Unrequited (18 page)

FACING MY OWN
narcissism has pushed me to consider something I couldn’t consider when I was obsessed: the impact of my actions on B. It’s likely he felt harassed and confused, beset by the moral dilemma of the rejecter. He very well might have felt violated, angry, frightened, or worse. I’ll never know. After my obsession ended, I decided not to seek him out for any reason, though for a while our proximity meant we ran into each other occasionally. Even now, I suspect that wanting anything from him might come across as invasive—even (perhaps especially) the answer to the question of what my obsession felt like to him.

Yet I knew I needed a more comprehensive way to see outside the self-absorbed perspective of the unwanted woman who’s lost herself to unrequited love. I’ve noticed in my survey responses, interviews, and casual conversations a strong tendency to see the beloved as the self-centered and sadistic tormentor who won’t give you the relief of returning your love. Though cruel manipulators do exist, no matter the character of the rejecter, rejection will
feel
cruel and self-serving when you’ve got so much invested. I spent plenty of time when I was obsessed seething about what B. was “doing to me”—in retrospect, I don’t think he was a cruel manipulator. He was confused and sometimes insensitive, but these are far lesser sins.

With this new understanding of the unrequited lover’s self-absorption, I felt I had to look at the problem from the other side. When the unwanted woman loses herself to the narcissism of unrequited love, what is the impact on the beloved, who must witness her breakdown?

AFTER RENZO AND
his girlfriend broke up, he spent a lot of time with a group of fellow South American expats living in Manhattan. The split was unexpected and painful, and he needed their support and company. One of the women, Yoselin, drew particularly close to him. “She took the role of good friend and mother, because she felt I was lost,” he said.

She had a beautiful smile, and he told her so. They kissed and hugged every time they met. It was part of their culture, he said. He was affectionate with all his friends and generous with compliments to the opposite sex, and Yoselin was no exception. He walked her back to her apartment at the end of evenings out, in what he regarded as a gentlemanly gesture. When she fell ill with shingles, he stopped by her apartment every day to take care of her. He enjoyed her friendship, but he wasn’t attracted to her.

Renzo, who is a composer, was so anguished over his breakup that he fell behind on writing a commissioned piece for a chamber orchestra. “I knew I had to reorganize myself,” he said. He threw himself into finishing the work. One afternoon Yoselin stopped by his apartment while he was composing. He greeted her and explained that he had to keep working. She set about cooking a meal for him. After they ate, she asked him what else she could do to help him. He said she could mark measure numbers on the score. “I trusted her hand,” he said. “She did it perfectly.” He would come to regret accepting her offer of help. But at the time, he was absorbed in trying to finish the piece. “I just thought she was helping me, as I had helped her when she was sick,” he said.

The evening the piece was performed, Yoselin “behaved as though she were part of the composer, as if she understood what I had gone through to write the piece, as if she knew what the piece was about,” Renzo said. “It was as if she was my wife and part of the process. That did not go over well with me.”

A few days later, he returned to his apartment to find his voicemail full of messages from his friends, asking if he was okay. He noticed some of his papers were out of place. He discovered that Yoselin had convinced all their friends and the super of his apartment building that Renzo intended to kill himself in the bathtub. The super had let her into the apartment to check on Renzo while he was out. She came back later to tell him what she had done. “I got really mad, because it was an imposition and she was doing something that was not for her to do, out of some dream of the woman who helps the artist,” he said.

Yoselin’s calls and visits increased. She wrote letters to his siblings abroad. She even visited his parents, who lived near Renzo in Manhattan. Her message was twofold: She warned them that Renzo was emotionally and mentally weak. And she confessed to them that she could not live without him.

Renzo began to avoid his home. He had a first-floor apartment and knew she could see the light from the street whenever he was inside. He stopped going out with their group of friends. He was afraid to pick up the telephone. When he started dating another woman, Yoselin became even more distraught. She cried whenever she saw them together. One afternoon he was staring out his front window, as he often did, and saw her on the street. Their eyes met, and he felt he had to open the door. She handed him a bunch of flowers. Then she lay down on the floor and began to cry. Again and again she asked how he could be seeing someone else. “We had something that was so beautiful!” she protested. She sobbed and cursed and asked the same question repeatedly.

