The Golden Condom (3 page)

Then his behavior became even worse. When he was finally ready to go to bed—he was still high at the time—he went upstairs with her and coolly proposed yet another experiment to add to his catalog of experiences: “Let's try anal sex.”

His timing and his attitude, rather than the specific request, left her aghast and brought her to her senses. “I like to think that his shooting up would have been enough to end it for me—that on reflection I would have drawn the right conclusions—but it wouldn't have been,” she admitted. “I'd have excused it, talked myself into tolerating it, tried to prove my sophistication. But this was too much.” The one-two punch finally jolted her out of her fantasy and showed her the ugly truth about his character. “The first round was hard drugs, but wanting to use me sexually on top of that was totally over the line. He had no consideration for me or my feelings—he was completely into himself and just wanted to try new things. That was the worst, and it put everything in perspective for me. It became so crystal clear that this guy is a shithead, a fuckhead, and a jerk.”

She flatly refused; it was the first time she had refused him anything. She spent the rest of the night on the couch by herself. Then she left in the morning, never to return. True to form, he did not even bother to call her afterward, or ever again, and their affair ended abruptly.

Maggie explained what had most appalled her about how he acted on their final night together. “If he cared about me at all, he wouldn't experiment with narcotics while I was staying over, and he wouldn't treat me like garbage”—a low bar indeed. “His behavior passed beyond the point of disrespectful; the sexual transgression was the end. It was obvious then that he didn't respect me or love me, that he didn't really even like me.”

In fact, she was giving this man more credit than he deserved. It wasn't just that he didn't respect, love, or like her; she did not exist for him as a person with feelings of her own worthy of the slightest consideration. She was just another novelty, something on his checklist. Her body and a syringe full of heroin were identical in his eyes, both objects to be used for his pleasure or edification however and whenever he saw fit. She meant nothing to him, and she finally realized that this was not because she was worth nothing, but because he could feel nothing. When his naked coldness was revealed to her, her illusions shattered, and the thrill was gone. She never again allowed herself to be treated this way by a man. Just as a brush with the law can scare a person straight, a brush with a pathological narcissist amid the right conjunction of disasters can scare a person sane.

*   *   *

What drew this tender, thoughtful, and highly intelligent young woman to such a man? The fervor of her physical description, even decades afterward, and the blind, self-obliterating nature of her surrender to him were the keys; they pointed to her past.

Maggie's sometime boyfriend was a malign caricature of her father, to whom he bore a striking resemblance both physically and mentally. “He looked a little bit like my dad, who also had a beautiful body at that age,” she confirmed. Maggie's father had been a minor-league baseball player and a spectacular physical specimen, as well as a daredevil in his youth, and he too had a tyrannical streak. Maggie's mother, whom he'd swept off her feet when she was a teenager, married him at nineteen, the same age her daughter was when she fell for her athletic philosophy major. Both men called the shots with everyone in their lives. Maggie's self-effacing mother spent her life under her husband's thumb, doing his bidding. The entire family catered to his whims and feared his wrath, but he also had a generous, principled side, which his young stand-in conspicuously lacked. Seeing her parents' relationship and being bullied by her father as her mother also was predisposed Maggie to submerge her own needs and to be attracted to a man who would dominate her and who would confirm her conviction of her own inadequacy.

Why didn't living with her father and seeing the toll it took on her make Maggie run from a man who so resembled him? Her experience of her father was not consistently awful enough to prevent her from being drawn to someone like him—at least when she was young and insecure. Her identification with her mother and their close relationship also played a role in her choice. The unconscious urge to repeat problematic relationships from the past is both potent and insidious; our history is always alive within us and affects us our entire lives. The sexual and emotional magnetism that the man she chose exerted over her seduced her and overrode any rational objections she might have had.

Her father, like his look-alike, belittled the women in his life and did what he wanted when he wanted—although, luckily, drug use was not among his vices. Maggie only began to appreciate her own worth and to seek and then to find a man who would cherish her when she stopped tolerating the kind of treatment that her mother continued to endure.

