The Golden Condom (5 page)

Later on, however, the thrill diminished for her, and she started pulling away as guilt and wariness took over. I could sense that she felt oppressed and disturbed by the intensity of his attentions; objects of obsessive preoccupation rarely enjoy being on the receiving end for any extended length of time. He became increasingly desperate and foolhardy as she did so. One weekend when he had business in Northern California, he drove eight hours each way to deliver a bouquet of rare orchids and left it on her doorstep. I wondered how his wife could fail to notice how distracted, irritable, and otherwise engaged he was, emotions he took few pains to conceal.

José seemed like a man possessed, outside of time even as he was excruciatingly aware of its passage. To my astonishment, I discovered that he and his chosen one had not been lovers for two years when I first learned of her existence, although he talked as if their affair was not only still ongoing but was becoming ever more intense and absorbing—which was true, but entirely in his head; with the exception of an occasional brief text message in response to a barrage from him, he rarely heard from her. He mentioned almost as an afterthought that she had already moved on to another boyfriend as old as he but who was not married. This did not seem to faze him or indeed to register as an impediment. He himself described his behavior as “stalking” her—showering her with gifts and letters, begging her to speak to him and at least to let him see her. She equivocated but gave him very little access. At some point, he actually proposed to her, which obliged her to point out that he was not in fact free to marry her even if she had been willing. His obsession increased as the possibility of satisfaction slipped away.

Eventually, José could no longer deny that the relationship had become unilateral. His frantic efforts to win her had failed. The gap between them was unbreachable, and she would never be his. The pressure had become too much to bear, and he had to do something, so he unconsciously arranged to be found out. Since he believed he had no control over his behavior, he needed someone else to stop him and to break the spell. He “carelessly” left an incriminating array of text messages on his cell phone in a place where his wife was sure to find it—all the while cursing his fate and insisting that he had no idea how he could have been so incautious. His wife's shock and horror at his betrayal were excruciating to hear about, and the fallout did not dissipate quickly. Before he felt both thrilled and awful, and afterward he felt only awful, but he regretted nothing.

Has José learned anything, or will he try to find another antiaging elixir? It remains to be seen whether he will face reality and try to understand himself or simply repeat the pattern and seek another much younger woman to give him the illusion of agelessness, another second chance to do his life over and—for a little longer—turn back the hands of time.

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What made José act with such reckless, thoughtless abandon? His history explains why he was overwhelmed by his fantasy of a perfect love: he was seeking an antidote to a life that he believed had been forced upon him by his sense of duty and responsibility, one that he had gone along with rather than actively decided to pursue. He impetuously and heedlessly married his high school sweetheart right after graduation, and they had a child immediately. He then took up the role of devoted husband and father without making conscious choices about either obligation. Over the next three decades, he became increasingly claustrophobic, sinking into deep unhappiness with his lot that no success could compensate for or distract him from.

José was convinced that having married and become a father at so young an age had caused him to miss out on what mattered most—a sense of freedom. His feeling of being trapped in convention became unendurable, and his craving for passion and adventure only increased as the prospect of a too-quiet old age loomed. He saw his passion as defying fate, asserting his will, rebelling, and starting over, but it really was an external solution to an internal problem.

Why did he not get divorced and find someone adventurous his own age, particularly now that his children were grown? Ironically, his sense of duty kept him locked in place. Only a force beyond his control, a love he felt he could not and should not resist, could permit him to escape and to assuage his guilt at the same time.

His new love represented the road not taken, the life he desired rather than one that seemed just to have happened to him, and he was willing to pay the price. He picked a much younger, impressionable woman because he wanted to control the outcome this time; here was someone he thought he could mold into his ideal, a tabula rasa to be inscribed to order, in contrast to the mature woman he found himself married to.

The affair was José's attempt to reboot his life rather than come to terms with it. Sex with a partner half his age gave him the illusion of becoming young again himself, a remedy for the malaise and built-in doubts of middle age. When he embraced his beloved, he felt, as so many middle-aged men (and women) do, “I'm still desirable; I can still experience and elicit passion. I am free to choose somebody thrilling.” Having her would change everything, erasing his disappointments forever.

José became obsessed with recovering his youth through a lover because he had failed to grieve for his lost opportunities. He could not see that nobody forced him to stay in his conventional life, that doing so had been his choice. Recognizing the benefits as well as the limitations that choice entailed could have been a source of authentic pride and self-acceptance, both of which are prerequisites for real love, but recognizing them would involve rigorous self-examination.

Instead, he took a desperate, doomed chance on illusory happiness based on denial—refusing to accept that five decades were forever behind him, that it is not possible to build a mate entirely to your own specifications, that past actions cannot be undone, that another person cannot enliven you or give purpose and meaning to your life, and that there is no such thing as youth by association.

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José would never have described his preoccupation with his muse as an addiction—she was simply the great and only love of his life in his eyes—but his behavior had all the earmarks of one, at least metaphorically: self-neglect, compromised judgment, single-minded pursuit of his desire regardless of the consequences to himself or others, insatiable craving only momentarily assuaged by scoring a sexual encounter. Even though he used no drugs, it was almost as though he were narcotizing himself by thinking about her, insulating himself from the disappointments of his life. Sex with her, or the memory of it, was his fix, a fleeting, ecstatic distraction from the dread that he had wasted his youth and now was trapped forever.

Contemporary brain research confirms that obsessive love like José's does indeed share many characteristics with physical addictions and also with gambling, a habit that can be as compulsive and destructive as alcohol or cocaine, though no substance is involved. This commonality explains the primitive urgency and the sense of being in the grip of forces beyond rational control that the obsessed experience; every compulsive lover I spoke to felt this way.

Functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a recently developed noninvasive brain-mapping technology for observing activation patterns that underlie mental states, has led to a proliferation of research about “the brain on love” that has captured the popular imagination. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, whose studies of the neurophysiological foundations of love are among the best known, used fMRIs to explore the brains of newly enamored and recently rejected lovers.
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She discovered that romantic passion and drug addiction have similar effects; both stimulate regions in and directly above the brain stem, including the hypothalamus, which synthesizes and secretes neurochemicals from which sensations of pleasure, arousal, focused attention, and high-risk behavior arise. The spurned lovers' brains registered an inclination to pursue risky investment strategies and to make efforts to manage anger, but also to ruminate and to engage in obsessive-compulsive behavior; like José, they couldn't stop thinking about the one they had lost.

fMRI research on the cerebral correlates of passion and obsession, while intriguing, has been criticized by some researchers as lacking reliability and validity on the grounds that it may be tracking only superficial changes and that sample sizes tend to be small or of limited generalizability.
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One fact that the new brain research has demonstrated is the centrality of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the experience of obsessive passion. Stanford neuroendocrinologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky described the role of dopamine in his provocative TED Talk “The Uniqueness of Humans” and in numerous publications.
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Dopamine, released by the hypothalamus, enables goal-directed (including very long-term goal-directed) behavior, the anticipation of pleasure, and responses to uncertain rewards. The system is activated when something good happens unexpectedly, and you want it to recur. Ventures that only pay off randomly or occasionally become more deeply compelling than any others; we work the hardest for tantalizing potential, though unlikely, gratifications, like winning the lottery or getting the attention of a lover who responds only every once in a while. In conditions of unpredictable reinforcement like these, dopamine levels explode. Driven by this chemical surge, what Sapolsky calls “the astonishing human capacity to hold on” can keep people playing infinitesimal odds for astonishingly long periods. This cycle, whose primary evolutionary function is to produce stick-to-it-iveness and the ability to tolerate delayed gratification, can also end up encouraging playing the slot machines, investing in thirty-year mortgages, believing in the afterlife, and waiting around for women like David's beloved Anna to find time for you. As Sapolsky astutely observes, “‘Maybe' is reinforcing like nothing else on earth.”

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Long before the discovery of dopamine, Bluma Zeigarnik, a Soviet Gestalt psychologist,
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was researching a phenomenon that sheds light from another angle on the motivation of obsessive lovers' pursuit of their impossible dreams. Her discovery, first reported in 1927 and known as “the Zeigarnik Effect,”
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demonstrated that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks (and, in the case of people who love those who don't love them back, uncomplete-able tasks) better than completed ones; in her original experiments, unfinished problems are 90 percent more likely to be recalled than finished ones. The mind has a compelling need for closure, a desire to end uncertainty and to resolve unfinished business—which helps explain the lasting impact of the “business” of hopeless love affairs, which can never be resolved, at least not with the other person.

In subsequent studies of the phenomenon, researchers found that highly motivated subjects who were asked to solve mathematical puzzles continued to work on their assignments even after being told the experiment was over. When they felt “tension,” a physical component of anxiety, while executing these tasks, their memory for the details improved. Tension also led to intrusive thoughts about what they had left undone; the anxiety that tortures the obsessed increases their preoccupation. People take the lack of closure seriously. It is a constant irritant, like a stone in one's shoe, or in the case of unhappy lovers, in one's heart.

Is there any value in compulsive remembering? Reconsidering failures may be useful in finding solutions to similar problems in the future.
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To my mind, the best possible use of this dogged cognitive persistence is to apply it to figuring out why one continues to pursue relationships that lead only to grief.

All this research reveals nothing but the neurophysiological substrate of these overwhelming emotions—the where and the what, but not the why: What in our histories and our personalities makes us susceptible to searching for love in all the wrong places? Why are some people more prone to miserable love affairs than others? Why do we pick the people we fall for and then continue to pursue them when there is not a chance in the world that they will reciprocate? How do we ever stop? These are questions for psychologists and philosophers, not physiologists. Obsessive love, as torturous as it is, is in most cases not a disease or a mental illness but part of the human condition.

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Freud's renegade student Theodor Reik made the troubling and perceptive observation that people are most likely to fall intensely in love when they are anxious and their self-esteem is lowest,
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which explains the timing of José's infatuation; he had reached an age when he was frantically looking for a way to rewrite his life and retrieve his battered self-image. Feeling inadequate, unhappy, and empty inside are virtually prerequisites for falling and staying desperately in love; at least temporarily, the ecstasy of desire seems to cure everything that ails you.

There is a connection between aversive states of mind—loneliness, shame, even grief and horror—and a propensity to feel overwhelming passion; this is one reason romances blossom in times of war or natural disasters, as well as during the private disasters of our everyday lives.

Psychopharmacologist Donatella Marazziti
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noted that both passionate lovers and people with obsessive-compulsive disorder are deficient in the brain-soothing neurotransmitter serotonin. Low levels of this chemical occur in anxiety states, as well as in depression and aggression, and especially in states of intense jealousy. This finding led her to declare that “love is a type of insanity”—a judgment that may not be true for every kind of love but makes sense to anyone who has fallen into an obsessive abyss.

More potent than reinforcement, dopamine, and serotonin is the ineradicable specter of the past and the urge to reproduce it. Freud wrote about this unconscious force in a paper called “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,”
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in which he named it “the repetition compulsion.”