Unrequited (2 page)

Because women who yearn and chase are “out of their place,” usurping a traditionally male prerogative, we’re more confused about how to view women caught up in impossible desire and how to determine whether female pursuit has gone too far. We don’t understand as much about the variety of ways women experience unrequited love and what light female obsession can shed on our understanding of relationships and gender. This book illuminates these issues. It explores the lesser-known, yet equally complex, cultural and historical representations of women in unrequited love. It addresses the psychology of why people become obsessed with an unwilling other. Throughout this exploration, I mine my own story and the stories of the many women I’ve interviewed—teenagers, college students, single women, wives, straight women, queer women, mothers, and grandmothers who, at some point, were too consumed by unrequited love to just “get over it.” Some kept their feelings quiet, while some openly courted and pleaded. Some had a big crush that energized and inspired them. Others became deflated. Many toggled from euphoria to depression and back. Some became self-destructive, some invasive and aggressive. Most eventually came to understand themselves better. Several felt their obsession led them to make major changes in their lives.

What I’ve discovered through these stories is the importance of listening to unrequited love and seeking out its many possible meanings. I have come to believe that we must open ourselves to what unrequited love can teach us. What is our romantic ob
session really about? What are we projecting onto those reluctant beloveds? What are we protesting? In other words, what is it that we’re really yearning for?

THESE QUESTIONS TAKE
on a different kind of urgency for women who end up behaving in ways they regret, like I did. Some of the women I interviewed became frightening and destructive. I don’t intend to glorify unwanted pursuit or stalking, a crime that ruins lives. Inasmuch as I argue that unrequited love is potentially meaningful and life-changing, this book also delves into the ways romantic obsession can go badly astray, and how, and why.

The distinction between right and wrong in romantic pursuit can be particularly intricate for women.
Women are far more likely to be the
victims
of stalking than the perpetrators. Anti-stalking initiatives are, like anti–domestic violence and anti–sexual assault programs, framed as protective of women, often with little or no mention of the possibility that men might be victims of these crimes. Even though
more than one out of ten stalkers is female, we’re reluctant to see women as aggressors who might pose a real threat.

Far more common are women who react forcefully to romantic rejection
.
Several studies of college students found that women are just as likely or more likely than men to resort to what professors William Cupach and Brian Spitzberg label “
obsessive relational intrusion” (ORI)—ongoing, invasive, and unwanted relationship pursuit. ORI may fall short of the legal definitions of stalking, which generally entail a pattern of unwanted and threatening behavior
that causes the target to fear for his or her safety. But ORI—what we might call “soft stalking”—still has a significant impact on its targets. These unsettling findings have remained largely under the radar. Society seems to be culturally
blind to the reality of women’s capacity for aggressive chasing, harassment, and stalking.

Research into male stalking victims shows that men who have been subject to relationship stalking by women don’t believe they’ll be taken seriously, and they’re less likely to report incidents to the police. Men also face a “blame the victim” mentality.
They’re perceived as responsible for being stalked. Several men I interviewed said that when they talked about being the target of a woman’s aggressive unwanted pursuit, friends criticized them for doing something to cause her behavior.

For years after I stopped pursuing B., I could not acknowledge that I’d gone too far. I blamed my behavior on him and his ambivalence. Even when I began to come to terms with my actions, my friends kept telling me, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. He drove you crazy.” But I’m certain that if I’d been a man, they would have had a far different reaction. They would have accused me of stalking—a word none of my confidantes used with me. We literally didn’t have a language for what I’d done, just because I was a woman.

In the nearly twenty years since I pursued B., the idea that women stalk has become widely recognized—mainly in inconsequential ways. The voyeuristic opportunities of the digital age have turned “stalk” into everyday slang, its definition diminished in irony. “I’m so glad to run into you. I’ve been stalking you all day!” we might remark to a colleague, when all we mean is we’ve sent a couple of texts and an email. We can “stalk” online as much as we want, gazing undetected at photos and status updates. We can track someone’s whereabouts on social media apps without taking a step. The term “stalking” has become a buzzword for the pursuit of a variety of female lusts. Allwomenstalk.com is a cheery shopping and lifestyle site featuring articles such as “7 Tips on How to Accessorize Your Summer Dresses.”

