Unrequited (8 page)

For a while, she felt better. His rejection was no longer so mysterious. But their re-encounter launched another round of spending time together and flirting. They’d text each other often, competing in what she called contests of wit. She kept feeling that they were “building up to something,” but that something never happened.

LAYING BARE THE
dynamics of the interpersonal train wreck of unrequited love doesn’t absolve anyone of responsibility. Ryan indulged his ambivalence in a way that seems unjust. We don’t have to feel pity for the rejecter’s moral quandary and difficulty in making decisions, particularly if he isn’t treating us with dignity along the way. We just have to understand that the rejecter’s challenges are significant and can cause confusion and pain for both sides of the unrequited love equation. The rejecter doesn’t have to be a villain, or a broken soul who needs fixing, for the unwanted woman to face her real challenge: coping with the fact that she’s not getting what she wants.

Yet the unwanted woman deserves some credit for her purposefulness. She is taking a stand amid—and against—the capriciousness of today’s mating landscape. She is looking for a sense of power in a confusing situation. In the simplest terms, she has a clear goal, and she’s doing what people working toward important goals do. They ponder and strategize. They face obstacles and try to remain patient. They take encouragement from signs of progress. They problem-solve. These qualities of perseverance are
valued in most other areas of life. If we believe a goal is possible to achieve and we want it badly enough,
we’ll put in the effort over time to make it happen.

This dynamic helps explain the “motivational paradox” of unrequited love. Psychology researchers Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron developed the influential self-expansion model of love, which holds that being in an intimate relationship benefits us because it expands our resources, perspectives, and sense of effectiveness. We incorporate our partner’s identity into our own and thus “expand” our selves. In unrequited love, we aren’t getting those benefits, yet we persist in loving. “It’s a paradox in that we’re being motivated toward something that’s not likely to be successful,” Arthur Aron said. “You maintain a desire for something you don’t expect to get. It’s painful, and the more you try, the more painful it is.”

What unrequited love
does
give us is a goal to pursue. The Arons found that the more unrequited lovers thought they had a chance of winning over their beloved, the more their love increased. And
the more they valued the goal of having a relationship with the beloved, the more attached they felt. Both Janey and Sonya grappled with this potent calculus.

How is it possible to give value to a person who doesn’t love you back? When I asked Sonya why her feelings had lasted, she said she couldn’t quite shake her initial yearning to take care of Ryan, even after he rejected her. “There was a part of me that wanted to help him have better relationships,” she said. “The caretaking impulse is a pretty big part of my life. I come from a family of social workers, and we have a long history of helping people. It was the way I was raised.”

Behind Sonya’s yearning, then, lay a larger reason. She needed to caretake. This need played out in her attachment to the idea of having a relationship with Ryan. Professors William Cupach and
Brian Spitzberg call this dynamic “goal linking.” They describe the goal of having a relationship with the beloved (particularly when he does not want you back) a “lower-order goal,” in itself not nearly as important as the higher-order goals it gets linked to, such as caretaking, happiness, easing loneliness, self-worth, the dream of a future with a loving partner. Lower-order goals can help us reach the higher goals, but the
lower goals are supposed to be flexible and substitutable.

Goal linking psychologically binds the lower goal to the higher one. The beloved comes to represent something beyond himself and what’s really happening. Sonya may have associated Ryan with her need for caretaking, but she couldn’t take care of someone who didn’t let her be close to him. The goal-linking theory helps explain why the script of unrequited love holds so much sway over the unwanted woman, even when it’s getting her nowhere. Giving up on the beloved can feel like giving up on her most fundamental desires and dreams. It’s the bestowal process on steroids. I remember all too well the way my world narrowed in the months I was obsessed with B. I saw in him my last chance for marriage and family. Looking back, I see how ridiculous it was to feel, at thirty, so dire about my future.

The concept of goal linking can help us see beyond that all-consuming matter of what the beloved is doing to us—how unfair, screwed up, and wrong his behavior is. “Rejection can be useful if a person can reflect on it,” said Jacqueline Wright, an Atlanta-based Jungian analyst. “For example, what expectations did we have about the relationship? What unrealistic beliefs did we have about ourselves and the other person? This kind of reflection takes courage because of our tendency to take the easy way and blame a failure on the other person.”

Even if we can’t stop our longing, we can consider using the
urge to persevere in another way: to better understand ourselves. What does the beloved
mean
to us? What ideas, needs, or dreams have we cast upon him? Then we might begin to understand what it is we’re chasing.

MARIA GOT MARRIED
in her early twenties to a man she never deeply loved. She explains it this way: She grew up in a traditional Catholic household. Her mother always told her to wait for a man to choose her. “Let them come to you,” she used to say. When she was single, Maria spent her evenings hanging out in bars in the small New Jersey city where she worked. Around the time she turned twenty-three, she got tired of the scene. She decided it was time to get married and have children. One night she met Johnny. He spent the evening following her from one bar to the next. They started dating. He was good-looking, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. He was also loud and boisterous. He smoked pot. He got around by hitchhiking. It was 1969, and plenty of young people were doing the same things. She shrugged off any doubts she may have had. Johnny had chosen her. She was ready to be chosen, and that was that.

She would spend most of their thirty-five years together trying to get him to, as she put it, “be good.” She attended mass regularly and kept a strict workout schedule. She urged him to be more religious and take better care of himself. He shunned church, brought junk food into the house, and rarely exercised. He kept smoking pot. He got arrested for shoplifting. He was devoted to their son and loved his part-time work as a bus driver, even though it didn’t bring in a lot of money. Maria’s steady government job made her the family breadwinner. She was mad at him most of the time. Sex—which he seemed to want all the time—lost its appeal. She often endured it by fantasizing about other men.

