by Jeanne Safer
Working on my doctoral dissertation kept me occupied initially, but what ultimately got me through was my single-minded determination, voiced aloud to myself and recorded in my diary, to discover the causes of my blindness and never to repeat them. Fearlessly pursuing insight was my badge of honor, my route back to self-respect. I started with the fact that in my own history, as in Barbara’s, lay a philandering father and a mother who for years made herself oblivious and then martyred herself by staying with him anyway even after the truth came out. Understanding and grieving—and a wise analyst—painstakingly changed my life and the choices I made.
* * *
There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one’s fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call “the Affirmative No.” The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim. This is not an act of negation or rebellion; it is an act of self-assertion, subjectively defined. Deirdre’s vow exemplified this. It reestablished a sense of self that had been battered almost to death. Her thoughts and actions announced to Ben and everyone else, “I refuse to allow you to obliterate the things I hold most dear; they cannot be taken from me. This is the essence of my life, and here I stand.” Her antidote to passive suffering was swearing fidelity, just as Barbara’s was furthering justice and mine was pursuing self-knowledge. Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none.
Will is misunderstood by many contemporary therapists as a purely behavioral tool involving techniques like assertiveness training and one-size-fits-all affirmations—superficial caricatures of a process that can activate the deepest healing capacities of the self. Will is underrated as a therapeutic agent, an instrument of transformation and self-determination—sometimes the only tool a person can call upon in extremis. There is nothing natural or spontaneous about it. To make a blessing out of a curse is a genuine triumph of will, and transforming shame into pride a rare form of alchemy.
FAITH REWARDED
Betrayal forced Deirdre, as it does every betrayed person, to contend with the demons of her nature. Her vow and the actions that sprang from it converted her self-hatred and negative grandiosity (the clinical term for the common assumption people make that they themselves are the cause of everything bad that befalls them) to unassailable pride in the way she conducted her life. When she realized nothing could stop her from behaving with love toward others, she was finally able to behave with love toward herself again.
Two decades later—we last discussed their relationship on what would have been their twenty-fifth anniversary—Deirdre has remained true to herself and to Ben, after her fashion, but the nature of her love for him has changed: she has finally stopped missing him. “I don’t have room for him anymore with all the other people I love,” she declared. “That frequency is no longer one I tune in to.”
Keeping faith is no longer something she has to work at; through long practice, it has become her natural state of mind, and she employs it in all areas of her life. “Now,” she says, “it feels very peaceful, very easy, and calm.” The self-doubts and humiliation that bedeviled her have faded away along with the ever-decreasing potency of Ben’s betrayal in her mind.
Along the way, she has miraculously managed to preserve a revised version of her first husband, stripped of his vices. This adorable Ben visits her regularly. “He’s in my dreams,” she confessed with a tender smile. “Sometimes it’s night after night for two weeks, sometimes once every three months. I’m always glad to see him; I always care about him. Of course, it’s tricky to figure out what I’m supposed to do about my second husband.” Here, at long last, is a moral dilemma she can contemplate with pleasure.
* * *
Deirdre, Barbara, and I accomplished the essential thing a person must do to transcend betrayal and to help prevent its recurrence: we each transferred the locus of our self-respect from the one who abandoned us to ourselves so that no one could wrest it from us ever again.
Defining your own truth and then living according to it—whether you do it by making a vow, testifying in court, or committing yourself to unflinching introspection—changes your sense of self and sets you free; it makes you fearless—or at least more courageous—with every significant person in your life. When you’re not so insecure, there are things—offhand cruelties, insensitivities large and small—you don’t tolerate, things you don’t have to deny. You no longer hold yourself responsible for everything or believe that it’s up to you to make every relationship work. You expect and demand to be treated by the one you love as you treat him. Once you are the one who defines the meaning of your life, nobody can gainsay it. This act of self-assertive defiance immunizes you—at least to a certain extent—from ever allowing someone else to control your destiny ever again. Then you can love and be loved in return.
5
UNREQUITED LOVE
My Golden One
MY YOUNG SELF SPEAKS
If you do not love me I shall not be loved.
—SAMUEL BECKETT
When I was nineteen years old, I fell passionately in love with a man who meant far more to me than I did to him. I surrendered my will to him and only felt fully alive when I was in his arms. I needed him too desperately to accept that he didn’t love me.
Unrequited love affairs are hardly unusual (especially at that age), but the aftermath of this one was: I buried the most telling details of our relationship for nearly fifty years, barely alluding to him in therapy and mentioning him to my husband only in passing. For all those decades, I hardly gave a conscious thought to the one who had briefly been the center of my universe—who had been my universe and who had left me bereft. The only trace of him was in dreams—opaque ones.