None of this constitutes real stalking. You can’t be harassed without knowing it, so Facebook or Google stalking isn’t really stalking at all—unless you’re using these platforms to relentlessly message, bully, or threaten your target. Occasionally high-profile cases of true female stalking are received as novelty news, with plenty of victim blaming and sympathy for the aggressor. When Canadian actress Genevieve Sabourin was arrested for allegedly stalking Alec Baldwin, she asked as she was handcuffed, “Why am I being arrested?” The Huffington Post and other news sites were full of her defenders (“A female does not react in this way if there was no emotion, interaction or feelings. He’s got $, she does not. . . . I feel sorry for this woman”) and Baldwin critics (“That’s what happens when you hit it a little too well”; “
Alec is a sicko. Everyone knows it”).

We need to reconsider our long-held assumption that when it comes to aggressive unwanted sexual pursuit, the victimized are always female and the victimizers are always male. Feminists and victims’ rights groups have been trying since the 1970s to transform attitudes about sexual assault and stalking by educating college and high school students about sexual consent. In this book, I argue that we also need to remove what I call “the gender pass” for female aggressors: the mentality that, in short, lets them off the hook.

The very real potential peril of unrequited love does not have to undermine its power. Throughout this book, I defend the essence of unrequited love as a highly imaginative, life-altering experience that gives us insight about ourselves in a way that tamer emotions rarely do. The surge of feeling for an elusive beloved can be channeled in more productive directions. Pop superstar Lady Gaga once told
Rolling Stone
magazine that her yearning for a heavy-metal drummer who rejected her was key to her rise to success. Losing
him, she said, “
made me into a fighter.” Several of the women I interviewed testified that going through a romantic obsession brought them to a place where they needed (and in retrospect felt destined) to be—and wouldn’t have arrived at any other way.

THIS BOOK UNCOVERS
the many dimensions of women’s experiences of romantic obsession. By offering an understanding of an otherworldly and volatile state of being, I hope to ease the desperate bafflement felt by any woman who has ever been hopelessly obsessed. This book sheds light on the question: How could rejection in love transform us so radically?

This is the book I wish
I
had when I was obsessed, the book that would have helped me feel less alone. That said, this book presents no easy answers to those of us who have been or are in unrequited love—or are concerned about others lost in romantic obsession. Rather,
Unrequited
explores the consequences and possible meanings of our feelings and actions. And it offers new possibilities for our tortured hearts.

B. AND I MET DURING THE AUTUMN OF
my last year of graduate school, in a theater seminar on tragedy. We were the students who spoke the most in class. At times it seemed we were talking mainly to each other, the rest of the small class receding into the background. I was attracted to him then, though he seemed somehow remote.

At the end of the semester, he mentioned he was dating another student, an actress in the theater performance program. I didn’t know much about her except that she was a Russian-born divorcée about to turn forty. B. and I were twenty-nine. I also got involved
with someone else, a gifted short-story writer in his early forties. His career had started promisingly, with prizes and publications in well-regarded literary magazines. By the time we met, he was floundering. He juggled writing computer game scripts with short-term teaching gigs. He still hadn’t sold the volume of stories he’d been working on since he was my age.

I looked past all that, and his two divorces, and fell hard for him. I had a weekend job as an announcer at the local public radio station, and he woke up early with me on Saturday mornings to keep me company at work. He teased me by calling me a “radio celebrity,” even though all I did was push buttons and read a few minutes of news and weather every hour. Our relationship quickly grew serious, then unraveled just as fast. That summer, he went to New Hampshire for a month at an artists’ colony and met someone else.

A few days after he broke up with me, I ran into B. I hadn’t seen him much since we’d been in class together. We agreed to meet for a beer. He told me about the play he was writing, a one-woman one-act about Amelia Earhart. His girlfriend would perform it at a theater festival in the Berkshires. After the festival was over, he explained, they planned to part ways as friends. It was a fun relationship, but neither of them thought it should get serious. She wanted children and would soon be too old to have them. He wasn’t ready. “I think I would like to have a wife, but I can’t see it happening with her,” he said. “I’m at least two years away from my Ph.D. I can’t give her the stability she wants now.”

