The Golden Condom (2 page)

But even this did not break the spell of my longing for him. To my astonishment, he actually did write and call me over the next year, often to ask advice about other women and to tell me about his travails with them. “You're the first person I turn to when I want to talk,” he said, and despite everything, I was gratified to hear it because it meant I was special to him—the same response I had when my friend said virtually the same thing to me decades later. When he came back to see me briefly the following summer, I welcomed him with a combination of vengefulness and excitement—a mistake I vowed not to make again with my friend.

My entire adult life, my long career as a psychoanalyst, and thirty-three years of marriage to the man who showed up every day I was in the hospital as well as every other day had not severed the bonds of hunger, despair, and enraged humiliation over my long-lost lover that I buried in 1967. My reactions to my friend's call catapulted me back to him and exposed a wound that had never healed, that I had not even realized I bore. I knew the outlines of my youthful disastrous attachment, but the full meaning and impact of the experience had lain, unmetabolized and radioactive, a long-dormant template I thought I had destroyed long ago, until I heard her voice and felt exactly the same way.

The parallels between these two people from opposite ends of my life were both uncanny and enlightening. The common denominator was that both seemed so essential to me that I would have done anything to keep them, to the point of ignoring information that would make a more rational person flee. Betrayal is gender blind, and sex is a sufficient, but not necessary, component; a woman can hurt you as much as a man, a friend as much as a lover. Anybody who feels indispensable has power over you, and your desperation can make you behave in equally self-damaging ways.

Masochism is an equal-opportunity destroyer, and crumbs from the table are the same, whether they are offered by a beloved who kisses your eyes and then turns away or an intimate who prizes you and then disappears when the going gets rough. Masochism can hide behind the most beguiling facades, and it can seduce you at any age if your history makes you susceptible. The bonds of empathy between friends even much later in life can be as deceptive and compelling as adolescent passion, as skin deep as beauty. And the cure is the same: walking away. It took me almost half a century to realize this and only three days to do it.

 

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OF HUMAN BONDAGE

Obsessive Love

THE LURE OF THE UNATTAINABLE

He had a beautiful body (at least she thought so), and he knew—or seemed to know—his own mind. He experimented with shooting heroin and never called her, but toyed with whatever woman was close at hand. All these obstacles, which would horrify and repel a less besotted person, simply made him more fascinating and desirable to the naive, studious, and insecure nineteen-year-old who was in thrall to him.

He still had a beautiful body and a beautiful wife, but this fifty-five-year-old actor and former heartthrob fell for a wannabe filmmaker whose body was not only beautiful but half the age of his. After a brief affair, he continued to pursue her desperately and fruitlessly for five more years, driving hours for even a glimpse of her, jeopardizing everything and everyone he held dear. He put his emotional well-being in her inadequate and unwilling hands.

He was an appealing, multitalented, academic star at twenty, and he charmed myriads of young women who yearned to be his. But he spent his last two years of college as the self-proclaimed “love slave” of one who, though she had a deliciously sexy body, rarely had fewer than two other boyfriends.

She was a fortysomething executive, warm and vivacious, with devoted friends, who had caught the eye of more than one sophisticated and accomplished man. Yet for days at a time, she sat in front of her computer screen transfixed and tormented, surreptitiously scanning the Internet postings of a depressed, uneducated loser whom she found overwhelmingly desirable, even though his body was far from beautiful and his life was a shambles. For eight years, she had remained bound to him even though he continued to live with his ex-wife after they divorced and never even called to ask how she was when she had a dangerous illness.

Why?

*   *   *

The young are not the only ones wasting themselves on objects of desire who are unwilling or unable to reciprocate; the middle aged, and even senior citizens, fall under the same spell. This predicament is so common that it can hardly be called an aberration.
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Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome—especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because the sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which nobody wants to be cured.

Obsessive love, while it creates widespread misery, only becomes cause for alarm and an indication of deeper psychopathology when it goes on for decades, involves compulsive stalking (either digital or literal), self-destructive behavior serious enough to interfere with health or the ability to function for a significant length of time, massive anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts or actions, or delusional thinking.

The lovelorn give terrible interviews in the throes of obsessions. They all sound the same; age and circumstances make no difference. Even though unrequited passion can be spellbinding on the stage or the screen, the narratives offered by those in its immediate grip seem numbingly routine. They can talk forever about the beloved's charms or flaws, and give detailed reports of every meeting, every failure to meet, every lovemaking session, every rejection significant or petty (she didn't remember his birthday despite all the hints he'd dropped, he didn't respond to her meticulously crafted casual text message for a week), all of which is of little interest to anyone but themselves. How do they manage to turn so riveting a topic into a bore? Tunnel vision makes them lose the ability to observe or understand their experience. The world shrinks to include only two people, only one of whom—the beloved—has power. This inequitable distribution naturally breeds resentment and feelings of hopelessness that the dependent person dare not express for fear of alienating the necessary person even more. Hapless lovers are unable to analyze accurately why they feel what they feel or why they choose whom they choose and cannot seem to fathom why the object of their affection fails to respond. All they know is that he or she is indispensable, that life without this beloved has no joy or meaning to offer. Their self-absorption is paradoxical, since they believe that all they think about is the elusive other. Nobody has self-knowledge when immersed in a futile love affair; that only comes afterward—sometimes decades afterward, when the experience can finally be processed in relative tranquility.

