The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

  “So why didn’t you talk to me when you were here?” I asked, emboldened.

  “There wasn’t much to say,” he said—and then told me for the next hour, in wretched detail, everything that had happened in Mexico. Fortunately, the young woman had lived.

  He was frantic, desperate, and on the verge of tears; I had never seen him like that. As reprehensible as I found his conduct, the specter of so self-contained a man revealing his distress to me—and only me—was both unnerving and gratifying. Despite everything, I also pitied him.

  After we hung up, I wrote in my diary, “The thought crossed my mind when we were talking how ordinary it all was, and he was. Why had I tormented myself so over him?” “Ordinary” was the last adjective I would ever have imagined using to describe him until that moment. My Golden One was nothing but base metal.

  I couldn’t tolerate this insight very long, however, and very quickly I converted him in my thoughts back to “extraordinary.” He still filled my need to win the love of an unattainable man, a need I could not yet relinquish. To face the truth about him would mean I had lavished myself on someone entirely unworthy of my devotion.

  I told Jonathan nothing about this conversation. “Somehow when I am alone,” I confessed to my diary, “all of Jonathan’s tenderness melts away before the bright glances of Michael’s elfin eyes.” When you are in thrall to an obsessive love, a reciprocated one seems less alluring. You prize what you cannot have more than what you can.

  * * *

  Michael told me he was coming back in July, and we arranged to meet. Unbeknownst even to myself, I was planning my second act of vengeance against him. The first had been for insulting me by asking for sex tips; the second would be bending him to my will to punish him for crimes of the heart against me. I wanted him to stay with me and be my lover once more, but this time, I vowed, unconsciously, that I would be in charge.

  Fastidious reporter though I was, it is striking that I did not record how I arranged an assignation with him without my current boyfriend’s knowledge. My deviousness disturbed me too much to admit even to my diary.

  Seeing him again and dancing with him again seemed to undo a year’s worth of frustration, anguish, and humiliation at his hands. We went back to my apartment, where we spent hours making dinner, talking, listening to music, and embracing by candlelight, all tension cast aside. “He moves like a blond cat,” I wrote later in my diary. “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this.” We finally fell asleep fully clothed on my bed. To seduce him when we awoke in the morning seemed the easiest, most natural thing in the world. I encountered no resistance.

  The sensual romp that I orchestrated was in fact a coldly calculated (if disavowed) act of retribution on my part. Ever since the day I met my hated, beloved tormentor, he had exerted control over me—control made worse by my complicity. Turning the tables on him, forcing him to do what I wanted when I wanted it, was meant to be my payback.

  I felt neither powerful nor gratified afterward, however. Instead, I sat bolt upright in bed, pale and shaking in agitation, engulfed by a wave of guilt, shame, and sorrow. It was a full-fledged anxiety attack that seemed to come from nowhere.

  At the moment, I thought I was punishing myself for being untrue to Jonathan, but that was the least of it; I was overwhelmed by Michael. He was floating away even as he lay beside me, just as he always had. Controlling the superficial conditions of our encounter had not changed how he felt about me or wiped away the harm I had already allowed him to do to me. He was still the same fundamentally unreachable man, and my love was as unrequited as ever. My attempt at payback had failed.

  My unwonted emotional outburst did get a reaction from him. It was exactly what I should have expected. He neither asked me what the matter was nor made any attempt to comfort me. “It’s not the end of the world,” he said from a thousand miles away. “The sun’s still shining.” He had no desire to engage when it wasn’t easy anymore. He left soon afterward, with a cursory kiss on my forehead. I never saw or heard from him again.

  After I closed the door behind him and crawled into bed to put myself back together, I wrote, “I saw one glistening hair of his on my pillow, and for a moment remembered only his loveliness.” I remember it still.

  * * *

  Not until four months had passed with no word from him was I forced to accept that this really was the end. It was then that this man, who had prompted me to behave in ways I never did before or have since, inspired another uncharacteristic action. For someone who yearns to preserve everything that is meaningful, it was a radical departure. “I just read all Michael’s letters and tore them up,” my diary announces. “I had planned to save one pleasant one, but I decided that it too had to go. Into the garbage with the whole relationship. I console myself that all of them lie in pieces in my wastebasket and can give me no grief anymore.” A symbolic act of demolition was the only way left to exert any kind of control. This was the last time—until now—I would ever write his name.

  I shredded the physical evidence of the most damaging attachment of my life, but even that couldn’t eradicate the psychological residue, so I tried to bury my unmanageable emotions. I told my diary that it was time “to wrap these feelings in cellophane and thrust them into a dark place in my mind.” This, too, proved ineffective. While I did not utter or write his name again for almost half a century, Michael simply moved into my dreams, where, under deep cover, he continued to give me grief for decades more. You can suppress your unbearable feelings about a tortured love and throw the evidence away, but you cannot destroy them. The only way to diminish their power, to stop being haunted by them, is to face them, figure out their meaning, and understand their impact.

