“Can you communicate?” he asks.
I say, “So far as I know, I’m pretty good at it.”
He says that’s critical to him. He asks if I’m independent. I say that I live alone and support myself (and cringe inwardly a bit at this, as I am more of a stray dog looking for a lap than an independent woman). I also say that I’ve been on my own since a young age, and that’s definitely true. He says that he has as well, coming over to the States from India and working his way up in the business world.
He keeps taking my hand and stroking it between his. While his hands are soft and his touch is soothing, his eyes burn. There are two forces in him, as there are in me: gentle and yet forceful, aloof and yet desperate. We savor the curries and give each other short rundowns of our previous relationships. I explain that I was deeply in love with a man who was so different from me that I ended up having to break off our engagement when I realized it would never work out in the long term. Hari describes being involved with a woman who was very intelligent and passionate but had a lot of trouble with him being away on business trips.
He looks at me. “How would you handle it if I had to go away for weeks at a time, or suddenly take off without warning?”
Oh dear. How do I feel about absences and being left? Bad first-date question for a borderline. I know I secured Taylor’s constant presence by camping at his house for years. Since he didn’t go anywhere, I could keep him close. “I guess I’m not happy when I’m dating someone and they’re always traveling,” I tell Hari.
“The reason I’m asking,” he lowers his voice, “is that my last girlfriend had a very difficult time with it. She’d call and beg me to come home when I was in the middle of important work overseas. She’d be so upset that when I got home, I had to spend days trying to convince her that I still loved her.” He shakes his head in bewilderment. “You can’t imagine what happened if I didn’t return her phone call right away.”
“I think I have an idea,” I say quietly. His ex sounds all too familiar to me—BPD familiar. How do I break it to him? And if I tell him, how do I then tell him about me? Oh, by the way, your psycho ex-girlfriend? I’ve got what she’s got. But don’t worry, I’m better. Just don’t ask my ex. He might tell you something else…
Hari wrings his hands. “One day, I called to say I’d be late coming home. Then my plane was delayed, and then it got stuck on the runway. When I got home, she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom. I ended up sitting on the bed for an hour trying to get her to come out, and when she finally did, her arms were covered with blood.” He looks up at the ceiling and breathes deeply. “Then she said, ‘Look what you made me do.’”
I take Hari’s hand. “There’s a reason she did this, but it’s not about you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She probably has borderline personality disorder.” I run through the symptoms with him and he nods at each. She’s nine for nine, alright.
“Do you know her?” Hari looks baffled.
“Well…in a sense.” Here is a moment when being a borderline “in recovery,” as I now construct myself, can make for confusion. If I tell him that his ex has BPD and that I also have it, he’s going to run for the hills. If I don’t say anything and we get involved, it’s a setup for both of us, because I’m still like his ex, just more in control of myself and more aware of what I struggle with.
I take a deep breath. “This is probably going to freak you out, but I know what happened with her because I have the same problem, only I’ve learned how to manage a lot of my symptoms.”
Hari remains still for a moment, then sits back in his chair. It’s like he’s backing away from me, but the chair is as far as he can get. I hurry to add that I’m not like his ex in many ways, that I’ve gotten treatment for BPD.
“Is it gone?” he asks. “Are you normal now?”
I think about everything that’s gone on in the past few months and know, deep down, that I’m not cured. I still have this thing, even as I also believe that I don’t. It’s that dialectic Ethan first saw within me. I both have and do not have BPD.
“No, I still deal with it,” I finally say. “Just better than most people.”
“What if I never called you again?” Hari asks. I’m sure he’s afraid that if he says the wrong thing, I’m going to retreat to the bathroom with my cutlery. I assure him that I can live with it. I don’t hurt myself anymore, and I try mightily not to hurt anyone else, either.
“You are so beautiful,” he says. “I don’t know what to do. I would like to see you again, but only if you can assure me that this won’t happen. I can’t go through another experience like that. It….” He can’t finish the sentence.
“I know,” I say. “I don’t want to go back there either.”
