by Jeanne Safer
To be consumed by unsatisfiable desire is to live in an altered state of consciousness. You are in a private realm, saturated with intense emotion, both positive and negative, that seems impossible to describe accurately to an outsider. In retrospect, when the person around whom your world revolved—who has been your world—shrinks back to human proportions, it is often difficult to imagine what you ever saw there.2
Only when the folly and pain of a doomed romance is recollected in tranquility (a state not easy to attain, because the shame, the longing, and the bitter disappointment can persist long afterward) does the constricted perspective open up and insight and awareness become possible.
Adolescence and postadolescence are the prime times for hopeless love affairs. In most cases, maturity, experience, and exposure to those actually capable of reciprocal love eventually diminish the magnetic pull of the unavailable. The services of a good therapist considerably raise the odds of recognizing people willing and able to respond, as well as understanding why they never seemed to be around before (when in fact we were unable to notice them). Yet there are those who persist or even succumb to obsession for the first time later in life and still struggle to extricate themselves as the years go by. Some never escape from the imprisoning conviction that a cold or unattainable lover can be persuaded to become warm or attainable if they only discover the key.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM
Maggie Clark is one of the most accomplished women I know. An adept public speaker at sixty-three who appears regularly in the media, she heads a major accounting firm in partnership with her husband of forty years. She has a loyal and sensitive nature as well as business savvy and good judgment. I knew that she also had an insecure side, but I had no idea of the depths of desperation and inadequacy that had engulfed her in her youth until we spoke about the college boyfriend—if he could even be called that—whom she worshipped and who treated her with appalling callousness. She described their relationship with far more contempt, clarity, and candor than she felt at the time.
To my surprise, Maggie, whose demeanor is usually demure, spoke in a tone more appropriate at a raunchy bachelorette party about this man’s physical attributes and how downcast she was to discover that they were mostly for show. “He had a hot body and a little green sports car,” she said, “but the action was never as good as the anticipation.” This “sexy, smart” acquaintance of her brother’s was a philosophy major “with a basketball player’s build—tall, lean, and well muscled,” she recalled, still savoring the image years later. Her condescension was a later-life corrective—an exorcism, really—of the overpowering desire she had felt for him, as well as her retribution for the humiliating treatment she had tolerated from him.
Even more compelling than his gorgeous physique was his penchant for risk taking. “He announced proudly, ‘I fasted for three days to see what it would do to me,’ and I was so impressed,” she recalled. “I put him on a pedestal. He seemed so exciting and seductive when I was nineteen; I was smitten. I worked hard to make the reality match the fantasy.”
Maggie was looking for a man to look up to, and this one seemed to fit the job description. At the time, she was trying frantically to convince herself that his inside was worthy of his outside, contrasting herself to him and finding herself wanting. Her painful awareness of her own timidity caused her to mistake foolhardiness (of which the fasting stunt was one of the early warning signals) for courage and character, and confirmed his superiority and his allure in her eyes. He was someone to idealize and to emulate, her passport to adventure and personal growth. On the surface, he seemed so bold, so strong, so in control, as narcissists often do to those less enamored of themselves.
Maggie’s adoration of her Adonis and her anxiety about losing him led her to put herself at his disposal without complaint. “I wanted so desperately to be with him for an hour that I would have done anything,” she said—adding that she had never told a living soul about her behavior. “He would see me when he deigned to,” she said, still embarrassed and offended by the memory. “I kept thinking that if I were a little bit sexier or smarter myself, and if I were just good or adoring enough, he’d want to be more involved with me. I could never cross him or object to anything he did; I felt so tentative—I didn’t have good self-esteem then.” She longed to be like him, and to be chosen by him was a way to bask in reflected glory before she had any of her own.
She was not, however, the only one who had noticed his charms. “This was the seventies—he lived in a group house, and there was another woman living there. I was annoyed because she had access.” He didn’t have to bestir himself; Maggie had to make all the effort in order to get even a crumb of attention from him. “I was always the one to call him,” she said. The very fact that her rival had the upper hand because she was more conveniently located should have made it clear to Maggie that women were interchangeable to him, but instead, it made her work even harder to attract him.
Maggie was a psychology major, and she referred to a concept from learning theory to explain the tenacity of her own behavior and his hold on her. “He showed just enough interest in me for it to be intermittent reinforcement,” she said. Intermittent reinforcement, also known as partial reinforcement, describes a paradoxical phenomenon observed in experimental subjects: they learn best and retain what they learn the longest when the rewards for correct responses are unpredictable. This principle is often applied to human motivation. It is one partial explanation for Maggie’s chronic subservient behavior. She doggedly persisted in making herself available to the man she wanted when he felt like seeing her, even though she felt bad about doing so, because sometimes it worked and he seemed to respond to her.
