Unrequited (7 page)

And what a rejecter has felt—a lack of love—is precisely his crime. We’re drawn to form close emotional bonds with one another. Attachment theory, first set forth by British psychiatrist John Bowlby in the early 1960s, maintains that human beings are social animals, born with a biological need to be attached to their caregivers. This need helps ensure survival. Babies who cry for their caregivers receive nourishment and other essential forms of attention: the cooing and talking that helps them develop language skills; the holding and sheltering that keeps them safe from predators. Research by psychologist Phillip Shaver shows parallels between attachment behavior in infancy and romantic behavior in adults: focused attention, holding, touching and other forms of affection, gazing into each other’s eyes, and so forth. These parallels suggest that
similar neural mechanisms are at work in both kinds of love.

In this light, someone who seeks love is naturally following the innately human quest for attachment. Someone who rejects love, Baumeister pointed out, is rejecting the opportunity to attach,
turning his back on this most basic human desire to form relationships. The reason sometimes is that the rejecter is already attached
to someone else. But often enough, the rejecter seems to prefer the unstable unknowns, the unpredictable state of being
unattached
. On a gut level, we can all understand this. Most of us reject arranged marriages, for example, as contrary to the natural impulses of humanity. We hold fast to the right to choose love. We don’t want the choice to be made for us—and that’s precisely what the unwanted woman does. She chooses the beloved, even if he’s not interested or changes his mind. It’s difficult to acknowledge the beloved’s position as one he can’t control, because he seems to have all the control. He is the one who shuns. If he refuses sex, his sin is even graver. Men are supposed to
always
want sex; as one male friend put it, “It’s like when the apple falls into your lap. You’re supposed to eat it.” Of course, if he accepts sex despite his lack of interest in a relationship, he’s
toying with a vulnerable woman.

What complicates the situation even more is that we live in a historical moment with few reliable markers of relationship formation and commitment. We can insist, for instance, that
Janey’s ex is wrong for leading her on with all his attention—a romantic sin. You are not supposed to lead people on and then push them away. This unwritten rule consoles us. If your beloved is acting so sweet with you, he certainly doesn’t intend to deny you the next steps: a date, a relationship, enduring love. Yet so often he will—it’s a story I’ve heard again and again. We have a very hard time shaking off the sense that a certain kind of attention must lead to romance. We take an early expression of interest as an inviolable truth. Nothing our beloved says later, including “I don’t love you,”
can have the same power.

Indignation about the person who leads a woman on is, to some extent, a vestige of earlier times, when mating rituals were more fixed. By the nineteenth century,
arranged marriages in Western culture began to give way to the idea that marriage should be
based on mutual love and free will, independent of parental supervision. But relationship building still relied on commonly understood signs of intent. Men sent flattering letters and sought private visits with women who caught their interest.
Women responded by granting them time, offering encouraging words, and welcoming eye contact. Later in the process,
kissing and heavy petting were seen as profound expressions of love and self-revelation, signaling a strong mutual expectation of marriage.

The rise of the dating culture in the twentieth century allowed for sexual intimacy that held no such assurances. Committed relationships evolved through dating, but they didn’t have to. In postwar America, teenagers and young singles frequently “went steady,” pledging loyalty and devoting all their attention to one person. Yet these “play-marriages,” as cultural historian Beth L. Bailey calls them, were fickle. Breakups and new unions were so common that teenage girls at one Connecticut high school in the 1950s wore “obit bracelets,” a chain of disks engraved with
the initials of the boys they’d broken up with.

Yet steady dating still functioned in a set social order. It was the bottom of a hierarchy of types of commitment. Going steady might not pan out, but if you got “pinned” by a fraternity man, you had a higher-order promise in hand. Then came engagement and marriage. The protocol of what journalist and social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead calls the “national courtship system” was so widely accepted that the process of dating, falling in love, and finding a life partner in your twenties seemed natural and inevitable.
As late as 1970, nearly 90 percent of women married by the age of twenty-nine.