When Hari drops me off at my place, he kisses me at the door and we hold each other. I’m thinking that it was a good first date, and I can’t believe I actually outed myself without driving the person away or going into too many gory details. It probably wasn’t a good idea to kiss, however, because after a long hug Hari asks if I have time for a cup of tea. I agree that it would be nice to relax together for a while—which leads to more kissing in my apartment and then a tussle on my couch when I realize he’s going for my underwear. I pull back. “Let’s slow down.”
Hari asks if I’ve ever been with a dark-skinned man before. I don’t answer, since he’s probably the eleventh ethnicity I’ve locked bodies with. He begins to stroke my legs, and I feel myself weakening again in the hold of his muscled arms and deep kisses. Without warning, he bends down.
“Wait,” I say.
“I just want to taste you.”
“Really, wait.” I try to pull his head up, but he’s planted himself between my thighs.
Now there are two battles going on: My body is responding to a lover and I want him to keep going, especially because my clitoris is having feelings that it hasn’t had in a long time. But I’m also no longer feeling safe. What really disturbs me is that this conflict and my arousal are simultaneous. I’m starting to get off on the struggle. While Hari tries to reach my most delicate point, I alternately lift my head and say, “I don’t think this is a good idea,” and then fall back, writhing.
“Enough,” I finally declare. I roll over and stand up.
“It seems to me you were enjoying that.”
I pick up his coat from the kitchen chair and hold it out. “I think you should leave now.” He takes it and pulls out his car keys. And only at this minute do I realize that I don’t know his last name, what company he owns, or anything about him, really. He’s just a handsome man who complimented me, and I took him home because I’m lonely.
Ethan and I discuss the episode at our next session. He wants to know what I feel now. It’s totally cliché, but I feel guilty and ashamed. If I hadn’t taken Hari home, hadn’t been so desperate for attention, I could have prevented this whole thing. Ethan reminds me that I’m not entirely capable of controlling the environment and that I did the best I could.
“But that’s not the end of it. I was freaked out and aroused. I resisted him, but that made me more wet. And after he left” (how I hate telling Ethan these things), “afterward, I, you know, was able to get myself off.” I don’t admit that I also fantasized about Hari fucking me.
Ethan is nonplussed. “Why wouldn’t you be? He made you feel good on some level, even if you ultimately had different goals.”
“Well… But…”
“It’s possible to have contradictory feelings at the same time, just as it is to have opposing viewpoints. Think again of the dialectic. You want and you don’t want. Both are true.”
We sit in silence and I feel shame bubbling up. Revealing my sex life to Ethan is difficult. When I tell him these things, I’m constantly worried that he’s thinking the worst of me. So far my sex life has been focused on Taylor and our issues; Ethan hasn’t witnessed me freelancing full force, and hasn’t seen how quickly I can get into troubl
e. When I tell him how I worry that he may be judging me, he asks if he’s ever given me any reason to think he’s negatively judging me. I admit that, for all these years, he hasn’t. But here’s the difficulty with validation and acceptance: People can say anything, but what goes on in their hearts and minds is ultimately unknowable, as is any state of another person’s mind. How do you confirm love or devotion? In exposing myself to Ethan, I’m always looking for some undercurrent that will reflect back how fucked-up I am. I wonder if that’s why he still so rarely uses the word “borderline,” to avoid adding to my arsenal of self-flagellation. After we review my date with Hari, Ethan asks me, just as he did years earlier, what I want from a man, a partner, or even a first date. And again, this intense conflict arises within me: I want someone gentle and strong to win me over, slowly and skillfully, and to not lose myself along the way. And yet I also want to be taken, broken open and entered, so that in the end I am no longer myself but lost in someone else. How do you resolve that dialectic?