I only recovered the full truth about what really happened between us when I reread the diary I kept at the time. The black morocco cover fell apart as soon as I opened it, and I had to hold the whole thing together with rubber bands. What I read there—every emotion, every conversation, every encounter painstakingly recorded in my own handwriting—did not seem like memories, but living presences in my body and my psyche, fresh, raw, and unmetabolized.
My young self was speaking directly to me from that tattered volume. I saw how, in order not to lose him, I had tried to stifle any emotions that might have displeased him when I was with him and to censor unacceptable feelings even when I was alone. I had erased all this from consciousness because the experience was too painful in itself and evoked pain from earlier in my life.
As I read on, I realized with a jolt that I also held in my hands the key to an anxiety dream that had recurred for decades. I knew it referred to the period in my life when I had known him—in sleep I returned to the city in which we had been lovers—but I’d never been able to grasp the meaning of these nocturnal visits until I opened the diary once more.
Those gold-edged pages also revealed an aspect of my character that I had conveniently forgotten because it didn’t fit with my self-image. Despite my efforts to suppress my rage at him for how he’d treated me, I had actually expressed it in two acts of revenge against him—the first one witty and self-possessed, the second far darker. It was the only time in my life that I acted this way. Unrequited love always has a sinister side that no lover wants to admit to.
In the process of recovering the excruciating details of my doomed affair, I also retrieved its full, fervent, thrilling intensity and the joys that were intermingled with the anguish. Despite my abject behavior, I even saw precursors of boldness and insight in myself.
The impetus for turning to my diary and uncovering the secrets from this pivotal chapter of my life—secrets that had never surfaced in twenty-five years of intensive analysis—was an eerily parallel ex
perience I had at age sixty-five: my most intimate friend left me alone when I was seriously ill. Her abandonment led me back to his, and it caused me to reencounter myself as a young woman frantically, hopelessly in love. To this young woman I owe the insights into the nature of passionate unrequited love—and how to escape its clutches—that I might otherwise never have discovered.
MY GOLDEN ONE
I thought of Michael as “golden” from the moment I saw him. We were both avid folk dancers, and he first appeared at a dance early in my sophomore year in college. He was like nobody else I had ever known. Tall and lithe, he moved like a sprite, with musicality and joie de vivre. Brightness seemed intrinsic to him, and I was sorely in need of brightness in a city infamous for its freezing wind and bleak winters, at a university whose unofficial motto was “Where fun goes to die.” Michael had a roguish smile, a profusion of blond curls, sly amber-colored eyes, and an aura of gleaming ease and aplomb; at twenty-four, he seemed to dance through life. His wit and his wildness intrigued me. When I found out that he wore a black leather jacket as he drove his sleek motorcycle, played the oboe, and was more than willing to help me with my incomprehensible math homework, my monochromatic world burst into color because he was in it.
The only problem was that he was a doctoral student from another university on a science fellowship of uncertain duration. At first, I panicked that I would lose him just as I had found him, but I rejoiced when his tenure was extended first three and then six months. I was longing to fall in love, and I didn’t want to miss even a temporary opportunity to do it.
I flung myself into passion because of my dark emotional state at the time. This was the nadir of my life. I was almost unimaginably lonely before I met Michael, beyond even the usual late-adolescent angst. In addition to my disappointment with the university, my beloved roommate had taken a year’s leave of absence, and nobody had replaced her as my confidante. I was living alone in a tiny dormitory room that seemed like it was on the edge of an abyss; one weekend when I was sick I didn’t speak to a soul. My last high school romance had been so excruciating—my boyfriend was both unstable and unfaithful—that I hadn’t sought another in two years.
The most unsettling thing of all was that my family, which had seemed a bastion of stability, was disintegrating. At the age of sixteen, I had been the one to discover concrete proof of my adored father’s infidelity—I found two women in our house alone with him one night. Even worse, my mother never left him. I felt there was nowhere I belonged, nobody I could rely on. Utterly unmoored and in dire need of a haven, I turned to Michael to provide it. He was my remedy for emptiness, my bulwark against hopelessness, and it worked—at least when I was with him and he smiled at me. In that cold desert where it always seemed to be winter, it was easy to mistake charm for warmth and desire for love.
Our romance began promisingly enough. In addition to his endlessly patient help with my homework, we played in the snow and rode his motorcycle to the zoo, to coffeehouses, and to concerts—I didn’t care that it was freezing—and talked into the night. We had so many interests in common, and he had such a lively mind and clever tongue that I didn’t realize he revealed hardly anything significant about himself other than that he was afraid of the dark.
Michael seemed to be welcoming me into his world. He showed me the lab where he did his research, and he cooked for me, the first time a man had ever done so. We kissed for the first time while we were baking a cake. I found his combination of domesticity and sensuality both comforting and alluring. At the time, I never consciously made the connection between our frequent after-hours trips to Michael’s lab and having accompanied my father, who was also a wry, self-contained scientist—a doctor—on his nightly hospital rounds, but the subliminal link between the two was compelling.