Today, in the wake of the sexual revolution, the rise of birth control, and women’s increasing economic independence, we are left with a mating system characterized by mind-boggling variety. There is still romantic dating and marriage, but more traditional
relationships coexist with no-strings-attached sex, living together with no formal commitment, online dating services that provide an unprecedented wealth of new prospects, social media romances that boom and bust without the couple ever meeting in person. Whitehead points out that the new system is more inclusive and gives people more freedom of choice. Yet
lost in the shuffle is “any coherent set of widely accepted practices or conventions” to that marriage or a committed relationship.

All these choices can have a paralyzing effect. A recent wave of studies on decision-making show that when we’re confronted with
too many varieties of jam or
too many prospects in a speed-dating session, we become unrealistic, insecure, and less likely to make any choice at all.

In the current dating culture, the idea of “being led on” has become an anachronism. Where, exactly, could we expect to be led when there is no clear path to begin with? The liminal, neither-here-nor-there relationship is the perplexing default. We don’t know if we’re on a date or an outing, or how many dates mean we’re now in a relationship, or whether sleeping with your best friend means you’re “together” or merely “friends with benefits.” We don’t know whether we have grounds to be dissatisfied, because we have to consider what relationship expectations are acceptable. Are daily phone calls a right you can claim after you’ve slept together? Or only after you’ve agreed to be exclusive? Ambivalence thrives, with many relationships being neither
here
, firmly in the romantic, nor
there
, firmly not. This is particularly so
for men, who can wait longer before they have to reckon with the question of whether they want to start families. The rejecter may not want you at all—or he may not want you back
as much
or
in the same way.

I realize I’m asking for a lot here: an understanding of the position of the rejecter and his choices, which can, without question,
be selfish, clumsy, and hurtful. My purpose isn’t to let the rejecter off the hook. It’s to show that the unwanted woman and her beloved are
both
self-absorbed, though we’re more accustomed to using that label for the rejecter. They are living out two very different stories, with distinct sets of assumptions and expectations. The rejecter certainly should be aware of the potential impact of his erratic attention. But the hopeful lover should face the fact that the happy ending of the unrequited love script is
not
her rightful fate. In Janey’s situation, the myth of her perseverance clashes with his illusion of endless possibility. She fixates on The One. Her ex-boyfriend, perhaps another kind of dreamer, believes The One is in the future somewhere or slipped by him in the past.

SONYA, A TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD
design researcher, met Ryan through a mutual friend. The three met in Sonya’s apartment before going out to dinner, and Ryan complimented her favorite chair. She was touched, because good design was important to her and it was rare for her friends to notice it. That summer, she and Ryan spent time getting to know each other, and she developed a “large burgeoning crush” on him. Then he disappeared. No one in Sonya’s circle knew where he was. He didn’t show up for his job. She was at a loss, at times disappointed not to see him, at times angry that he didn’t tell her where he was.

Seven weeks later, he reappeared and told her what had happened: He had broken his neck in a bicycling crash. The injury, he added hauntingly, was to the same vertebrae Christopher Reeve broke when he was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident. Ryan had spent all those weeks recuperating in bed at his parents’ house outside St. Louis. Knowing what he had been through erased Sonya’s anger and amplified her feelings for him. “I felt like I wanted to take care of him,” she said.

They went out a few times. They flirted. But he made no move to start a relationship. She began to believe he never would. At the end of the summer, a night out morphed into four straight days together. They holed up in her apartment, making out. “It was a whirlwind,” she said. “Once it was moving forward, it was so fast that it was hard to believe it was actually happening. In four days I slept maybe ten hours. It seemed like we had this great connection.”

Then he left and didn’t call.

She waited. Waiting for the phone call (or the text, or the email) is a mortifying cliché of unrequited love. So many of us have been there. The whole situation feels like the worst injustice, worthy of R & B singer Macy Gray’s helium-voiced protest:
We had such a good time / Hey!
Why didn’t you call me?
Even so, the unwanted woman can go a long way to rationalize the silence. There
must
be a reasonable explanation. He’s lost his phone. He’s busy.
He needs space as he comes to terms with the momentousness of his feelings. Ryan, after all, had disappeared once before, and the cycling accident—which Sonya never could have suspected—justified his prior silence. Maybe there was something else that would explain what was happening.

