Unrequited (9 page)

I bought as many groceries as I could at the shop next door to the Morrowfield. I knew when B. was likely to be at the neighborhood café and peered at him through the windows, his head bent over a book, carrot juice and coffee at his elbow. I knew when and where his classes were. I cut a block over on my way
to the bus, so I could walk the route he was likely to take. I kept my distance. I didn’t want him to notice I was trailing him. Only sometimes did I let myself greet him face-to-face. It was natural enough for this to happen, as we lived in the same neighborhood and worked in the same building. I always hoped for news. Was he still with the actress? Did he still care about me? I didn’t ask these questions, but they hung between us as we chatted politely. This stealthy tracking seemed the only thing I could do to feed the doubting madness. It kept possibility alive. If I hovered on the margins of his life often enough, one day he might return my gaze and announce that he was free to love me back.

This wasn’t the way I was supposed to be spending my time. I had a one-year part-time teaching position, a job meant to allow me time to work on the novel I was writing. I wasn’t able to concentrate enough to make progress on it, though. I was too obsessed.

Late one afternoon, I ran into B. I knew right away that something was different. He looked glad to see me, and it was easy for me to suggest that we have dinner together. Sitting across from me at the restaurant, he said he missed me. “I could just see this thing between you and me taking off,” he said, angling his hand into the air like an airplane ascending.

My face flushed. My careful efforts were working, I thought. He told me that the only thing he needed to do was end his relationship properly, in person, when his girlfriend visited him the following weekend.

The weekend came and went. I waited until Monday evening to call him. She was still there. They had decided to stay together.

I fell into deep despair. I woke up each morning with a tremendous yearning I was certain I would not be able to endure. My days were shaped by my efforts to distract myself. I could not stay still. I
swam lap after lap at the gym. I rode my bike for miles through the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, sweating up the long, steep slopes of Bloomfield, Greenfield, Polish Hill. When it was too late to talk on the phone or exercise, I lay on the couch in my living room, too anxious for the small rituals of bedtime. It could take me an hour to bring myself to take off my shoes. I barely ate. I fell behind in my work, faking my way through classes I hadn’t prepared to teach. Sets of student papers piled up on my desk. I could not quiet my extreme anxiety. I had been seeing a therapist, but she decided to leave her practice. I found another one, but the sessions with her didn’t seem to help. And when she told me I was “going too far” in my efforts to win B., I canceled my next appointment and didn’t go back to her.

I woke up one morning so overwhelmed by the prospect of facing another day that I checked myself in to the psychiatric ward at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I didn’t know what else to do.

You might say I was lovesick. The psychiatry resident didn’t give me a specific diagnosis, though he told me in a matter-of-fact and not unkind way that I wasn’t the first woman to check herself in over a guy she couldn’t stop thinking about. He gave me a prescription for tranquilizers, which brought me stretches of relative calm. But the pills, which I allowed myself to take only occasionally, didn’t cure me.

Lovesickness is a condition with a long and complex past. Since ancient times, we have seesawed between fearing lovesickness and being awed by it as an enchanted insanity, all the while dabbling with various cures. Today’s scientific understanding of the brain chemistry of love and what happens when we lose it gives us more of a foundation than ever before to deem lovesickness a clinical condition, worthy of a place in the medical books and a
pharmaceutically tailored cure. This sounds on its surface quite promising. I had, and still have, no objection to taking medication for relentless emotional pain. But as I delved into the colorful yet distressing backstory of lovesickness, I came to realize there were reasons to be wary of the disease model of romantic obsession. Historically, it has been used more as a means to control the unwanted woman than to help her. Lovesickness has been a label of shame, used not to heal but to put women in their place.

IN SECOND-CENTURY
R
OME
, the famed physician Galen was summoned to the side of a woman described only as “Iustus’s wife.” We might speculate that Iustus was the one who demanded that she have medical attention, because she pointedly did not want to be cured. She was agitated and couldn’t sleep, yes. But when the doctor arrived, she would not answer his questions and hid under the bedcovers. Galen came back to her home day after day, only to be dismissed by the maid, who told him that the mistress of the house did not wish to be disturbed. Finally, Galen managed to see her. Another visitor at her bedside happened to mention that he had just come from the theater, where he’d seen the dancer Plyades perform. Galen noticed a change in his patient’s expression and complexion. He touched her wrist. Her pulse was irregular. Later, when he asked one of his associates to mention the names of other dancers while in the presence of Iustus’s wife, her pulse didn’t change. It wasn’t until Galen was present for an announcement that Plyades would be performing that he caught disturbances in her pulse again.