Sometimes it feels like this must be a psychiatric experiment: How long can the borderline do online dating without losing her little mind? The process is grueling, the results demoralizing. I am hooked as quickly as I was the last time, up until I met Taylor. In an hour, my entire life shrinks, my fate hanging on an email exchange—from a stranger! With Taylor, at least, I feared rejection from a concrete, complex human I had a real relationship with. Now my attachments are fixated on chimeras, ghosts on a screen, and I’m being tortured by my own projections. There’s no way I can convince myself that these limited exchanges and superficial dates justify the life-and-death gravity I’m feeling, and yet those feelings persist. I’m strung out on Internet dating, and I haven’t even gotten laid. Men who email me intensely for days disappear without a trace. I go on a date with a cute Buddhist guy and he baits me with the hope of sex, then plays cat and mouse for two weeks until I want to stalk him and have my way with him in a dark alley. Should I even be playing with this stuff? I tell my mom about my frustrations, and, not for the first time, she suggests that I join the Appalachian Hiking Club. (Which, I hear from one of my coworkers, is glutted with single women hiking Mt. Monadnock like packs of hungry she-wolves. Apparently, men just go to bars when they get lonely. Women go to lectures and join hiking clubs.)
At least once a day, the longing for Taylor washes over me like a tide, leaving pieces of my need stranded on the shoreline and exposed. I gather the detritus and heave it all back into the Internet, hoping something might get hooked. If it weren’t for Alexis, I’d have no more ties to my Buddhist practice. When she observes how lost I’m becoming, she once again tells me to come to her Sangha. Actually, she tells me to cut the shit, then tells me to come to her Sangha—direct as always, but it doesn’t penetrate.
I spend close to a month having chaste dates with a divorced man. As it turns out, his ex-wife has BPD. (Are they finding me, or am I finding them?) Then he ends it, explaining I remind him too much of his ex. For a couple of weeks, I see a man with OCD, and then I spend a couple more weeks dating a man with an anxiety disorder. It’s like I’m forming my own little mental health support group. So far I haven’t slept with anyone—not until Tony. Like Taylor, he rides a motorcycle and is a computer geek, but that’s where the resemblances end. In fact, he’s so completely inappropriate that I can’t tell Alexis about him because she’d scream at me. Not only does he ride his motorcycle, with me on it, through freeway traffic at 130 miles per hour, he also drinks daily and actually makes a pot deal in the middle of our second date. I sleep with him that night, numb and clinging to him like a child. When he doesn’t contact me for another date, I’m devastated. This is such insanity. It’s like I’ve been working on a broken car for years, and now that I’ve finally gotten all of the parts working, the transmission goes.
“You’re grasping,” Alexis tells me. “You’re caught in the vicious cycle of samsara. Put all of your sexual energy into Dharma practice and you’ll be like a rocket—you’ll shoot toward enlightenment in no time.”
But what does that mean? I’ve lost sight of how Buddhism can relieve my suffering. I can’t see beyond the feelings that sweep me up from minute to minute: hope, frustration, despair, desire, anger. I call or email Alexis every day now so that someone knows what’s going on, because I’m starting to scare myself. I even start sitting in front of my shrine more regularly, trying to connect my mind to Rinpoche’s, way out in Nepal. Many of my parts are clamoring that I need to put the brakes on this sexual searching, but every day while I’m at work, every night at home, I sit at the shrine of the computer, hypnotized by the collective mirage of need.
Amidst this chaos, spring has sprung once again, replete with flowers in the manicured Cambridge gardens and students in shorts. I go to work, answer the phones, and try not to be a bad Buddhist. But I am, feverishly checking my emails and scanning profiles. Phone calls, dates, and heartbreak. I’m exhausted. It’s like I’ve been in one of those survival TV shows for too long, running obstacle courses, trying to make fire from horsehair and three donuts, except here my endurance is measured not in physical stamina but in my emotional capacity to want, to have, and to lose—intensely and repeatedly. It’s a gauntlet of desire and rejection, possibilities and refusals. It is, as Buddhism says, the essence of “Samsara”—the endless cycle of grasping that keeps us bound in a state of suffering.
How many days of my life have I spent focusing on the attention of men, no matter how questionable that attention may be? I’ve devoted endless hours to craving touch, reeling from its reverberations, gnawing on its absence, and chasing after it again. It’s true that I’m not as devastated by all of this as I used to be. I have to keep reminding myself of this. Whatever is happening with my loneliness and sexuality now is emerging because I’m somehow ready to be exposed and to resolve it. Even in this insanity there is a process: I go under and feel like I’m drowning, but now I can open my eyes underwater. I can see the distortions when I’m immersed. As in drowning, a moment underwater can feel like an eternity, with no hope for escape. But I continue to find the strength to rise up through the water and eventually climb out and get back on my feet.
