by Michelle Tea
I understood the voice my friends were speaking of. Not only did Fake Johnny Depp talk about his breakfast selection as if it were the most precious, even spiritual moment of his day—he talked about everything like that. The fuzzy kangaroo paw he was planting in his garden. The Roland Barthes essay he’d read while eating his poached eggs and miso in said kangaroo paw garden. He was a recent graduate of Oberlin, and he used the word praxis in daily conversation. Frequently I had to ask Fake Johnny Depp what he had just said, ask him to repeat it in the language of the common American English speaker. Because I was in limerence, overdosing on crush chemicals, I thought all this shit was adorable. I liked his swingy “mushroom hairdo,” as a concerned friend unkindly called it. I was ready to go shack up with him in a yurt in the forests of Maine, so that he could apprentice to an obscure elderly artist whose hand-carved wooden bowls had garnered much praise on the artisanal hand-carved wooden bowl scene. Everything I had worked for—my writing career, the nonprofit literary organization I directed, my home in San Francisco—I would have thrown away for this guy. All because I loved his swingy mushroom hairdo and the way he flung me around in the sack.
Fake Johnny Depp was, according to my best amateur research in the DSM, suffering from borderline personality disorder, so thankfully the relationship was doomed. People with borderline personality disorder—or, as I like to cheerfully call it, the beeps—are dangerously easy to fall into limerence with, because their signature behavior of delusional mania looks a lot like the throes of first love. They’re like a parasitical mimic, taking on the characteristics of love but actually burrowing into your psyche and laying eggs there—eggs that will hatch and drive you mad! “What has happened to my awesome true love affair?!” I asked myself, sinking deeper and deeper into the sort of psychotic fighting that kept us up until five a.m., forcing me to cancel plans because I was so sleep deprived and dehydrated from sobbing. I’d lie to my friends about my canceled plans, because I didn’t want them to know I’d been up all night fighting with Fake Johnny Depp, because they already didn’t like him very much (note: when your friends don’t like your date, it’s a red flag) and I wanted everybody to get along. But lying about my relationship to my friends made me feel ashamed and low-self-esteem-y, like I was in an abusive relationship. And I started to wonder: Am I in an abusive relationship? Because even though Fake Johnny Depp’s torments were never physical, they made me feel so completely unhinged that I actually hit myself. Nothing slams the self-esteem like hitting your own freaking self. This was the cycle of violence I found myself in, due in no small part to the heady effects of limerence upon my delicate system.
When Fake Johnny Depp ended our brief and volatile affair to take up with a trust fund princess who paid his way to Africa, I was startled to find myself relieved. As I walked away from his apartment, the thought He’s not my problem anymore rang through my head, and I actually felt sorry for the girl he’d newly attached himself to. He soon left her for one of his grad school professors, who paid his passage to Iceland, then left her for a host of others, on and on; he’s currently swindling a poor sod who is footing the bills while Fake Johnny Depp fake-farms a plot of land out in Red Hook, like Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid at Versailles.
“What was I thinking?” I gasped to Lee. “He’s clearly so crazy. Nobody liked him. We fought all the time and I can’t even tell you one thing we fought about.”
“Was the sex good?” Lee inquired.
“Yes.”
“Well, there you go. Good sex does something to your brain chemicals.” And so my BGB hipped me to the concept of limerence. Prone to making the occasional cameo at support groups for sex and love addicts, Lee, too, was particularly sensitive to the effects of limerence on his common sense. “You gotta watch out, girl,” he warned.
“What am I supposed to do, never have sex again?” I wailed dramatically.
“One step at a time.”
I wish that Fake Johnny Depp—clearly a Sex Only person, if not an Avoid Completely person— was the first and last time I confused lust with love and allowed an unsuitable paramour to take up space in my heart and my head. But it takes a while to understand what’s wrong with you, and even after you’ve figured it out, it takes a while to care, so I continued dating and sleeping with hotties who were less than Marriage Material.