This impassioned young woman seethed with suppressed resentment about her inconsistent beloved’s insensitive behavior toward her, but she could not let herself acknowledge the selfishness and contempt that underlay it. For months, she continued to pursue and to idealize him, hoping to win his favor. Her eyes were finally opened one night when his true character was revealed in a way that even she could not justify or ignore.
“I had come to his house to stay overnight with him,” she told me, “but instead of spending time alone with me, he took me downstairs where his housemates were shooting heroin and said, ‘I want to try this.’” This was an experiment of his that did not seem the least bit glamorous or admirable to her, but she could not protest. As repelled and horrified as she was, she stayed riveted to the spot; she still needed to impress him. The scene was shocking and sad to hear about, even forty-four years afterward. “I sat there trying very hard to be cool, watching him put a needle in his arm. I felt I didn’t matter enough. I could show up, but he would do what he felt like doing, anyway; this was always the deal. He never changed his routine for me.” Mainlining heroin in her presence rather than giving her his attention went far beyond ordinary boorishness. Even in extremis, she felt inadequate in his eyes, obliged to prove to him that she was sophisticated and game for anything.
Then his behavior became even worse. When he was finally ready to go to bed—he was still high at the time—he went upstairs with her and coolly proposed yet another experiment to add to his catalog of experiences: “Let’s try anal sex.”
His timing and his attitude, rather than the specific request, left her aghast and brought her to her senses. “I like to think that his shooting up would have been enough to end it for me—that on reflection I would have drawn the right conclusions—but it wouldn’t have been,” she admitted. “I’d have excused it, talked myself into tolerating it, tried to prove my sophistication. But this was too much.” The one-two punch finally jolted her out of her fantasy and showed her the ugly truth about his character. “The first round was hard drugs, but wanting to use me sexually on top of that was totally over the line. He had no consideration for me or my feelings—he was completely into himself and just wanted to try new things. That was the worst, and it put everything in perspective for me.
It became so crystal clear that this guy is a shithead, a fuckhead, and a jerk.”
She flatly refused; it was the first time she had refused him anything. She spent the rest of the night on the couch by herself. Then she left in the morning, never to return. True to form, he did not even bother to call her afterward, or ever again, and their affair ended abruptly.
Maggie explained what had most appalled her about how he acted on their final night together. “If he cared about me at all, he wouldn’t experiment with narcotics while I was staying over, and he wouldn’t treat me like garbage”—a low bar indeed. “His behavior passed beyond the point of disrespectful; the sexual transgression was the end. It was obvious then that he didn’t respect me or love me, that he didn’t really even like me.”
In fact, she was giving this man more credit than he deserved. It wasn’t just that he didn’t respect, love, or like her; she did not exist for him as a person with feelings of her own worthy of the slightest consideration. She was just another novelty, something on his checklist. Her body and a syringe full of heroin were identical in his eyes, both objects to be used for his pleasure or edification however and whenever he saw fit. She meant nothing to him, and she finally realized that this was not because she was worth nothing, but because he could feel nothing. When his naked coldness was revealed to her, her illusions shattered, and the thrill was gone. She never again allowed herself to be treated this way by a man. Just as a brush with the law can scare a person straight, a brush with a pathological narcissist amid the right conjunction of disasters can scare a person sane.
* * *
What drew this tender, thoughtful, and highly intelligent young woman to such a man? The fervor of her physical description, even decades afterward, and the blind, self-obliterating nature of her surrender to him were the keys; they pointed to her past.
Maggie’s sometime boyfriend was a malign caricature of her father, to whom he bore a striking resemblance both physically and mentally. “He looked a little bit like my dad, who also had a beautiful body at that age,” she confirmed. Maggie’s father had been a minor-league baseball player and a spectacular physical specimen, as well as a daredevil in his youth, and he too had a tyrannical streak. Maggie’s mother, whom he’d swept off her feet when she was a teenager, married him at nineteen, the same age her daughter was when she fell for her athletic philosophy major. Both men called the shots with everyone in their lives. Maggie’s self-effacing mother spent her life under her husband’s thumb, doing his bidding. The entire family catered to his whims and feared his wrath, but he also had a generous, principled side, which his young stand-in conspicuously lacked. Seeing her parents’ relationship and being bullied by her father as her mother also was predisposed Maggie to submerge her own needs and to be attracted to a man who would dominate her and who would confirm her conviction of her own inadequacy.
Why didn’t living with her father and seeing the toll it took on her make Maggie run from a man who so resembled him? Her experience of her father was not consistently awful enough to prevent her from being drawn to someone like him—at least when she was young and insecure. Her identification with her mother and their close relationship also played a role in her choice. The unconscious urge to repeat problematic relationships from the past is both potent and insidious; our history is always alive within us and affects us our entire lives. The sexual and emotional magnetism that the man she chose exerted over her seduced her and overrode any rational objections she might have had.
