The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

  Even if theirs was a more typical relationship, they are ill-suited for each other and have little in common. With justification, her friends accused her of “dating down”; they were appalled to see her in thrall to a man whom she dismissed as “a part-time construction worker and fan of mixed martial arts.” He was barely responsive and showed no concern for her welfare, failing to call her even when she was seriously ill. He was not even a good lover. “He was terrible in bed. It was the worst sex I ever had. He never satisfied me or tried to” was her withering assessment of his erotic talents. Still, she insisted, “I’ve never been more attracted to anyone in my life.” Gratification and desire are not necessarily related.

  Monica was astute enough to realize that his unappealing qualities were part of his attraction. “This guy won’t run—he’ll never find anyone else who would put up with him,” she declared, demeaning them both. This was security of a kind; she could have him, more or less, forever.

  Last year, Monica finally allowed her friends to persuade her to go into therapy. That interrupted her computer mania temporarily and jump-started the process of self-examination, but twelve months of “abstinence” left her feeling so bereft that she called him and arranged a meeting. “I reached out to him in a weak moment,” she confessed. “I felt such a high when he responded. I had to go wherever it took me; I had to lessen the pain I felt at being without him.” Of course, seeing him did nothing of the sort. We spoke a few days afterward, when the high from her adventure was already beginning to fade.

  A seemingly logical rationalization had allowed her to act on what she must have suspected was a terrible idea—that seeing him in person would be a test of her resolve. “I had built up an image of the power he had over me, and I wanted to see if he still had it. It was a constant battle to control following him online. I felt like an addict waiting for my next fix, when maybe I didn’t even need the fix anymore.” That her urge to see him still seemed entirely beyond her control should have been a warning signal, but she ignored it. “I’m always just one step away from a relapse; it takes a huge amount of effort to fight this,” she said. “If I look now, I’ll go through a whole year of stuff nonstop. Why haven’t I learned that I could end it? There should be something like AA sponsors to keep people like me ‘sober.’”

  In fact, Monica had all the support she needed in her sympathetic and very patient friends, but this time, she didn’t call any of them for help in controlling herself. No external support in the world can restrain someone hell-bent on surrender. “I didn’t tell my friends; they would be concerned after all the times they’ve picked me off the floor,” she said. They might even be frustrated and furious with her, but she didn’t let herself think about that. The obsessed tend to think of themselves as victims rather than as perpetrators of their own unhappiness and rarely consider the toll of their folly on those who truly love them and want to help them. This unconcern for the feelings of anybody else but the object of desire is an indication of the self-absorption that otherwise sensitive and caring people fall into when they give themselves over to obsessive love.

  When they met at the trendy restaurant she picked, he behaved as he always did. “I noticed that he didn’t look that great when he walked in,” she said, both relieved and disappointed. Over his resistance, she tried to bring up how she felt, but as usual, he wasn’t interested. “He said, ‘I never meant to hurt you. You’ve got to understand my situation’—it was all about him. We sat in the bar kissing a long time, and then I put him in a cab. He held my hand. At least, for the first time, I didn’t ask him to come home with me.”

  Soon afterward, as always, the high dissipated, and the cycle of self-hatred, desire, and contempt began all over again.

  Talking to this tormented woman was a sobering, painful immersion in the world of someone so deeply possessed by a timeless fantasy that she cannot see how much she is actually living in her own shocking past. At the root of Monica’s compulsion is a history of extraordinary trauma and terror. “My mother left my father for another man, and he never forgave her but became insanely jealous and murderously vindictive. My father stalked my mother, constantly threatening to kill her, and those threats were real. I’m much closer to him than my mother, whom I never believed ever loved me, so I heard all about it. When he was supposed to pick up my brother and me for visitation, she left us alone on the street corner, because we were terrified that he would stab her or shoot her to death or hit her over the head with a baseball bat if their paths crossed. It was a constant battle between them; I’ve never had a nuclear family.” Her lover’s family situation, as peculiar and dysfunctional as the arrangement is, is not a waking nightmare for his children, and he and his ex-wife do not expose them to constant threats of horrific violence. Monica is seeking to acquire, or co-opt, a saner version of what she knew.