Galen had his diagnosis:
Iustus’s wife was besotted with Plyades. It was the first documented instance of
a woman being diagnosed with lovesickness. What this meant, under the Hippocratic system of the day, was that the passion Iustus’s wife felt for the
dancer had created an imbalance in the four essential humors, or fluids, of her body,
causing her physical symptoms.

Iustus’s wife may have been out of balance, a concept that foreshadows our contemporary understanding of the combination of hormones necessary for emotional regulation. More important, she was out of bounds. A wife’s primary function in ancient Rome was to produce children, perpetuate her husband’s bloodline, and make family alliances that would help him increase his holdings. The Roman man was defined through his property. The more land, livestock, money, and slaves he owned, the greater his status. The myth behind the founding of Rome, in fact, is a cautionary tale about the value of property over passion. In the story of Dido and Aeneas, Dido, a widowed African queen, falls in love with Aeneas, a Trojan hero who has accidentally landed on her shores in the wake of the fall of Troy. She becomes, as Virgil describes in
The Aeneid
, “wild with passion” and consumed by a “rage of desire.” Aeneas loves her back—yet the gods swoop in to ruin the couple. His fate, they decree, is to create a new city in Italy. Dido pleads for him to stay with her, but he won’t. She drags their bed and some of his belongings, including a sword she gave him, into a courtyard and sets them on fire. She climbs to the top of the pyre, falls on Aeneas’s sword, and
perishes as his ship sails away.

Dido’s fate exemplifies the ancient Greek and Roman mistrust of passionate love as a “divine madness” sent from the gods, a threat to social order and progress. If Dido had succeeded in keeping Aeneas by her side, the myth suggests, then Rome, the world’s first big city, would not exist. Her all-consuming passion was a threat to progress and greatness. In a similar fashion, the jittery longing that Iustus’s wife felt for Plyades, who was likely a slave or a freedman, presented a threat to Iustus’s hold on his property and the social order that protected it. An affair between his wife and the dancer
would be adulterous, disreputable, and illegal. While the law didn’t penalize men who cheated on their wives, wives who strayed lost half their dowry and were forbidden
to ever marry their paramours. Under these conditions, the nameless wife’s desire was an emotional rebellion against the rigid social order. She dreamed of a life in which she was more than property and a womb, a life in which she had erotic agency that reached across stringent class divides and defied the constraints of what was likely a less than satisfactory marriage. Galen’s diagnosis took none of this into account. It reduced all her feeling, and its social context, into an illness to be cured.

Galen, who detailed the case in
On Prognosis
, his major work, did not describe how the lovesickness of Iustus’s wife was resolved. At the time,
the standard cure for lovesickness was “therapeutic intercourse,” ideally after you’d married the love object. If marriage wasn’t possible, available surrogates such as prostitutes, slaves, or widows might do—
but these were options available only to men. Even the marriage cure probably panned out only in instances when a girl’s lovesickness was over someone her father happened to find suitable husband material, an unlikely situation when girls were married off in their teens.

While the prevailing attitude toward female lovesickness reinforced women’s constrained role in ancient Rome, male lovesickness was seen as a force that could successfully
transform
the social order. Galen’s pulse test for diagnosing lovesickness was based on the approach used by the physician Erasistratus on Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, the king of Syria. Antiochus fell in love with his stepmother, Stratonice. His secret longing made him so miserable that he intended to starve himself to death. To figure out what ailed Antiochus, Erasistratus kept a close watch on how the prince reacted to the beauties of the court. When Stratonice entered the
room, Erasistratus watched Antiochus turn pale, stammer, then flush red. The doctor felt Antiochus’s heart and found it palpitating wildly. Antiochus’s love, like the desire of Iustus’s wife, was transgressive and seemingly impossible, as Stratonice belonged to his father, the king. Yet amazingly, once the physician told King Seleucus what was wrong with Antiochus, the king ended his marriage. He gave his wife to his son and made the couple the rulers of what was then known as Upper Asia.
Antiochus was instantly cured.