All of this insight is great, but it doesn’t take away my Match account. In fact, I start joining other sites when I realize there are more options out there: Chemistry.com, eHarmony, Yahoo! Personals, and Nerve.com. I don’t mention this to Ethan; I know it’s excessive, as is the time I spend creating and revising my profiles. I have five now and each is unique—you might even say, unrecognizable from the others. I don’t want people to see that I’m so desperate that I’ve signed up on every dating site on the Internet, so I use different pictures for each and emphasize different aspects of myself. A little more artsy and edgy here, a little more stable and conservative there. It’s all me, I reason, depending on the day. And I’ve never been short on contradictions: The Buddhist desires to be free of all this attachment. The fertile woman wants to get fucked. The younger parts want to be nurtured. The borderline wants security at any cost.
On Nerve, the raciest of the dating sites, I receive an email from Larry, an older man with a boilerplate ad: likes long walks, the ocean, and movies. He says he’s a doctor, and there are pictures of him on a boat, on a horse, and standing next to his Mercedes, which I find really tacky. There’s no reason to respond to him except that he writes, as an introduction, “I think your arms are really sexy.” This stumps me. I look at my Nerve profile. I only put up one picture, and I’m just sitting at my desk in jeans and a tank top. I’ve been working out, but not that much. I write back and ask why. He replies, “Your arms—covered with hair—the most beautiful quality a woman can have.”
I’ve never met a hair fetishist, but I’m about to. I tell Alexis about him when we meet at Starbucks for coffee.
“He has a hair fetish?!”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. I’m tired of shaving half my body just to feel normal.”
“Okay, listen
,” Alexis says. “Just because he gets off on body hair doesn’t mean you should go on a date with him.”
“But do you know how rare these men are?”
“Go to Germany!” Alexis throws her napkin at me. “I thought you said you wanted a relationship.”
“Well… maybe it could lead to one.”
“That’s not the way things work.”
How is it that, after all of the emotional grief I suffered due to Alexis, now she’s giving me relationship advice?
I bring up the subject with Ethan at our next session. I’ve given this man my phone number now, and half regret it. Ethan tells me I don’t have to do anything. He suggests that if it doesn’t feel right, I should just put the date off and wait a couple of days. Put off a date with a mysterious man who in his latest email said he’d like to worship my body with his mouth? As I drive away from my session, my cell phone rings and I answer it without thinking. A deep, resonant voice asks for me. It’s him—hair fetish man. Before I can figure out what I want or what to say, he asks, as though we’ve known each other for years, what I prefer: a tongue right on my clit, or being licked up and down along the sides? I almost go off the road.
I tell him that’s a bit too private to discuss with him, as though I’m offended. Yet I’m not. A man who likes hair and wants that kind of information definitely has my interest. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a long-term thing. Everyone deserves to have every inch of their body worshipped. That’s why, two days later, I end up driving an hour south to meet Larry at his house. He says he has a pool and that he’ll make us brunch. And he begs me not to shave.
I know this is a hookup. From the time I get into my car all showered and unshaved to when I pull up in front of a large colonial in a suburb I’ve never visited, it’s just lust that’s bringing me here—pure desire. The man who answers the door is shirtless and overly tanned, and handsome but reeking of a cologne that immediately causes my eyes to tear up. He extends his hand in greeting, and when I reach out to shake it he pulls me to his chest and tilts my head back to kiss the length of my neck. We step into the foyer and he murmurs, “I’ve been waiting all day for this.” I’d tell him it’s only eleven in the morning, but I can’t because he’s kissing me passionately. Too passionately. I’m reminded of Hari’s forcefulness, and once again those conflicting desires rise up. He pulls me toward an open living room, and I barely have time to look around. All of this is happening too fast, and as I realize that, all of the lust that propelled me to this point evaporates. It only takes a second. Now I’m completely dissociated, and completely outside the embrace.
Buddha and the Borderline Page 25