Why didn’t he call her? Silent avoidance might be a symptom of the rejecter’s moral paralysis. There’s another possibility: that he was in the process of deciding whether he wanted to move forward with a relationship. Sonya and Ryan were in a “reconnaissance dance”—the exploratory stage in the formation of a relationship. In this stage, potential couples or friends sample each other’s company in an effort to decide whether they want to be together. The decision is based in part on
an unstated cost-benefit calculation: what the relationship will give versus what it will take away. Sonya no longer needed to dance, so to speak. She knew she wanted to be
with Ryan. She’d appraised him and determined that his insights, his intelligence, and his attractiveness would benefit her; they seemed worth the costs of holding out for him to respond in kind.

She also
bestowed
value on him. In loving him, she made him valuable beyond his objective appraised qualities. While appraisal asks, “What is the person worth to me?,”
bestowing value isn’t evidence-based. It’s more closely linked to the need for attachment, which isn’t always rationally expressed. For most people,
falling in love is something they can’t control.

Chances are that Ryan and his ilk—The Ones Who Do Not Call—are having a very different experience of the reconnaissance dance. They are conducting a more detached cost-benefit analysis. And yet there’s no good way for the rejecter to share this appraisal process with the prospective partner. It may be rude not to call after you’ve had an intimate four-day date—but what do you say when you
do
call? “Hello, thank you for necking with me for hours on end, I just wanted to let you know I’m still deciding how I feel about you and it isn’t looking good”?

I had a disarmingly honest interview about the cost-benefit analysis with Lorne, a forty-seven-year-old entrepreneur living in a New York City suburb. In his twenties, he fell for a woman who confided that in girlhood she had been sexually abused by a relative. At first he was furious that anyone could have violated her in this way. He wanted to care for her and protect her. As he got to know her better, he realized that she wasn’t the beautiful heroine he’d imagined. He saw her ongoing vulnerability and was frightened by what he perceived as her neediness. He told me he realized that he could not be her “knight in shining armor.” The cost-benefit analysis he conducted no longer tipped in her favor.

He began to show up late for dates, or not at all, until she called him out on his rudeness and ended the relationship. Later, she
tried frantically to get him back, distraught that a man she’d let herself trust had been so callous with her. He didn’t relent. Her efforts confirmed for him that she was too much of a handful. He described his reaction as “she was nuts and I wasn’t interested.” Now he understands that he was too scared to be direct. He said that actually confessing how he really felt would have been “too emotional, too time-consuming,” and he couldn’t handle it.

Lorne’s story is unsettling, not just because of how cowardly he was but also because there seems to be no way he could avoid being cowardly. The woman he was involved with deserved the love of a supportive man, but Lorne didn’t have it in him to be that man. Faked love would not have done either of them any good. Being honest, the more ethical path, still would have caused her pain. And it’s difficult to say which would be harder on her already deep psychological wounds: Lorne the irresponsible no-show, or Lorne the confessor, admitting his unwillingness to help carry her emotional baggage.

FIVE DAYS AFTER
Sonya’s long weekend with Ryan, he finally called. “I feel terrible,” he said. “But this is over.” The answer to “Why didn’t you call me?” was belated but clear: He didn’t want to continue what they’d started.

Sonya went through the rituals of getting over her disappointment. She immersed herself in chick flicks and tried to focus on starting her senior year. But she couldn’t quite let go of all the significance she’d bestowed on Ryan. The day Sonya found out that a close high school friend had died after a long struggle with leukemia, she ran into Ryan. She embraced him. “I thought it was very significant that he was there,” she said. “He’d shown up in that moment when I needed someone to be there.” They met for dinner that evening. He made a confession quite similar to the one Janey’s
ex had made, admitting to his own preoccupation with The One Who Slipped Away: Just before his accident, he’d started to have strong feelings for a girl from his hometown. But after he was injured, she didn’t call, and he hadn’t heard from her since. He was getting over her, and that was why he couldn’t have a relationship with Sonya.