Unrequited (24 page)

Moments later, the nun realizes she is saved and is carried up to heaven. Rina’s final vocal gesture was a “colossal, fortissimo high C, which came out of me gloriously by means I couldn’t explain,” she remembered.

It was a larger-than-life moment: the potboiler tragic love story onstage; the pivotal high note; the conductor’s glare evoking Svengali, the impresario who hypnotizes a tone-deaf Trilby into becoming an opera star. Rina’s triumphant finish redeemed her from her mistake, as her nun character was redeemed from her sin.

The final high note signified another kind of redemption: from the failure of unrequited love. True, the conductor would never love her back. In this respect, Rina’s compulsive rounds of the conservatory and all her daydreaming were fruitless. But her obsession was also what unleashed her into a moment of transcendence and heightened her understanding of what it meant to be a performer.

Throughout her obsession with the conductor, the specter of the out-of-control stalker haunted Rina. She did everything she could to avoid making her attraction known. “I would rather die than seem to be stalking,” she said. Instead, she brought “the compulsion of a stalker” to her education, harnessing the unwanted woman’s blend of abjection and aggression in the service of her music. She submitted completely to the conductor’s guidance. “That’s an unhealthy way to be in real life,” she said. “But onstage, there’s an inherent sort of slave mind/slave master thing going on.”

Under his direction, she could be her “purest self—really an
unself
,” completely absorbed in making music. The state as she described it sounded a lot like the perfect union she’d fantasized about having with the conductor—yet she experienced it with her singing instead of with him.

We have seen how a conscious scrutiny of unrequited love can tell us a lot about what we want in our lives. We also know that if
we chase unrequited love too hard, we can cause harm—to others, or ourselves, or both. Rina’s story raises another important possibility: that we may be able to
do something
with unrequited love and use it to our benefit. About a third of the women in my online survey responded that their unrequited love experience “
changed my life for the better.” The beloved can become a taskmaster and a muse, our impossible desire for him a primal teacher, guiding us toward accomplishment and transforming our lives.

THE SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY
outcomes of romantic obsession—constructive and hurtful—are not mutually exclusive. Rina’s accomplishment did not erase the pain of the conductor’s lack of interest, which she felt acutely for years, every time their paths crossed in the music world. Ancient Greeks believed the god of Eros was created out of these disparate forces. He was the offspring of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and Ares, the god of war. Eros embodied the creative and destructive power of love in the figure of a mischievous child who struck lovers and poets with the “divine madness” of romantic obsession. The same kind of energy, the myth suggests, lies behind both the urge to create and the urge to love. Sappho, the ancient Greek poet whose work expresses the intensity of romantic longing, called Eros “bittersweet” for the combination of pleasurable and painful feelings his victims endured. Jungian analyst Jacqueline Wright wrote that desire, which “engages every lover in an activity of the imagination,” opens up possibility because “
the lover is forced to notice what is missing.” This realization has the potential to make us dream, change, and create. “The creative urge that is channeled toward another person can be taken back and owned,” she said.

This state, both grandiose and needy, can be highly fragile, as Sappho’s own story attests. A main preoccupation of her poetry,
which survives mainly in enigmatic verse fragments, is the Socratic idea of
pothos
, translated as
yearning, longing, or regret for “that which is elsewhere.” At times addressed to female beloveds and at times to male, her poetry moves from soaring, hopeful imagery to descriptions of great pain. The persona of Fragment 31 describes how the laughter of a beloved “puts the heart in my chest on wings.” A few lines later, the sight of the same beloved leads to a mortal fit: “cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass /
I am and dead—or almost / I seem to me.” As poetic legend has it, Sappho ended her own life in the throes of unrequited love. She supposedly jumped off the Leucadian cliffs into the sea after Phaon, a young ferryman, rejected her. The leap, which Ovid wrote about in the
Heroides
, cannot be proved as fact. But the staying power of the story points to our fears about the creative potential of romantic obsession—that it is a precursor to ruin.