The stories of Antiochus and of Iustus’s wife are repeated in medical treatises and literature from ancient times through the Renaissance. Their contrasting fates—the prince who gets what he wants and the nameless wife who doesn’t—underscore a double standard for male and female victims of lovesickness. Antiochus’s lovesickness was righteous, the cure increasing his personal power and justifying the demise of his father’s royal union. Iustus’s wife gets nothing but a diagnosis, a label put on her insubordinate heart. For men, lovesickness had heroic and erotic power. For women, the disease emphasized their degradation.

These ancient meanings carried considerable weight as lovesickness became more entrenched as a disease category. In the early Middle Ages, Arabic physicians saw the main cause of lovesickness to be
the buildup of
sperma
, a substance that, in the medical understanding of the day, both men’s and women’s bodies produced. The cure remained the same: intercourse, if possible, with the love object; if not, with a prostitute or a slave. This view spread to Europe via Constantine, a North African physician who translated
Arabic medical handbooks into Latin. For a while, European physicians conveniently ignored the question of where women fit in to the disease model. Lovesickness became known as
amor hereos
,
a term that translates as “heroic love” but has more to do with the social status of the lover than his courage.
Amor hereos
was a
disease of entitlement,
primarily affecting noblemen. The noblemen’s symptoms—obsessive thinking, loss of appetite, heart palpitations, and the like—were not much different from those of the knights and troubadours whose obsession inspired them to feats of bravery, poetry, and song. The noblemen, though, lived lives of comfort and leisure and didn’t have to sublimate their desires into making war or art.

By the thirteenth century, more women—also typically of the entitled classes—were seeking medical attention for the symptoms of lovesickness.
Discussions of “erotic melancholy” and “uterine fury” began to show up in the medical literature. The increasing familiarity of female lovesickness in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance did not make it any more honorable for women. Uterine fury described a kind of bodily rage, a loss of control and decorum. It was a condition of shame and vulnerability, an indication that the sufferer needed moral correction.

In
A Treatise on Lovesickness
, published in 1623, physician Jacques Ferrand warned women that the excessive lust of lovesickness would leave them vulnerable to dishonor. He saw women as more susceptible to lovesickness than men, owing to the presence of female “spermatic vessels” (what we now call fallopian tubes) inside the main cavity of the body, too near the repositories of imagination and judgment; in men, these vessels were farther away and
less likely to interfere with rationality. The ideal cure for women, as for men, was marriage and marital sex.

If marriage couldn’t calm a woman’s uterine fury, Ferrand believed, the prospect of being what we would now call “slut-shamed” might. He compared the lovesick woman’s plight to that of the female tortoise fearful of being turned on her back during intercourse: She would likely be abandoned “to face the sky” after her partner is done with her (a highly unlikely situation in the reality
of tortoise mating habits), thus “exposing her not only to the eagle (who is the devil) but also to the crows—the gossips, and slanderers who publicize her fault.” Ferrand’s treatise several times brings up the story of the virgins of Milesia as a cautionary tale. Inflamed by love, they ran wild in the marketplace and fell prey to suicidal urges. Nothing stopped this self-destructiveness until the authorities ordered that the bodies of those who had hanged themselves be cast out “naked on dung heaps.”
The prospect of sexual humiliation, even after death, was the best prophylactic.

Ironically, Ferrand also resorted to female shame as powerful medicine against
male
unrequited love. Under the watchful eye of the censorious ecclesiastic court of France, he parted ways from his “Mohammedan” predecessors who advised heartsick men to patronize prostitutes to evacuate
sperma
. A man who could not marry his conquest should take what writer Carol Neely calls the “misogyny cure.” He should “meditate upon the imperfections and impurity of women.” He must find a way to spy on her
before she has brushed her hair and primped for the day. He might want to find a crone to egg him on; an old woman’s withered limbs and wrinkled face would remind him of the inevitability of female ugliness in age. Ferrand related a particularly noxious trick of last resort: Hypatia, the brilliant daughter of Theon the geometrician and a mathematician in her own right, was so put off by the advances of one of her students that she reached under her skirt and pulled out a bloodied menstrual rag. “Look, young man,” she cried. “You will see that
what you love so much is nothing but vileness and filth.” No matter which role a woman plays in unrequited love, she is the problem. Feeling impossible desire disgraces her, and so does being its object.