*   *   *

Maggie's lover certainly had a personality that predisposed him to addictions and to extreme experiences, even if he was only experimenting with heroin at the time she knew him. But was she herself what is popularly called a “love addict”? There is no consensus among professionals about whether a predilection to pursue futile love affairs is a true addiction, a physiologically based craving like drugs or alcohol, or only a metaphorical equivalent.

Love addiction is not included in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition
, the latest catalog of psychiatrically diagnosable conditions (or in any of the four earlier editions), and, in my opinion, does not belong there. There are many more “love addicts”—usually defined as such by the sufferers themselves or by Web sites purporting to cure them—than alcohol or drug addicts; although exceptions do exist, it is hard to find someone of either sex who has not had such an experience. These people do not ingest psychoactive substances or have to “detox” by enduring physiological withdrawal, and most of them do not seek or require treatment; addiction is different from compulsion,
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a clinically more accurate description of the experiences of obsessive lovers. Even though who and how they love make them miserable, they often function well in other areas of their lives. The condition also tends to be self-limiting; those who suffer its pangs usually recover or improve over time, as Maggie did. Those who remain obsessive lovers into middle age and beyond typically have more serious underlying psychological issues that they are attempting to resolve.

Love addiction is often confused with “sex addiction,” a different and more ominous type of pathology also omitted from the
DSM
because of a lack of consensus among professionals about its physiological substrate. Though it may not be a literal addiction, it is a serious and disorganizing affliction. So-called sex addicts use sex for comfort, stimulation, or escape. They seek sexual experiences indiscriminately with multiple partners (or via pornography), while love addicts are “hooked” on one person, and may not even be sexually involved with that person. One seeks a sensation, the other a relationship.

Behavior like Maggie's, so typical in adolescence, need not become an entrenched or inescapable pattern of loving that marks a person for life; more solid self-esteem, judgment, and knowledge of the world eventually protect most people from infinite recurrences. She went “cold turkey” by repudiating her unloving lover completely when she saw who he really was and never pined for him (even though she still found him attractive) or reproduced the same kind of slavish relationship with anyone remotely like him for the rest of her life—hardly the behavior of either a codependent personality or a recalcitrant love addict.

In her senior year of college, soon after she ended this humiliating affair, Maggie met the man she would marry two years later; it would have been difficult to find someone more different from her former heartthrob. “He was the first man to value me as a person, and by then, I was open to seeing it and feeling it,” she told me. “He was mature himself and considered me his equal. To be appreciated by him was a relief and a delight.”

THE OTHER MAN

David Shapiro was bewitched. He met Anna, a vivacious, voluptuous freshman, at the beginning of his sophomore year, and he had to have her. It seemed like this would be an easy conquest, as most things in college had been for him, both intellectually and socially. The friend who introduced them assured him that she was available and that her boyfriend, who attended another college and visited her only sporadically, would be “no problem.” And so it seemed; in addition to being clever and alluring, she was completely willing to gratify David's every desire, and in no time, they were spending hours and hours in bed, on the floor, up in a bell tower, in delirious lust. He was new at love, with only one previous girlfriend—he had ended their yearlong relationship even though he cared about her because she had wanted to move in with him almost immediately and he knew he wasn't ready—but Anna's appetite was only matched by her enthusiasm and expertise, and she made no such demands. This was his first taste of what seemed like thrilling sensuality, the unbridled expression of desire, which was especially intoxicating for someone who had grown up in an atmosphere of extreme sexual repression. “I wasn't really looking for another girlfriend or a serious relationship,” he said. “I wanted amusement, at least at the beginning. She was jolly and lively, extremely sexy and sexualized, and I'd never had oral sex before.” The only stumbling block to bliss was the boyfriend, who proved more of an impediment than the go-between had asserted (in the manner of college sophomores, the go-between had his own designs on David's former girlfriend).