Yet accomplishment is often what
rescues
the unwanted woman from ruin and gives her an outlet for her restless longing. One reason why people love someone who doesn’t love them back is so they can be inspired by love. Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron call this the “Don Quixote situation.” In Miguel de Cervantes’s early-seventeenth-century novel, Don Quixote devotes his chivalric quests to his unrequited love, a neighboring farm girl he renames Dulcinea. Even though she never responds, his adoration allows him to experience heightened emotion, focus his life goals,
and enjoy being inspired to act heroically in someone else’s name. For those in the Don Quixote situation, love is an adventure, a mystery to be solved. They are the stars of the story, privileged figures in an exciting world of emotional extremes.

Interestingly, Cervantes portrayed Don Quixote as a satirical, largely ineffectual figure. He attacks windmills, believing them to be giants, and insists on rescuing a lady from a band of what he
perceives as malevolent wizards, who are in fact a group of friars. His heroism often verges on buffoonery. Better evidence of the power of being in unrequited love comes from Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most prominent figures in the history of feminism and the author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

In 1793, Wollstonecraft fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, a restless American entrepreneur. The first few months of their affair were idyllic. Neither lover approved of the institution of marriage and its artificial demands. Commitments, they believed,
should last only as long as the feeling of love. Yet she came to believe that what they had together was sacred unto itself, creating a connection more durable than the marital bond. Imlay had a different take on the situation, which became acutely apparent after they conceived a child together. Imlay was away on business for a good deal of her pregnancy. When the baby was just a few months old, Imlay departed again, this time for London. He promised to send for Wollstonecraft and baby Fanny, who remained behind in France. He was cooling on the relationship, though, and started up with another lover. His letters to her became shorter and less frequent. She wrote to him often and with great fervor, trying to convince him of his obligation to continue to love her. He finally asked her to come to London—but not as his partner. He arranged for her to live in separate furnished lodgings. Soon after she arrived, she tried to kill herself by swallowing laudanum.

After she recovered, Imlay made a startling proposal. He asked her to travel to Scandinavia to negotiate compensation for a cargo of silver he believed had been stolen. The suggestion, in the wake of his betrayal and abandonment, was quite an audacious brush-off. He was asking his emotionally fragile ex to sally forth, baby daughter and maid in tow, on a rough and dangerous journey into unsettled territory—all for the sake of his business interests, his perennial excuse for
distancing himself from Wollstonecraft. She regularly accused him of neglecting her in favor of his many commercial ventures: “You seem to be got into a whirl of projects and schemes, which are drawing you into a gulph, that, if it does not absorb your happiness, will infallibly destroy mine,”
she wrote from Paris in 1795. Yet there Imlay was, conspiring to draw her into that same gulph—likely hoping that it would distract her and get her out of his hair. The plan included sending her away with a sworn statement that she was his wife. The document would give Wollstonecraft the authority to act on Imlay’s behalf, but it also underscored the ways he was using her. Though their transcendent union was in tatters, he didn’t hesitate to give her the title of wife when it might strategically benefit him.

Wollstonecraft saw opportunity instead of insult. The mission gave her a new challenge. Even though she was working on Imlay’s behalf, she was also doing what she was best at: breaking new ground as a woman. She reveled in the continual surprise of being a woman in the male role of hero-adventurer, babe in arms and all. Her journey gave her a new subject to write about. In journal entries and letters, she took in the craggy beauty of Scandinavia and brought to bear her keen analytical mind in observations of local politics and customs. She bathed in the sea, took long walks, and rode horses. She negotiated strenuously on Imlay’s behalf, though she failed to get the money he sought. She was by no means cured of her obsession with him. Her letters to Imlay continued to refer to her brokenhearted state. She still struggled with thoughts of suicide and was haunted by the question of whether she and Imlay would reconcile when she returned. But a steady sense of purpose on her travels kept her from dwelling too long on sadness.