I told him about my breakup. “At first it was so powerful to be so much younger,” I said. “It seemed to redeem him, to bring him some sort of second chance at youth. But it wasn’t real.” I felt suddenly relieved not to have to play this role. I was glad to be spending time with someone my own age.

At the end of the evening, B. confessed that he’d had a crush on
me when we were in seminar together. I walked out of the bar, the pain of my breakup no longer scalding. B. once wanted me from afar. His relationship was ending. Might he want me again? The idea thrilled me, and it was enough to lift me out of despair.

That moment, I realize now, was when I set into motion a chain of events that would lead to my obsession. I chose B. to love next, and I chose him specifically because he was not available. I was wounded, I told myself, and not at all ready to date again. The best remedy might be to spend time with a man who was not free to love me back.

I could have joined a bowling league instead, of course. But while bowling would be a mere distraction, B. gave me a sense of possibility that I badly craved. I would be good, I promised myself. I would not try to take him away from his girlfriend. Their relationship would move to its conclusion in its own time. I would have a chance to recover from my breakup. Meanwhile, B. and I would get to know each other.

For the rest of that summer, I got what I wanted. We took walks through Schenley Park, went to movies, and nursed milkshakes in the air-conditioned refuge of the Eat’n Park on Murray Avenue. On the rooftop deck of the Morrowfield, he played Willie Nelson songs for me on his guitar, singing the lyrics with a twang from his native Arkansas that was all but hidden when he spoke in class. He liked to call me by my last name. “Phillips,” he’d bark playfully when I picked up the phone. I imagined he did so to emphasize the discipline of our situation. It seemed clear we wanted each other but refrained from doing anything because he was involved. We had, to quote the Louis Armstrong song, “a fine romance, with no kisses.” I decided that was the best way to fall in love. In my past relationships, things had always moved too fast, too much intimacy before any real trust could develop.

THIS PARADOXICAL DESIRE—TO
want someone you can’t have—isn’t as strange as it may seem. Countless novels ride on the ideal of the love that cannot be. It’s a plotline that can stretch as taut as gut strings on a violin. Whether it’s played sweetly, sadly, or dissonantly, we love to listen. Consider Edith Wharton’s never-consummated couples: Newland Archer and Countess Olenska in
The Age of Innocence,
Lily and Lawrence in
The House of Mirth.
There is always a reason why one side of the couple can’t return the love of the other. Countess Olenska’s failed marriage makes her damaged goods in the eyes of New York high society, and Newland can’t bring himself to leave the far less enticing woman he is engaged to. Lily, with her fragile orphan’s status in New York City’s elite, resists considering her friend Lawrence, who isn’t wealthy, as husband material, though
they are clearly meant for each other. We rank these stories among our greatest romances—yet beyond sporadic dramatic confessions, mutual love never fully develops in either tale.

When unrequited love does morph into reciprocated love, the story usually has to end. Jane Austen’s single female heroines spend chapter after chapter weathering uncertainty and obstacles as they figure out whom to love, and who loves them, until the plot concludes with a round of marriage proposals, resolving all mystery. Nineteen thirties cinema capitalized on this theme in the classics
Bringing Up Baby
and
Footlight Parade
, which end after the heroine’s unrequited love is requited at last. In our own time, unsatisfied desire has propelled many hit television series to their conclusion. In
Friends
, Rachel and Ross trade off hidden yearning for each other—and even parent a child together—before they admit their mutual love in the last episode.
Gossip Girl
’s entitled Upper East Siders Blair and Chuck are obviously fated to be together, but during the show’s five-year run, the two never pair up
for more than a few episodes at a time. The program was more enticing when they pined for each other, wrestled with jealousy, and flirted. They were two people who had everything except each other, until the show’s last episode, when they hastily yet gladly married to avoid a criminal investigation.