  With the unerring instinct of the unconscious, Monica found the one man ideally suited to meet her need to redo her past. Every time she turns on her computer and sees her lover’s two children smiling and waving with their parents at an amusement park, she dismantles the horror of her own childhood and becomes one of them. The horrors she endured still possess her because she has not fully experienced or grieved for—what Freud once called “abreacted”17—them. She still feels buffeted by her parents’ madness, which was so gripping that they exposed their children to its fallout.

  At the deepest level, Monica wants her beloved and his ex-wife to be her family; she wants to be their child, not his lover—the child of amicably divorced parents who are still providing a secure home for their children and a semblance of family life, parents who do not force their children to participate in their murderous mutual rituals of hatred. It is a perfect fit with her unmet needs. Desires can have different goals from what they appear to have, and what takes the form of sexual desire may have an entirely different underlying motive.

  Another indicator that Monica is stuck in her past is her constant refrain that she has no sense of control over her life (she is prone to say variations on “I don’t know why I choose the men I do—they choose me,” “I’ll accept any kind of treatment,” and “Men always leave me when I was just beginning to feel comfortable”), which was tragically true in her relationship with her father, who sacrificed her welfare to his vendetta against her mother even though she loved him. She sees marriage as a chamber of horrors; it is no wonder that she is attracted only to unmarriageable men. Like José, she feels no sense of agency and, like him, believes she has no choice but to give in to her feelings, no matter how destructive she knows them to be. In order to live in the real world as an adult with some control over her own life, she has to realize that it is she who chooses the men who choose her.

  A poignant image from one of Monica’s dreams indicates some of the themes that may liberate her if she pursues them seriously. “I find myself in my lover’s mother’s beautiful kitchen, but there is no place for me to sit.” She believes that she can never have what other people have—and, secretly, that she does not deserve to have the comforting joys of domestic life that this woman’s kitchen epitomizes, where healthy appetites of all sorts are satisfied. Being nurtured feels forever off limits for her, and care is not something she deserves by right. This is a deduction from her childhood experience; children often hold themselves responsible for the way their parents treat them.

  * * *

  When she is not invading her lover’s life online, Monica reads all the self-help Web sites the Internet has to offer and tries to follow their recommendations, but to no avail. “I wrote down ten things he said that should stop me from seeing him. I remind myself how selfish he is, that he has no empathy. I still cry when I think about his coldness. But when he was silent for two weeks after I last saw him, he seemed to regain the power that he used to have over me.” Despite all this effort, she still thinks of him constantly. Advice, even sensible advice, changes nothing unless the recipient is receptive.

  There are some in
dications, however, that Monica is taking the first steps toward disengaging with him online, without which nothing can fundamentally change. She has now texted him to request that he stop “liking” her posts. “I think it is finally becoming clearer to me how much pain I’m in when I watch his life from afar,” she said. “It is taking a long time to accept that I can never be part of his life. If I’m honest, I have to admit that the real reason I contacted him was that I hoped his situation had changed and that he might be ready to have me in his life. That will never, ever happen.” Saying the truth can lead to believing it.

  Is freedom within Monica’s reach? I believe that there is hope for her, with resolve, support, and continued commitment to therapy. She already knows the outlines of the unspeakable terror that she is trying to undo, but she has to recognize that she will be trapped as long as she continues to hope that it can be magically altered by having the man she covets—a universal theme in obsession. In her case, reenactment and self-soothing by Internet stalking are symptoms of a serious post-traumatic stress disorder and must be identified as such to be treated effectively. She needs a profound, emotionally alive understanding of what she endured and how it affected her. Reexperiencing the terror in the nurturing holding environment18 of a therapeutic relationship—the “kitchen” with a place for her—and a caring therapist, as both guide and witness, salves the deepest wounds.