He sat on the couch and watched her. He tried to explain that they had never been more than friends, but he couldn’t stop her lament or get her to leave. It was the first of several visits when she would lie prostrate in distress. Even though he knew he wasn’t to
blame for her behavior, he regretted the encouragement he unwittingly had given: the affection, the compliments, and most of all, his acceptance of her offer of help. “I should have used my eyes better and been more careful,” he said.

We can see through Yoselin’s eyes the hope she placed in his early affection and acts of kindness. Being cared for when you are sick is a classic marker of intimacy and commitment—“in sickness and in health,” the wedding vows say. But that’s also what good friends do. Renzo saw his caretaking only as an expression of friendship, which at the time he badly needed. Research on unrequited love shows that these different interpretations are very common. One side values the growing friendship;
the other reads it as a buildup to romance. Yoselin’s misreading grew to surreal proportions—to the point where she deluded herself into believing that Renzo wanted to kill himself and needed her to save him. This is where she lost herself.

Even though Renzo hasn’t seen Yoselin in fifteen years, the image of her on the floor keeps coming back to him. He remembers the numbers on the clock as he went to let her in: 12:45. He remembers what she was wearing: a white shirt and a blue skirt. And he remembers that she lay down right inside the door, as if she couldn’t go any farther. “I hated that,” he said. Through his eyes, we can imagine how excruciating it must have been to watch her lying there. You would want to do anything to make her leave, but in the face of so much vulnerability, there are no good options. “It was difficult for me to see a person crumble like that, and become something so small,” he said.

Renzo could not be the person Yoselin fantasized about, the lover-composer-compatriot-partner. In losing herself to the narcissism of unrequited love, she experienced this disappointment so acutely that she couldn’t, as Renzo so aptly put it, “see herself
again.” But what happened to Yoselin was Renzo’s loss, too. After his new relationship grew serious and eventually led to marriage, Yoselin left him alone. He was greatly relieved. Yet he also mourns for the Yoselin he knew before she lost herself. She was his friend and a part of the community that helped him out at a difficult time in his life. He had believed in the value of the warm ways of his homeland, embodied in her and the friends with whom they used to drink wine and go salsa dancing. “She had everything in her to be this wonderful human being,” he said. Renzo could not be the person to restore her to her strengths. He hopes she found a way to do it herself.

IN THE WAKE OF MY OBSESSION WITH B
., I met a graphic designer and visual artist I’ll call Patricia. She was in her mid-fifties, with expensively tinted blond hair. She had grown up in Georgia and wore the air of a former Southern belle, but with a proud, don’t-mess-with-me edge. One evening I told her about my unrequited love and the lengths it drove me to. “Honey,” she said. “That was
nothing.
”

She proceeded to tell me about the affair she began when she was thirty-nine. At the time she was living outside San Francisco. She was married and had a nine-year-old son. Her family began to take sailing lessons, but
her husband didn’t take to the sport. So she continued the lessons alone. She found sailing exhilarating. “I felt refreshed after a race,” she said. “I’d spent myself physically, hauling sails, water in my face. It was much better than seeing a shrink, and cheaper, too.”

One evening at the marina, she met a man she asked me to call Wolf, for his loner spirit and ruggedness. They had what she described as a strong intellectual rapport, which meant a lot to her. She had a college degree but had been raised to treat higher education as a means to find a husband. She had always felt insecure about her intelligence. Wolf, who lived in a converted tack house on a ranch, seemed to be everything her corporate husband was not.

The affair lasted over a year. He pressured her to leave her husband, but she refused. He grew insistent and aggressive. Once, he hit her so hard that she fell to the floor. Another time, he wouldn’t let her leave his house until the next day. She had no way to explain her absence to her husband, who’d been terrified about her disappearance.