Take, for example, my yearlong intrigue with a recovering heroin addict living on probation and opiate blockers in her mother’s sewing room on the other side of the country. It took us a long time to meet in person, as various issues—say, a court case for driving the getaway car for a grocery store holdup with a dirty syringe—got in the way of her coming to visit me. Because of the distance (and the whole sleeping on a twin bed in her mother’s house thing), visiting her seemed out of the question. But goshdarnnit I am plucky and resourceful, and a romantic who was apparently experiencing the effects of the infatuation chemical norepinephrine, which makes you do batshit crazy things for “love.” Sadly, experiencing obstacles in love actually increases dopamine. Cruel world!
When I arrived in upstate New York to visit Internet Girlfriend, her mother was not thrilled to meet me, a thirtysomething, heavily tattooed woman from California, but she endured it the way she had endured the traumatizing years of her daughter’s drug addiction—years that weren’t actually that long ago. However, after she walked in on us having sex to a Dario Argento movie on the twin bed, I decided we had to leave the nest and bought her a bus ticket to stay with me at a friend’s house in the city. Internet Girlfriend didn’t like taking my money; she even tried to sell her opiate blockers to junkies at the bus station. I sent Tali a text message from the bus station, seated on a plastic chair near a losing pile of scratch tickets while IG was off hustling the hustlers. Is it nice or not nice that the recovering junkie is trying to sell her opiate blockers to heroin addicts at a bus station? Tali texted back quickly: Oh girl. What are you doing?
I only ever saw Internet Girlfriend in person once after that visit, but the double-whammy dopamine punch of sext messages (text messages + dirty talk = double dopamine!) kept me in and out of limerence for a solid year. At the end of that year, I broke up with her in an epically long text message while simultaneously flipping through Vogue and eating Thanksgiving leftovers. The more I reflected on the apocalypse that was the Internet Girlfriend Affair, the more it revealed itself to be a treasure trove of brand new Rules for Love—what not to date. Don’t date people who sell pills in bus stations. Don’t date people who you know in your gut are lying to you all the time, whose stories are so shady you start to hope they are lying to you. Don’t date people whose idea of a good tattoo is an evil, fanged carrot eating a bunny. Not to be a snob, but maybe no hooking up with people who live with their parents. No long-distance relationships. (I know there are lots of long-distance love stories out there; I’ve seen them on TV talk shows and commercials for dating Web sites. But these are my Rules for Love, and for me, if I’m not in the same city as someone, I can’t experience real-time hangouts, free of the wild dopamine stimulants of travel and deprivation.) Also, Internet Girlfriend was twenty-five years old. There is a saying among recovering addicts that your emotional maturity freezes at the age you start abusing your drug of choice, and that you don’t start growing again until you get sober. I’ve found this to be true, which means at that point, though I was thirty-seven years old, I was emotionally twenty-five years old. And the more I fooled around with and dated young people, the more I found them to be, well, young. In an annoying way. I didn’t want to hang around while they figured out the significant life lessons I knew were right around the corner. I didn’t want to wait for them to understand—no, really understand—that, for better or worse, I was not their mother. And I didn’t want them to grow up and out of the dynamics we’d established. They’d still be young and full of life and lust for the wild world of dating, but as I got older, I realized that if I had anything to say ab
out it, this would be my last time on the market. So I turned in my cougar card, as my new Rules for Love stipulated that the younger generations were off-limits for dating.
I was beginning to realize that having off-the-rails sexual chemistry is not only not necessary for a stable relationship; the off-the-rails-ness of it is actually detrimental. Dopamine isn’t the only chemical in your relationship chemistry kit. There are other, sweeter chemicals that start surging as the dopamine lightens up, chemicals that facilitate attachment and affection and maybe actual true love. So I made another Rule for Love: no more sex addicts. In fact, no addicts who don’t have at least three years sober in a reputable recovery program. Just at the beginning stages of staying clean from heroin, Internet Girlfriend couldn’t even see how she was out of her brain with all the other ways you can get yourself high. I was only beginning to understand it myself. For a little while, I didn’t want to understand it. But then I really, really did.
A funny thing happens when you start implementing standards in your romantic life—they grow. As I started to get a handle on my dopamine issues, I got bored with sleeping around with sexy losers. In my Rules for Love, dates do friendly-type things for one another, not leave their dates to walk home after a hot make-out on the roof of a perfectly functioning automobile (true story). I felt a strange new pride in myself for even recognizing this. Having standards was so new and exciting, I swear I was getting dopamine off it.