Her father, like his look-alike, belittled the women in his life and did what he wanted when he wanted—although, luckily, drug use was not among his vices. Maggie only began to appreciate her own worth and to seek and then to find a man who would cherish her when she stopped tolerating the kind of treatment that her mother continued to endure.
* * *
Maggie’s lover certainly had a personality that predisposed him to addictions and to extreme experiences, even if he was only experimenting with heroin at the time she knew him. But was she herself what is popularly called a “love addict”? There is no consensus among professionals about whether a predilection to pursue futile love affairs is a true addiction, a physiologically based craving like drugs or alcohol, or only a metaphorical equivalent.
Love addiction is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, the latest catalog of psychiatrically diagnosable conditions (or in any of the four earlier editions), and, in my opinion, does not belong there. There are many more “love addicts”—usually defined as such by the sufferers themselves or by Web sites purporting to cure them—than alcohol or drug addicts; although exceptions do exist, it is hard to find someone of either sex who has not had such an experience. These people do not ingest psychoactive substances or have to “detox” by enduring physiological withdrawal, and most of them do not seek or require treatment; addiction is different from compulsion,3 a clinically more accurate description of the experiences of obsessive lovers. Even though who and how they love make them miserable, they often function well in other areas of their lives. The condition also tends to be self-limiting; those who suffer its pangs usually recover or improve over time, as Maggie did. Those who remain obsessive lovers into middle age and beyond typically have more serious underlying psychological issues that they are attempting to resolve.
Love addiction is often confused with “sex addiction,” a different and more ominous type of pathology also omitted from the DSM because of a lack of consensus among professionals about its physiological substrate. Though it may not be a literal addiction, it is a serious and disorganizing affliction. So-called sex addicts use sex for comfort, stimulation, or escape. They seek sexual experiences indiscriminately with multiple partners (or via pornography), while love addicts are “hooked” on one person, and may not even be sexually involved with that person. One seeks a sensation, the other a relationship.
Behavior like Maggie’s, so typical in adolescence, need not become an entrenched or inescapable pattern of loving that marks a person for life; more solid self-esteem, judgment, and knowledge of the world eventually protect most people from infinite recurrences. She went “cold turkey” by repudiating her unloving lover completely when she saw who he really was and never pined for him (even though she still found him attractive) or reproduced the same kind of slavish relationship with anyone remotely like him for the rest of her life—hardly the behavior of either a codependent personality or a recalcitrant love addict.
In her senior year of college, soon after she ended this humiliating affair, Maggie met the man she would marry two years later; it would have been difficult to find someone more different from her former heartthrob. “He was the first man to value me as a person, and by then, I was open to seeing it and feeling it,” she told me. “He was mature himself and considered me his equal. To be appreciated by him was a relief and a delight.”
THE OTHER MAN
David Shapiro was bewitched. He met Anna, a vivacious, voluptuous freshman, at the beginning of his sophomore year, and he had to have her. It seemed like this would be an easy conquest, as most things in college had been for him, both intellectually and socially. The friend who introduced them assured him that she was available and that her boyfriend, who attended another college and visited her only sporadically, would be “no problem.” And so it seemed; in addition to being clever and alluring, she was completely willing to gratify David’s every desire, and in no time, they were spending hours and hours in bed, on the floor, up in a bell tower, in delirious lust. He was new at love, with only one previous girlfriend—he had ended their yearlong relationship even though he cared about her because she had wanted to move in with him almost immediately and he knew he wasn’t ready—but Anna’s appetite was only matched by her enthusiasm and expertise, and she made no such demands. This was his first taste of what seemed like thrilling sensuality, the unbridled expression of desire, which was especially intoxicating for someone who had gr
own up in an atmosphere of extreme sexual repression. “I wasn’t really looking for another girlfriend or a serious relationship,” he said. “I wanted amusement, at least at the beginning. She was jolly and lively, extremely sexy and sexualized, and I’d never had oral sex before.” The only stumbling block to bliss was the boyfriend, who proved more of an impediment than the go-between had asserted (in the manner of college sophomores, the go-between had his own designs on David’s former girlfriend).
Anna threw herself headlong into their affair but barred the bedroom door on weekends, which she reserved for her steady. “He’d park himself in her room,” David recalled, still annoyed about his exclusion. Even though he wanted a no-strings fling after his too-much-too-soon prior relationship, he wasn’t pleased when he realized how many additional contenders for Anna’s favors were hovering around. Anna admitted that she had had several “erotic friendships”; in fact, as he discovered, she specialized in them.
David was used to succeeding, but this was one of the few times in his life that he was confronted with an obstacle he couldn’t overcome. He kept hoping he would prevail over his various rivals, of which the boyfriend proved to be only the most prominent, and win her for himself, but instead he found himself perennially condemned to be her other man. Since he had read his Freud, he figured that it had to be significant that she had the same name as his mother—as did his previous girlfriend. He knew something was afoot, although the knowledge did him little good.