When Wolf told Patricia he didn’t want to see her anymore, she couldn’t accept it. She would go to the marina and lie in wait in his sailboat. She wrote fragments of Edna St. Vincent Millay poems in nail polish on the boat’s beautiful wood:
I know what my heart is like / Since your love died.
She stole things from the boat, including a sail. “I became like a predator,” she said. “I wanted to catch his scent, so I could feel near him.”

When Wolf began to see someone else, Patricia was consumed with jealousy. At night, after her husband fell asleep, she snorted cocaine, got into her Jaguar, and sped the eighty miles to confront Wolf. The drive ended on dusty, windy roads. She would park out of earshot and tiptoe to the house. Before she walked in on him, she peed near his front door, “to make my mark.”

She begged him to come back to her, but he resisted, telling her
he was too involved with his new girlfriend. From time to time he would relent and spend a night or a weekend away with Patricia. She rented a studio on an estuary for the two of them to escape to, but he never showed up. She discovered that he had gone to Lake Tahoe with his girlfriend for her family reunion. The news sent her into what she described as attack mode. “You’re going to find this person and confront him and nothing else matters,” she said.

She found out where he was staying by calling resorts in Lake Tahoe and claiming to be part of the family reunion. She rented a car she knew Wolf wouldn’t recognize. She gave her husband the bizarre excuse that she had promised his father she would go to Sacramento to research his family’s genealogy. She said she didn’t care if he went with her, so he did. When they passed Sacramento, she explained they would be staying in Lake Tahoe, even though it was over two hours outside the city. Her husband didn’t stop her. By now he had found out about Wolf and had tried to get her to stop seeing him. Patricia knew she was hurting her husband, but she couldn’t stop herself from her chase. “It was all about me,” she said.

She rented a cabin near Wolf’s. After her husband fell asleep, she went out to Wolf’s cabin and began throwing rocks at it. She ran in circles, beating on the doors and the walls. “Come out! I know you’re in there,” she yelled. “You think you can do this to me? We had plans!”

A friend of Wolf’s girlfriend came out and got into his car to go for the police. Patricia threw her body on the car hood to keep him from moving. She broke the windshield with a stick. He threw her off and drove away. She ran back to her cabin and told her husband they had to leave. After they got home, a police officer arrived with an arrest warrant. A restraining order was issued against her, and she had to pay damages for the smashed car.

In the weeks that followed, squad cars regularly cruised by her house—not to monitor her but to mock her. Police officers would roll down their windows, wiggle their tongues at her, and laugh. “The word was out,” Patricia said. “I was a horndog, a loose woman, available. When it wasn’t that at all.”

She remained fixated on Wolf, her rage at his abandonment still vivid. She turned to her art to help her cope. She created a sculpture for an art show put on by the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist art movement pushing for greater representation of work by female artists. The piece, which she called
The Legend of the Lost Cause
, included a copy of Dante’s
Inferno
, her police report, a photographic image of Wolf superimposed with a hyena face, and a railroad spike going through a flaccid cloth penis. She took her husband and son to the opening. “People were looking at me like ‘This is your son, and he’s looking at this?’” she remembered. “I was so self-absorbed. I failed to realize anyone else’s feelings.”

The sculpture and Patricia’s pride in it underscore the obliviousness that can come over women who cross The Line and keep going, becoming stalkers. “The person appears to give little thought to their impact on the other,” said forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy. “That’s how you can see the narcissism. They are dismissive or surprised when they’re asked if they thought about the other person. In the most extreme cases, I hear things like: ‘I don’t care what he thinks! I’m going to have a relationship with him anyway.’”

Unrequited love can be a potent and revealing manifestation of the wish to escape from an unhappy marriage, oppressive social mores, and other constraints. But while Patricia hooked her anger to a feminist movement, there is nothing liberating or feminist about real-life stalking. Even though Wolf had wronged and abused her, Patricia’s pursuit of him was itself invasive and violent. But like the cops who teased her after her arrest, we tend to resist
seeing the actions of Patricia and other women who stalk as cause for alarm. We’d rather give female stalkers the gender pass, telling ourselves what they’re doing is funny or nutty and not really a problem. It’s far more comfortable—and comforting—to mock their actions than to reckon fully with their impact.