My Rules for Love continued to morph into actual standards. In recovery circles you are encouraged to make a sort of wish list detailing all the qualities you would like your next beloved to possess. They can be serious, crucial, and deep—I want someone who communicates without yelling; someone who has a spiritual practice; someone who doesn’t hate their mom. They can also be shallow, or superficial—I want someone smoking hot; I want someone who has their own apartment; I want someone who makes more money than I do. Some parts of the list are deal breakers—no drug addicts. Some aren’t—I guess the person doesn’t need to have a car, as long as they have a driver’s license, because I don’t. I kept my list in a little notebook, adding to it as I made my way through broken-down love affairs. No recent breakups, I wrote after the crappy experience of being someone else’s rebound. After one fling left me with a killer sinus infection, I wrote No smokers. I’m a codependent smoker. If my date smokes, I’ll smoke. Smoking is awesome in your twenties, but frankly, any older than that and you just look slavish and weak willed (or, even worse, like you’re desperate to stay in your twenties).
One standard that took me a while to wake up to was no depressed people. It was tricky in many ways, the deepest being that depressed people were my type, and for a long time I didn’t even know it. Depression is like a haze, a cloud or an aura that surrounds certain people. It prickles my skin—a slight anxiety, an attraction-repulsion combo that drives me sickly toward them. It’s in the folds of their faces, no matter how youthful they may still be. It’s in the slump of their shoulders. For so long I thought it was emotional depth, a refined sensitivity that had left them wounded. Chalk it up to having a depressed dad who came home from his long nights at the labor union full of bitter cynicism about the world. If he was my default romantic ideal, I was fucked. There was a bit of opposites-attract going on, too; though I also suffered from depression, mine was of the weepy, bleeding-heart variety. The depressives I sought were more hard-hearted, sarcastic. Their humor was a biting sort that kept me on my toes. I didn’t know if I liked it or not, but I wanted to like it. I also, in my bleeding-heart way, wanted to take care of and ultimately cure my depressed lovers. It’s all so textbook it grosses me out, but it’s real.
For instance, take the boyfriend who took me on a cruise, on a yacht that sailed down the fucking French Riviera. I thought this gentleman was a Dating person, with his advanced age, regular income, and civilized manner. The ship was tipped with a row of stunning sails, and it slunk through the deep blue waters, docking alongside ancient castles whose beaches we were invited to splash upon. I could not believe my good fortune; I thought it would be the time of my life. Instead, I spent my days running bow to stern, dashing into bathrooms to cry tears of anxiety and disappointment. My moody boyfriend was no fun to be on a luxury cruise with. He was snippy and mean, a power grouch. Had he been like this before the cruise? Of course he had. Had his moods already raised the red flags of anxiety in my belly countless times? Yep. Did I ignore them always? Of course I did. Did this guy come with a list of prior offenses well known to me, a strand of excellent girls whom he’d treated carelessly, breaking their hearts? Yup. Did I think none of this would happen to me, that I was somehow different? Uh-huh. Can I even believe I fell into such a classic lady relationship trap? At this point, yes. Yes, I can believe it.
By the time the ship docked in Nice I was such a nervous wreck, all I could do was frantically e-mail my friends back in the States, and try to wring some soothing chemicals out of my brain by buying a way-too-expensive Isabel Marant sweater with round shoulder pads, a trend that would pass by the time I returned home. Even after the most miserable experience of my life, I still thought if my date would just open his heart to me we could be happy together. But depression is a disease as surely as alcoholism or cirrhosis of the liver. You can’t cure it by dating a happy person. All that happens is the happy person gets depressed, too. The week we returned from our miserable vacation he broke up with me, dodging my desperate seduction attempt by claiming to be sick with diarrhea.
Rebels without causes look sexy and romantic when they and you are young, but as you get older and wiser it all just looks like mental health issues. Cruise Dude had me always walking on eggshells, obsessing over what I did and didn’t say because I didn’t want to sound stupid, because I was dating someone mean enough to think I could even say something stupid. Relationships like these siphon your self-esteem. I left my time with Cruise Dude rattled by how I’d once again let a lousy romance linger long enough to eat at my sense of self. Freshly single, with that extra time on my hands, I delved into some extreme self-care.