When Maria was fifty-nine, Johnny died after a long bout with
cancer. Several months after she was widowed, she struck up a conversation with Scott, a clerk she knew at a sporting-goods store she frequented. She found out that they went to the same church. “I thought, ‘I could really get along with this guy,’” she said. “He seemed so nice, and I wouldn’t have to worry about how to convince him to be different.”

After a few more chats, she got up the nerve to ask Scott to go to Barnes & Noble with her. They browsed and talked. He told her that after he’d had a heart attack twelve years earlier, he’d changed his life completely. He stopped drinking and lost weight. He became so devout that he decided to be celibate until he found the right woman and married her. He’d been a bachelor all his life. All this made him thrillingly appropriate as a mate, though she worried that he might be holding out for a younger woman he could have children with. She was a decade older than he was. “The chances of me at this age finding somebody unmarried who is Catholic, interested in working out, and I’m attracted to him on top of it all? The chances of getting somebody better than that? Forget about it. I didn’t think I would find anybody else who would be such a great match,” she said.

For six months, they saw each other regularly. She usually initiated their outings. “I thought I had to be doubly aggressive because this guy was so passive and shy,” she said. “I called him up. I thought, ‘This is great.’ It was a new experience for me to ask someone out. I was having the time of my life.”

Their physical relationship was limited to hugs. She didn’t want to have intercourse, but she wanted to be intimate with him. She mailed him a copy of a passage from one of her religious books about how it was morally wrong to have sex unless it was meant for procreation. It was her way of letting him know that she supported his decision to abstain, and that she planned to draw the line in the same place. He replied with a brief note:
Thanks for the material. I
hope you find what you’re looking for.
“In other words, a kiss-off,” Maria said.

She couldn’t accept it. She started to court him more ardently. “I thought, I never pursued a guy before in my life! And maybe that’s why I never got the guy I wanted.”

They continued to spend time together. She schemed about how she might make a pass at him. At home, she felt surrounded by memories of her late husband. It didn’t feel right to be with another man in the same space where she’d lived for so long with her husband. Eventually, she got up the nerve to take Scott down to the basement, where the presence of her husband didn’t loom as large. They fooled around. She felt aroused in a way she hadn’t since the beginning of her marriage.

The next time they met, in the café section of a local supermarket, Scott was quiet and evasive. It was a warm fall afternoon, so she suggested they sit outside for a while before they parted ways. She went inside the store first to get some food and use the restroom. When she went out to the picnic table, he was gone. She looked for him all over the store. Feeling bereft, she drove over to his house. They had finally gotten close, she thought. She wanted to be with him even more, and he had abandoned her. She found him reading on his front porch. They took a walk and talked about their relationship. She asked him if they could see each other exclusively. He responded by telling her that he had promised himself he wouldn’t do “wild things” anymore. He felt guilty about what had happened between them. She gradually realized he was letting her know that he didn’t want to be intimate with her again.

She didn’t contact him for four months. She cried so much she thought she was going crazy. “I thought, ‘I have to see Scott, because I have a feeling that will make me feel better.’”

She started going back to the sporting-goods store. She went
every Saturday afternoon for weeks. She lingered for hours to talk with him whenever he was in between customers. Every time she visited, she hoped he would ask her out, but he never did. One Saturday, she stopped by and found out from his coworker that he was going to be late that day. She did other errands. She kept checking back every hour or so to see if he had arrived. He never showed up. She was distraught about feeling so compulsive—and about the prospect that he might be avoiding her.

The following Sunday, she went to a later mass than usual. Scott was there. After she took communion, she walked up to him and shook his hand. She let herself look into his eyes for a few seconds, hoping for some sense of connection. His expression was blankly cordial. She went back to sit down next to her son. As the service ended, she tried to catch up with Scott, but he was out the door before she had a chance. She searched the parking lot for him and found his car. She saw him walking down the sloping lawn next to the church with a young woman in a miniskirt and heavy eyeliner. They were laughing together. The sight pained her. This was what he wanted, she thought—someone young enough to have children with. Then Scott caught sight of Maria. He turned around to walk in the opposite direction. She knew he didn’t want anything more to do with her.

WHAT WAS MARIA
chasing in this reticent bachelor? After spending so many years with a husband she was not compatible with, she wanted to be with someone who shared her values. She wanted a man she didn’t feel she had to chastise all the time. These aims got linked in her mind to Scott. She couldn’t imagine anyone else fitting the bill. And there was an even more important matter at stake. Her life had been marked irrevocably by the mandate that she wait for a man to “come to her” first. The man
who did wasn’t the right man for her. She had long berated herself for letting that happen.

In her widowhood, she had a chance to choose. Even though Scott broke her heart, the feeling of that momentary power remains indelible. “I’m glad I had the experience of being with the guy I was dreaming about,” she said. “It wasn’t right when I was married and having sex with my husband and really wanting to be in someone else’s arms. This time I liked being in public with the guy I was fantasizing about. Choosing him was the best part.”

It took her a long time to realize he wasn’t choosing her in return. The pride of having spent time with a man she really wanted is mingled with the pain of facing his rejection. “I did everything I could, assuming he’d fall in love with me,” she said. “I gave him too much. I didn’t leave him any room.”

Maria has come to understand that having choices in love doesn’t mean she has to pursue them so single-mindedly. She also doesn’t need to abandon the goal of real choice in relationships. She doesn’t need to go back to feeling like the young woman she was forty years ago, ready to hand her destiny to the next man who chooses her.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PSYCHIATRISTS
called obsession
la manie du doute—
the doubting madness—because for the obsessed person, no reassurance is ever enough. What this felt like for me: The question “Do you love me?” went on repeat in my brain and became too loud for me to pay attention to much else.