To be consumed by unsatisfiable desire is to live in an altered state of consciousness. You are in a private realm, saturated with intense emotion, both positive and negative, that seems impossible to describe accurately to an outsider. In retrospect, when the person around whom your world revolved—who has been your world—shrinks back to human proportions, it is often difficult to imagine what you ever saw there.
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Only when the folly and pain of a doomed romance is recollected in tranquility (a state not easy to attain, because the shame, the longing, and the bitter disappointment can persist long afterward) does the constricted perspective open up and insight and awareness become possible.

Adolescence and postadolescence are the prime times for hopeless love affairs. In most cases, maturity, experience, and exposure to those actually capable of reciprocal love eventually diminish the magnetic pull of the unavailable. The services of a good therapist considerably raise the odds of recognizing people willing and able to respond, as well as understanding why they never seemed to be around before (when in fact we were unable to notice them). Yet there are those who persist or even succumb to obsession for the first time later in life and still struggle to extricate themselves as the years go by. Some never escape from the imprisoning conviction that a cold or unattainable lover can be persuaded to become warm or attainable if they only discover the key.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM

Maggie Clark is one of the most accomplished women I know. An adept public speaker at sixty-three who appears regularly in the media, she heads a major accounting firm in partnership with her husband of forty years. She has a loyal and sensitive nature as well as business savvy and good judgment. I knew that she also had an insecure side, but I had no idea of the depths of desperation and inadequacy that had engulfed her in her youth until we spoke about the college boyfriend—if he could even be called that—whom she worshipped and who treated her with appalling callousness. She described their relationship with far more contempt, clarity, and candor than she felt at the time.

To my surprise, Maggie, whose demeanor is usually demure, spoke in a tone more appropriate at a raunchy bachelorette party about this man's physical attributes and how downcast she was to discover that they were mostly for show. “He had a hot body and a little green sports car,” she said, “but the action was never as good as the anticipation.” This “sexy, smart” acquaintance of her brother's was a philosophy major “with a basketball player's build—tall, lean, and well muscled,” she recalled, still savoring the image years later. Her condescension was a later-life corrective—an exorcism, really—of the overpowering desire she had felt for him, as well as her retribution for the humiliating treatment she had tolerated from him.

Even more compelling than his gorgeous physique was his penchant for risk taking. “He announced proudly, ‘I fasted for three days to see what it would do to me,' and I was so impressed,” she recalled. “I put him on a pedestal. He seemed so exciting and seductive when I was nineteen; I was smitten. I worked hard to make the reality match the fantasy.”

Maggie was looking for a man to look up to, and this one seemed to fit the job description. At the time, she was trying frantically to convince herself that his inside was worthy of his outside, contrasting herself to him and finding herself wanting. Her painful awareness of her own timidity caused her to mistake foolhardiness (of which the fasting stunt was one of the early warning signals) for courage and character, and confirmed his superiority and his allure in her eyes. He was someone to idealize and to emulate, her passport to adventure and personal growth. On the surface, he seemed so bold, so strong, so in control, as narcissists often do to those less enamored of themselves.

Maggie's adoration of her Adonis and her anxiety about losing him led her to put herself at his disposal without complaint. “I wanted so desperately to be with him for an hour that I would have done anything,” she said—adding that she had never told a living soul about her behavior. “He would see me when he deigned to,” she said, still embarrassed and offended by the memory. “I kept thinking that if I were a little bit sexier or smarter myself, and if I were just good or adoring enough, he'd want to be more involved with me. I could never cross him or object to anything he did; I felt so tentative—I didn't have good self-esteem then.” She longed to be like him, and to be chosen by him was a way to bask in reflected glory before she had any of her own.

She was not, however, the only one who had noticed his charms. “This was the seventies—he lived in a group house, and there was another woman living there. I was annoyed because she had access.” He didn't have to bestir himself; Maggie had to make all the effort in order to get even a crumb of attention from him. “I was always the one to call him,” she said. The very fact that her rival had the upper hand because she was more conveniently located should have made it clear to Maggie that women were interchangeable to him, but instead, it made her work even harder to attract him.

Maggie was a psychology major, and she referred to a concept from learning theory to explain the tenacity of her own behavior and his hold on her. “He showed just enough interest in me for it to be intermittent reinforcement,” she said. Intermittent reinforcement, also known as partial reinforcement, describes a paradoxical phenomenon observed in experimental subjects: they learn best and retain what they learn the longest when the rewards for correct responses are unpredictable. This principle is often applied to human motivation. It is one partial explanation for Maggie's chronic subservient behavior. She doggedly persisted in making herself available to the man she wanted when he felt like seeing her, even though she felt bad about doing so, because sometimes it worked and he seemed to respond to her.

This impassioned young woman seethed with suppressed resentment about her inconsistent beloved's insensitive behavior toward her, but she could not let herself acknowledge the selfishness and contempt that underlay it. For months, she continued to pursue and to idealize him, hoping to win his favor. Her eyes were finally opened one night when his true character was revealed in a way that even she could not justify or ignore.

“I had come to his house to stay overnight with him,” she told me, “but instead of spending time alone with me, he took me downstairs where his housemates were shooting heroin and said, ‘I want to try this.'” This was an experiment of his that did not seem the least bit glamorous or admirable to her, but she could not protest. As repelled and horrified as she was, she stayed riveted to the spot; she still needed to impress him. The scene was shocking and sad to hear about, even forty-four years afterward. “I sat there trying very hard to be cool, watching him put a needle in his arm. I felt I didn't matter enough. I could show up, but he would do what he felt like doing, anyway; this was always the deal. He never changed his routine for me.” Mainlining heroin in her presence rather than giving her his attention went far beyond ordinary boorishness. Even in extremis, she felt inadequate in his eyes, obliged to prove to him that she was sophisticated and game for anything.