  * * *

  These four obsessive affairs, so different on the surface, serve similar functions. Their hidden themes are identity, desirability, and redoing history. Each of these driven people was trying to re-create past experiences or relationships in new guises. For the duration of their doomed romances, all four were under the spell of the repetition compulsion, pulled inexorably back into their unmetabolized longings and losses. Maggie found her father again in her philosophy major, David tried to regain his mother’s exclusive love through Anna, José strove to revive his younger self, and Monica was revising the devastating experience of being her estranged parents’ child.

  It is much easier to say what doesn’t work to control this emotional imprisonment than what does. Like chronic dieting, the cheerleading advice and behavior tips on online self-help sites, such as making lists of the beloved’s hateful behaviors or obnoxious qualities or imagining him or her covered in vomit—are of limited long-term value. The only way out of pain is through it.

  Obsessive love is built on a tissue of illusions: that by having sex with someone you can possess that person’s soul; that you can transmute past defeats into present triumphs without understanding or mourning; that you can make the unloving love you by constancy, uncomplaining availability, and molding yourself into what you think that person wants. The only remedy is to recognize, acknowledge, and grieve that you have attached your hopes and handed over your destiny to someone who does not deserve them and who can never satisfy your desire.

  Is there an effective way out of the self-inflicted madness of hopeless attachments? W. Somerset Maugham, in Of Human Bondage, his autobiographically inspired novel about a humiliating love affair, hints at the path to freedom. It is usually long and slow, with many setbacks and small advances, insights that slowly eat away at the desperate desire for what you cannot have, which begins to look less appealing than what you can. Paradoxically, it is inaction, or what looks like inaction, but is actually intense self-examination and loving self-restraint, that opens your eyes to possibilities for real mutual surrender and fulfillment. As Maugham asserted, “Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.”

  3

  VENGEANCE IS MINE

  The Dark Side of Rejected Love

  THE WAGES OF SIN

  She opened the hood, unscrewed the radiator cap, and methodically stuffed the bits of frozen tilapia she had painstakingly cut into little pieces as far down into the radiator shaft as she could reach. Then she closed it, confident that when water circulated through the heating system, an ineradicable stench of rotten fish would fill the car belonging to her sixty-year-old husband’s twenty-six-year-old lover (who was also their joint employee), insulting its owner’s femininity in the grossest terms and forcing her to ponder her foul deed. This would certainly make the employee rue the day that she e-mailed her paramour a photograph of herself naked in front of his own family Christmas tree, an act of heedless bravado documenting the yearlong affair that his wife had discovered only days earlier. Not only would the culprit now have an inescapable reminder of her guilt, but she would never, ever be able to sell the car.

  The proverb says that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, when one can savor it more. But in this case, even though the instrument of revenge was frozen, the passionate hatred with which it was wielded was red hot. It is telling that the Internet lists many variations on how to stink up a car to get back at someone, suggesting the popularity of this activity, as well as of the actions that provoke it.

  I heard the story from a close friend of the perpetrator. This confidante had talked the betrayed woman out of her original plan, which was to send an illustrated, incriminating letter to the young woman’s mother. The employer and her now-former employee had been on such intimate terms that she knew the mother and had even been her houseguest in Mexico. Her friend had argued persuasively that the tilapia strategy was preferable, because only the guilty party and no innocent bystander would suffer the consequences. It was, the two friends agreed, a fitting penalty for a serious crime of the heart that would otherwise have gone unpunished.

  There was plenty to punish, as it turned out; the incriminating photograph was just the tip of the iceberg. As soon as her eyes were opened, the wife discovered that, even as she and her employee were regularly going out to lunch together and having heart-to-heart talks, the lovers had been conducting an extensive erotic e-mail correspondence, that they had trysted regularly at out-of-town business gigs, and—the final blow—that the young woman who had been like a daughter to her had recently miscarried his child.