My self-care regimen postcruise looked like this: a sliding-scale therapist to hash it out with; a couple of 12-step traditions to keep me scribbling in notebooks and forging a relationship with that mysterious higher power (aka Stevie Nicks); going to the gym and outrunning my anxiety on the elliptical machine, taking advantage of the free yoga classes when possible; a shabby on-again, off-again relationship with the Zen Center down the street, bingeing on inspiring dharma talks and then not even bothering to attempt a pathetic five-minute meditation from the comfort of my own home. Despite these noble efforts, the hoopla with Cruise Dude left me at a new low. Normally, I’d brush myself off and get back on the mechanical bull, but now the dating world looked über-pathetic and depressing. If the best indicator of the future is the past (yet another 12-step aphorism), then all I had to look forward to was more head-fucking losers. Try as I might—and I had been trying, hadn’t I?—I was going to keep trusting my heart to the wrong cad.
If the elliptical machine, the serenity prayer, and the budget therapist weren’t cutting it anymore, it was time for the hard stuff. I began a course of psych meds—Lexapro samples from the free clinic to start, a switch to Celexa when I learned the Lexapro was too pricey, and then a final downgrade to a generic Celexa called Citalopram that did what no amount of booze or wild sex or luv-struck limerence (or the lotus position or downward dog) had ever done: It evened me out and calmed me down, helping me feel, for the first time in my life, normal, content. My serotonin factory was working, and I could feel the soothing, organizing effects. I wasn’t looking for dopamine in all the wrong places. I felt self-contained—serene, even. The longer the drug was in my system, the more the love affairs in my past looked like what they were—insanity. They were fun, for sure, and I don’t wish them away. Part of me likes that I am (or was) the kind of person down for the thrill of chasing a sordid tryst into a New Englan
d sewing room against a backdrop of psychedelic sixties Italian horror movies. It’s like being the kind of person who would run away with the circus. These dates were my circus. But it was time to stop giving my energy to clowns.
The meds were taking effect, brightening my mood. With newfound conviction to pursue only Marriage Material, dating didn’t seem as scary. I had no idea who was out there, but I felt my optimism return. I’d always believed there was someone out there, someone whose standards for relationships mirrored mine, somebody capable of the same level of love and openness and kindness that I was. No more Sex Only, no more Dating. It would either be this dreamy Marriage Material or nothing at all.
A little less than a year after Cruise Dude I found myself at a fund-raising benefit for a mayoral candidate who, like nearly everyone I vote for, was too liberal to get elected, even in San Francisco. The event was a bust. I had been enlisted as a prize in a date auction, a practice I actually find humiliating and undignified, something I’d been asked to do a million times and always said no to. I don’t know what was different this time; maybe because I’d been asked by my favorite drag queen, someone I had a hard time refusing. Maybe because I wanted to help the flailing candidate. Maybe I was bored, or overly caffeinated. Regardless, that was how I found myself in a mostly empty Italian-American club, speckled with the light from the disco ball, seated in a folding chair at the far end of the room like a classic high school wallflower. The friends I had come with were talking to a sparse group of people I didn’t know. One of these strangers walked over. She was striking: pale skin and switchblade cheekbones, cheekbones sharp enough to have sliced the part into her perfect 1950s hairdo. Her eyes were the color of a pair of faded blue jeans, though the jeans she wore were actually quite nice, as were her jean jacket and spiffy shoes. She looked like she’d just walked through a hole in the space-time continuum, arriving in contemporary San Francisco from Oklahoma, 1959. In fact, she looked like she’d stepped out of the pages of my favorite book, The Outsiders—like Ponyboy and Sodapop’s cleaned-up brother. She looked good. She asked if the seat beside me was taken, and when I said no she folded her lanky frame into the metal chair and struck up a conversation. The questions she began to ask me were so . . . wholesome. How was my day. Was I having a good evening. Where was I from. What was it like there. I was charmed by her sweetness and confidence. She absolutely did not have that thing that usually drew me to the people I dated, the dark cloud I’d mistaken as deep or sexy for so long. That vibe was nowhere to be felt, and I found myself drawn to what I did feel off her—easy, good vibes. And happiness. She felt—she seemed—happy.