. I didn’t make a good career choice when I was younger. I can’t work a nine-to-five job. I need to do something with my hands, something I can do alone. He’s doing something I wish I had done.”

She related her infatuation to the Jungian notion of the anima and the animus, the respective feminine and masculine aspects of our collective unconscious. Men tend to repress the anima, the emotional, receptive, sensitive, caretaking feminine side. Women will do the same to the animus, which represents physical power, creative accomplishment, action, public expression, and the search for meaning.

Jung’s wife and colleague, Emma Jung, helped develop these ideas. Her two classic papers, published together as
Animus and Anima
in 1957
,
detail a phenomenon very much like the romantic obsession Alice described. A woman projects the animus onto a man she loves because her masculine side feels dangerous to her. Projection is a defense, a way of not owning her feelings and experiences. But the projection can also create a “compulsive tie,” as it did to Alice—what Emma Jung described as a “
dependence on him that often increases to the point of being unbearable.” She urged people to recognize the projection and dismantle it. Only then can they get in touch with their masculine side and harness it
to guide them to their own power. “We’re always looking for that missing piece in ourselves,” said Jungian analyst Jacqueline Wright. “That ideal lover or person that we’re looking for holds a quality that we don’t recognize or express in ourselves.”

This theory is one possible interpretation of what was happening to Alice, with no hard science behind it. But the idea resonated strongly for her. Powerful aspects of her self—her rebelliousness, her sexuality, her need to create and have purpose in her life—had been tamped down to keep her mental illness in check. There certainly was reason for caution. Her illness has caused her and her husband great pain. At times she has been suicidal. But the depth of her obsession raised questions about whether the tight restrictions on her life might have backfired in sexual, emotional, and creative frustration. Alice wasn’t really obsessed with Slater. She was obsessed with what was missing in her life. The real romantic possibility here—of a more fulfilled existence—was one that might very well be within reach.

In our time, seeing romantic obsession mainly as pathology closes a window in our psyches. The label of “sick” as opposed to “healthy” in love is often code for what’s inconvenient, messy, annoying, and confusing. In our eagerness to categorize yearning, we may neglect to ask what we are truly yearning for. If we dismiss romantic obsession as nothing more than a tumor to be excised from our psyche, we’ll see no reason to heed what our longing might be trying to tell us.

BEFORE I BECAME OBSESSED WITH B
., he told me about a new staging of
A Streetcar Named Desire
that was all the rage among theater scholars. Stanley was played by a woman, Blanche by a man. I laughed. “Sounds liberating.”

The idea quickly caught on between us. The first time I invited him out for a drink, his emailed response read:
Dear Stanley: Yes, I would like very much to have a beer. What night is good for you? Blanche DuBois.
I replied:
Dear Blanche: Maybe after my Monday night class? I’m free at 8:30. Stanley.

The exchange seemed like more than a flirtatious joke. I had been spending a lot of time
at the gym that summer, lifting weights to fight my sadness over the end of my relationship. The amount I could lift, push, and pull was gradually increasing. I felt my strength at other times, too, opening the heavy stairwell doors at school, or carrying my bicycle up and down my apartment stairs. Whenever I made a fist and bent my elbow, the new muscle rising from my forearm seemed like someone else’s. I was the kind of girl who was picked last for teams in gym class in elementary school. I’d never tried to be strong before. Had B. noticed I looked different? I let myself feel flattered.

As for Blanche, B. was tall and thin, with a sharp nose, a repertoire of expressive hand gestures, and an air of being too intelligent to stay in the confines of one gender. What was evolving between us felt new—a relationship in which gender roles were playful choices, not dictates. I had never bought into the idea that the man was supposed to make the first moves and the woman was supposed to play it cool. That game seemed retrograde and dishonest, though it was always
there
somehow: If I wait until he kisses me first, I’m behaving. If I go ahead and do it, I am transgressing—but that wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, it could carry a certain erotic charge, with the message:
I want you enough to break the rules
.

As my obsession with B. took hold, the role reversal intensified. I became the steadfast knight, shadowing him unseen, waiting and planning for the moments when I might get a dose of his attention. He played the girlie game of keeping me guessing and yearning. He wavered between devotion to his out-of-town girlfriend and what seemed like a clear attraction to me. He would confess he wanted me back, then ward me off by saying he needed more time.

A couple of times we ended up in each other’s arms. As we kissed and touched, I’d have the sense of a clock ticking loudly somewhere, counting off the moments before an alarm would go off in his tortured conscience, making him stop. We kept up the
gender-bending banter. One night after he stopped me from taking off his pants, he joked, “Sorry to be such a cock tease.”

The line unsettled me because it felt so appropriate. All the ways male desire had ever been described to me—its mind-consuming, nearly painful
insistence—
seemed to be my new reality. I felt like I really
was
becoming Stanley, standing on a fire escape in a white T-shirt, bellowing my beloved’s name without caring what the neighbors thought.

THERE MAY HAVE
been a neurobiological basis for what I was feeling. Research indicates that men and women go through similar neurochemical and hormonal changes when they fall in love, with one interesting distinction:
Testosterone, the hormone associated with sex drive and aggression, goes up in women and decreases in men.
How this testosterone fluctuation affects our behavior hasn’t been studied yet. But University of Pisa neuroscientist Donatella Marazziti, who led the testosterone research, surmised that the changes in female and male body chemistry may be meant to bring the sexes closer together in love—“
as if nature wants to eliminate what can be different in men and women.”

Women do, then, become hormonally more “masculine” when they’re love-struck. Confessed one woman I interviewed, who hadn’t known about Marazziti’s findings, “I just
felt
like I had more testosterone. I felt more stringy and muscular. It was totally bizarre.” The testosterone increase is accompanied by a rise in cortisol (which occurs in both sexes), a hormone associated with stress and physiological arousal—our fight-or-flight response. The more thinking you tend to do about the relationship, one study found, the more cortisol levels increase. In a reciprocated relationship, the cortisol rise happens along with stress-
reducing
responses:
an increase in positive emotions and the release of
oxytocin and vasopressin. The unrequited lover, in contrast, is stuck in thought, with fewer—if any—of these calming forces, her body hormonally primed to take action.

This hormonal shift is one of many factors that indicate a more complex reality behind the long-standing ideal that women are supposed to be the pursued in love, not the pursuers. Historically, our culture has coped with this reality by tagging lustful boy chasers as women who aren’t fully female. Hippocrates cautioned that longing and sexual frustration could literally transform a woman into a man; he believed that
the heat of desire could reverse female genitals and turn them into penises, a superstition that endured through the Renaissance. Desire—along with the freedom to travel alone, carry weapons, have adventures, and enjoy a host of other privileges—belonged to men. If women wanted any of these privileges, they needed not so much a set of male genitals as a set of male clothes. In masculine garb, some daring women got away with venturing unescorted into the world. Shakespeare linked this freedom with the freedom to pursue love, as cross-dressing gave
Twelfth Night
’s Viola and several other Shakespearean heroines
cover and authority to successfully win over their love interests.