Anna threw herself headlong into their affair but barred the bedroom door on weekends, which she reserved for her steady. “He'd park himself in her room,” David recalled, still annoyed about his exclusion. Even though he wanted a no-strings fling after his too-much-too-soon prior relationship, he wasn't pleased when he realized how many additional contenders for Anna's favors were hovering around. Anna admitted that she had had several “erotic friendships”; in fact, as he discovered, she specialized in them.

David was used to succeeding, but this was one of the few times in his life that he was confronted with an obstacle he couldn't overcome. He kept hoping he would prevail over his various rivals, of which the boyfriend proved to be only the most prominent, and win her for himself, but instead he found himself perennially condemned to be her other man. Since he had read his Freud, he figured that it had to be significant that she had the same name as his mother—as did his previous girlfriend. He knew something was afoot, although the knowledge did him little good.

Four months later, it was over. Anna #3 wrote him a letter telling him she felt too guilty about cheating on her boyfriend to continue their trysts. David spent the rest of his college career frantically trying to get back into her good graces, abetted by her continuing to flirt with him and kiss him passionately every so often in a perfect demonstration of maddeningly intermittent reinforcement. She toyed with him, but she never came back to him; he never displaced the boyfriend or rejoined the ranks of the auxiliary lovers. The more she rejected him, the more he hungered for her. To his shame and discomfiture, he found himself falling in love with her. What started out as a seemingly liberating interlude was turning into torment.

It is striking that David, a gallant and sensitive man, spoke graphically of his exploits with Anna in the same raunchy tone (“She was masturbating me before her boyfriend arrived, but I couldn't come. I wanted to fuck her…”) that the demure Maggie had used when describing her lover's body and (lack of) sexual prowess. He, like she, was still trying to exorcise the specter of a disturbingly compelling and humiliating attachment, even though it had ended decades earlier, by objectifying and demeaning the object of his desire. This was his way of finally expressing the anger he had to conceal from himself when he was pursuing her. If he had let himself know how furious he was, it would have been more difficult to conceal it from Anna, and she might leave him for good. Turning rage inward to protect a problematic relationship is one reason obsessive lovers are so often depressed.
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David “mooned over” Anna long after his tenure as her lover was terminated, and his “four months of exquisite torture” morphed into two years of ordinary misery, much of it self-inflicted. They remained on friendly terms—despite the covert mutual hostility of their mutually teasing behavior, there were genuine warm feelings between them—and continued to see each other in various classes and activities. They also continued to tantalize each other (“She stayed away but not too far,” he said) while carrying on brief affairs with others, with Anna's boyfriend never entirely out of the picture.

From the beginning, David had established himself as Anna's sexual and emotional confidant, a role he never relinquished despite his ambivalence about performing it. She told him about her problems as well as her exploits with her boyfriend and her other lovers, and he listened, disturbed and transfixed, to all the details. All her once and future conquests, her plans for seductions, and her anxieties were on display. She told him that her boyfriend, to her chagrin, never got her birthday cards “because he didn't believe in empty gestures like that”—after which David, aiming to be all that she could desire, bought her an expensive birthday present. He invited her to the prom, even though she wouldn't accept in case her boyfriend decided to ask her; he even met her parents.

Confession was intrinsic to the erotic charge between them. He became a perennial witness to, if no longer a direct participant in, “the traffic jam in her bedroom,” forever hoping to parlay her trust into winning her away from his chief rival or, if that proved impossible, at least rekindling their affair. “Hearing about her having sex was the best I could do, and she didn't tell just anybody. I tried to get her back by being there all the time,” he said. His rapt attention, he thought, was a way to make himself uniquely special to her, to stand out in a crowded field. In addition to inserting himself into her elaborate sexual adventures, it also gave him access to her inner world. “It was really an opportunity for her to boast and for me to lacerate myself,” he commented in retrospect—a tumultuous combination of exhibitionism and voyeurism, with tenderness thrown in.