Far away from her beloved, Wollstonecraft could do something with her love. She could be someone new, even with her heavy
heart. In Imlay’s presence, she had to face the fact of his rejection. Once she returned to England, she discovered he had taken up with yet another lover. She tried to kill herself again. This time, she dressed in heavy velvets, weighted her pockets with rocks, and, hoping to sink quickly, jumped off the Putney Bridge into the Thames. After she was rescued, she made a few more desperate pleas for reconciliation. When she was refused again by Imlay, her thoughts returned to the adventure that had revived her spirits before. She knew her journey and the devotion that had inspired it were worth something, emotionally, creatively, and financially. She asked Imlay to return the letters she sent from Scandinavia and published many of them, enriched by her journal entries, as
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

The book was a hybrid of epistolary travelogue, memoir, political analysis, and sociology. It was a tremendous commercial success. Much of its appeal came from its subplot of longing. Her letters regularly allude, somewhat obliquely, to her heartache, often
followed by reassurances that she was overcoming the pain. By the time
Letters
was published, her personal story was no secret. Instead of letting her intimations of subjugation and woe
discredit Wollstonecraft’s feminism (as some modern critics have done), her readers connected with
the “creature of feeling and imagination” behind the astute philosopher.

Wollstonecraft was caught up in a passion that drove her to great lengths. Her letters to Imlay were compulsively frequent, her rhetoric at times as well honed as anything in
A Vindication
, at times verging on humiliating supplication: “You could restore me to life and hope, and the satisfaction you would feel, would amply repay you . . . for God’s sake,
keep me no longer in suspense!—Let me see you once more!” She infamously begged to be included in
a ménage à trois household with him and his new lover (and that was not the first time she’d made such a proposal—she’d thrown out the idea at a previous lover, a married artist). But she fought despair by making something out of the frenzied energy of unrequited love. She cloaked herself, Don Quixote–style, in the mantle of the aspiring lover and went on a heroic journey. And the Imlay she imagined—the man with whom she shared a transcendent and enduring bond, above any social custom or law—was, like Dulcinea, a fantasy.

What she created out of the idea of him
was
real.
Letters
, the last book Wollstonecraft published, isn’t her best-known work. But it contains the statement that best explains the tie between her life story and her political analysis: “
We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.” Her writing was a way of turning degradation into power, of getting the last and most enduring word out of a situation
that might have silenced her forever.

This gesture—of using unrequited love as a goad to creativity—has endless variations. Literary critics believe that Charlotte Brontë’s impassioned letters to Constantin Héger, the married Belgian teacher with whom she was enamored, were “close to an imaginative act,” her way of beginning to enact
the passionate expressiveness that would distinguish
Jane Eyre
and
Villette.
Shortly after she wrote her last letter to Héger, she hatched her famous plot to publish a volume of poetry she wrote with her sisters, Anne and Emily, under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Two years later, she published
Jane Eyre
,
a book that stunned its original audience with its emotional frankness.

That frankness becomes playfully raw in contemporary French conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s installation,
Prenez soin de vous
(
Take Care of Yourself
). She incorporated the filmed and photographed responses of more than a hundred women to a breakup
email she received from her lover. She selected the women for their wide range of professional and intellectual perspectives. A criminologist pronounces her ex “an authentic manipulator” who is “psychologically dangerous”; a human rights specialist tells Calle she should be relieved to be rid of him. A woman in a short, strapless yellow dress, her straight brown hair swaying over her face like a curtain, performs a plodding conceptual dance.
A nine-year-old girl wonders why, if the email author says he loves Calle, is he leaving her?

The abundance of the installation reflects the excessiveness of obsession, the endless pondering of what a lover and his rejection
means
. It is also a kind of extravagant revenge:
If you don’t want me, I will make something out of us anyway.
This threat comes from within the relative safety of art. Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel
I Love Dick
is part one-sided epistolary novel, part confessional diary, and part public document of her real-life exhaustive and failed obsession with the eponymous Dick, a British cultural critic teaching at a university in California. He responds to her outpourings mainly with silence, evasion, and a single night in his bed; when she asks him to have sex with her, he consents with the evasive “I’m not uncomfortable with that idea.” She has said that the real Dick was so alarmed by the publication of the novel that he was going to
sue her for invasion of privacy, then changed his mind.