Much too soon, though, unpredictability crept into this routine, and Michael’s elusiveness began to trouble me. Every moment of our time together was on his schedule; he rarely made a date in advance and failed to show up at events at which we’d planned to meet. He spent hours with me one day and then disappeared for a week without any explanation or acknowledgment. I never considered calling him myself, much less objecting, because I felt so lucky to have him at all, so overjoyed to be alone no longer.
Ominous premonitions appeared in my diary. I wrote, “I feel myself rushing into something I’m not at all sure is there or can be there, and my recklessness terrifies me. I have no idea how to control it or to keep any kind of balance.” I noted anxiously what was happening to me, but the good parts felt far too good for me to heed my own internal warnings. All the symptoms of unrequited love were there—one-sided preoccupation with the beloved’s every move, legitimate anxiety about reciprocity, a willingness to tolerate bad treatment just to be near him.
I spent undue amounts of time and effort trying to interpret his motives—a favorite pastime of the besotted. When he didn’t call or show up, I became preoccupied with figuring out what I could possibly have done to alienate him. The problem had to be me, not him; otherwise, I was helpless to do anything about it.
“Is there someone else, here or elsewhere? Is he still interested in me?” I asked myself early on. When I went to his apartment the first time, I noted that my dorm was one of the “frequently called numbers” listed by the phone; I was overjoyed.
Soon, however, I had all the proof I needed that my fears were justified. One moonlit night, a month after we started spending time together, we walked to the frozen lake. Michael stopped suddenly, turned to me, and said with a serious edge in his voice I’d never heard before, “Jeanne, how vulnerable are you? The more time I spend with you, the clearer it becomes that I want to share my bed with you—but I may take that very pleasant situation more lightly than you. I’m not sure how much I can give. You may be more involved than I am.” Then he put his arms around me and said in a far more insinuating tone, “But I do think we should be lovers.”
When I read what he said to me, I wanted to rush back in time and yell “Don’t do it!” to my younger self.
At the time, I was so aghast that I didn’t say a word in response, although I wrote it all down verbatim afterward.
This is where my memory began to fail. Until I reread my diary, my version of this monologue had been heavily edited. I recollected the unadorned declaration of desire—it felt frank and adult, cool rather than cold, at the time—but I had erased the caveats that accompanied it. I was too frightened by what they implied: I could not stand to know my effort was doomed from the start, that no matter what I did, he would never be mine.
Michael’s declaration of intent, which seemed like openness and candor, was actually his way to manage his guilt preemptively. It put me off balance from that moment on, intensifying my insecurity, confirming all my dread. Despite this, I plunged ahead. I stayed overnight with him, barely chaste, a week later. It was the first time I spent an entire night with a man. “A glad night,” I reported in my diary, “but something says that I will never have his love, never at the level I want.” All the warning signs were there—I enumerated them in my diary, railed against them, and proceeded to ignore them. Acting consciously and wisely on what you know to be true, overriding inner compulsion on your own behalf, requires far more self-possession than I had at that point in my life.
Michael’s behavior toward me really was confusing. There were times when I clearly interested him—I made him laugh, and I was a worthy sparring partner—and times when he withdrew from me or rejected me, sometimes in close succession. Since I idealized him, I assumed he knew what he was doing, when in fact I see now that he had to have been as buffeted about by his emotions as I was by my own.
I longed for consistency, merger, and ardor, while he wanted occasional interludes of diversion, amusement, and pleasure. What drew me to him was obvious to me—he sparkled so—but why on earth he selected someone like me, so utterly unsuited to his wishes for minimal involvement, I still cannot understand. I can only assume that
my attentiveness and emotional intensity appealed to him as much as they caused him to flee.
Even after he made his position perfectly clear, I continued to cherish the fantasy that I would find a way to get through to him. Like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White in reverse, I would awaken his ability to love me; I believed that I held the magic key to his heart. The seductive grandiosity of this conviction was unshakable. When you are in the throes of this kind of desire, “never” is an unutterable word, because it is the death of hope; obsessive lovers strive to keep hope alive at all costs, even when it is clearly a lost cause.
One thing I tolerated silently but found disquieting was that Michael told me about his attraction to other women the first time I stayed overnight with him, and he continued to do so, often when we were in bed together. I wasn’t yet savvy enough to realize that recoiling from this wasn’t prudishness on my part, that his behavior was at the very least offensive and off-putting, an indication of faithlessness, in thought and deed. There were echoes of my father’s conduct in it as well that I must have willed myself to overlook but could clearly see when I read the diary.