  Why did she feel compelled to dramatically punish her husband’s paramour (she had already dealt with him by starting divorce proceedings), and why did she only damage her rival’s property rather than try to mentally torment, hurt, or even kill the paramour herself, as women scorned often do in tragedies and in the tabloids? I understood instinctively why she chose to punish the woman in this intimate way rather than her husband; unrealistically, most women (and many men) expect more loyalty from friends—even when they work for us—than from lovers or spouses, and therefore, betrayal by a friend seems more unforgivable. Since love is a passion, we are not shocked when it blows off course. Given the nature of the betrayal she was punishing, this woman believed that simply trashing the car would not have sufficiently expressed her outrage. In addition, although the wife was vindictive, she was not violent, except perhaps in her fantasies. She wanted the guilty woman to remember, so killing her was out of the question as well as against the law and the sixth commandment. Tilapia filled the bill.

  The underlying purpose of her vengeful act was to restore her own self-esteem and sense of control, to undo an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. “I didn’t want her to get away without suffering as she had made me suffer,” she told her friend. “I felt so much better knowing that in the hot Miami sun that fish would stink, and the smell of it wouldn’t go away.” Thanks to this ploy, she believed that the pervasive olfactory evidence of guilt would prevent the paramour from driving away scot-free. And it worked—at least on the surface. “She was the happiest woman,” her friend told me. “She was liberated.”

  But was she? Neither the car saboteur nor her friend questioned whether it really was possible to guarantee that the paramour would suffer as she herself had suffered or even suffer at all. The car saboteur felt compelled to force her rival to feel something, even if it was not the regret she wanted her rival to feel. However, there is no guarantee that revenge will have the desired effect, a fact often ignored in the frenzy of enacti
ng it.

  By doing the most insulting thing she could imagine, the wife wanted to humiliate her rival as she herself had been humiliated. However, having a car’s resale value destroyed, even if it makes the owner feel as rotten as her car now smelled, is far less devastating than having a marriage destroyed in a double betrayal of trust. Whether the intended victim actually was horribly insulted or was simply furious or dismissed the sabotage as the behavior of a crazy person acting out jealous rage, the perpetrator would never know. In fact, nobody can neutralize a grave injury that has already occurred by inflicting one in return. The past can never be undone, even though its meaning and impact can evolve over time, and the anguish can diminish.

  Authentic liberation from the pain of betrayal involves more than turning the tables. It is hard emotional work and requires a much bigger commitment of time and mental energy than even the most cunning act of vengeance. Delivering retribution is a Pyrrhic victory unless the betrayed person then turns inward and processes the impact of what has befallen her. In this case, the wife would have to confront her own blindness and misplaced trust and understand their origins in her own history. Only serious self-examination could then enable her to rebuild her life on less shaky ground. She would have to mourn for her losses—by confronting the fault lines in her marriage and her husband’s character, acknowledging that she had been helpless to prevent another woman from taking his love, and working through her hatred for the two of them for betraying her and for herself for being oblivious. Revenge may be a dish best eaten cold, but the best revenge of all is living wisely and well—learning from the past and applying those lessons in the future.

  Is there such a thing as healthy revenge? The auto vandal genuinely felt better afterward. Her spiteful glee at getting even lessened her losses—of her marriage, her trust, her former friend and employee, her emotional foundation—at least temporarily. As long as she had no illusions that it was a lasting solution to the task of recovering her self-respect, it served a purpose. Had she gone on to defame her rival on the Internet, kill her cat, try to ruin her life, or become obsessed with her, she would have continued to be victimized by the betrayal and allowed the affair to warp her permanently. But if the tilapia gave her momentary solace in extremis and if in addition she had no illusions that employing it circumvented the grieving process ahead, it was money and effort well spent, even if technically illegal.