  I stayed with Jonathan for two years and ended our relationship when I graduated. It took another decade, and a devoted male analyst, before I was able to find the man who has cherished me for thirty-five years of marriage, and whom I cherish.

  THE GOLDEN FANTASY AND RELENTLESS HOPE

  My Golden One stayed hidden in the recesses of my mind for almost five decades. I discovered him again serendipitously only after my woman friend betrayed me. When I saw that the two experiences evoked similar feelings, I realized I needed to exhume him, because I clearly had unfinished business with him. I had reached the point in my life when I finally felt able to withstand the whole truth about what had happened between us. I asked the questions I had always avoided while I still imagined that he could somehow be mine: What function did this alluring but dangerously cold man serve for me? What kept me coming back? What experiences in my past was I trying to repair (or undo) by being his lover? Why did I doggedly continue to hope despite overwhelming evidence that getting his love was hopeless? There had to be more going on that was as deeply buried as Michael.

  My explorations were aided by two psychoanalytic articles that I discovered as I was searching the literature for insights into unrequited love. They described my behavior with such uncanny accuracy that it seemed as if the authors, too, had read my diary—or perhaps lived through it themselves.

  The title of psychoanalyst Sydney Smith’s study “The Golden Fantasy”2 resonated immediately. According to Smith, the goal of this fantasy is to find someone who meets all one’s needs “in a relationship hallowed by perfection,” like an ideal mother in the “golden age” of infancy. Anyone who seeks such an experience as an adult harbors an “emotionally charged memory” of early traumatic maternal loss that never healed. Perpetuating this impossible dream prevents mourning by denying that the original abandonment happened and cannot now be undone.

  The Golden Fantasy is usually a shameful secret and one that is extremely hard to relinquish because you feel helpless without such an all-giving person, as though you were still a young child without resources of your own. You cling to the possibility of recovering the perfect bond because to renounce it “is to give up everything, to lose the primary source of comfort, even one’s sense of meaning … without [which] the world be
comes a place without hope”—an eternal winter of the psyche.

  A craving to be loved and a fear of being rejected pervade the emotional lives of those in thrall to the Golden Fantasy. They feel particularly desperate when they are alone, even as adults, and believe that separation from the indispensable person is unbearable, so they go to inordinate lengths to preserve such relationships at any cost. One of Smith’s patients said, “Without [him] reality seems so drab, so lifeless, and offers me nothing to keep me going”—virtually a quote about Michael from my diary.

  All this resonated for me, but one fundamental fact didn’t fit: Smith traced the origins of this fantasy back to an early traumatic loss of a mother’s care. The loss had to be severe, such as serious failures of empathy or wholesale abandonment, and the person who suffered it had to be painfully aware that it happened, which was not the case for me. If anything, my mother was too present in my life—a vital, opinionated, often demanding woman—and I had idealized her. I had always assumed that my choices of unavailable men to love (Michael was not the only one) derived from the way my father disappointed me in my adolescence by his flagrant infidelities.

  One of Smith’s examples enlarged my thinking. He described a woman who decided to marry the man who was courting her when he fed her from his fork on a dinner date. “She found this act of caring so gratifying, so compelling in its promise of a regressive3 fulfillment in the relationship, that her indecision was ended.” I realized that Michael’s feeding me satisfied a deep hunger in me for more than food. His cooking—coupled with his homework help, inviting me to his lab, the way he smiled at me4—were so compelling because they signified to me that he was a mother/father amalgam to lean on when I had just irrevocably lost both my parents as sources of security. No wonder I held on to him for dear life.

  Prompted by Smith’s article, I began to recall times when my mother had indeed abandoned me. There had been grave early lapses in her ability to provide a reliable “holding environment”—pediatrician/psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s name for the stable primordial world and a symbolic extension of the mother’s loving arms—that every child needs. The most terrible of these were two suicide attempts when I was five and eight years old. At other times, this otherwise vibrant and devoted woman was so desperately anxious that she could become hysterical or furious, or turn coldly away when I was frightened. I rarely woke her when I had nightmares as a child, preferring my father’s calm, reassuring competence.

  My father had replaced my mother. He was much better at being “the mother of physical comfort”5 than she, for all her other gifts. No crisis or emotional reaction of mine ever threw him; I felt safe in his hands.

  The golden age of my father’s total devotion did not last, either. Death and depression stalked him. The diagnosis of a faulty heart valve that could have led to an early death, a three-month hospital stay for another dangerous illness, and massive disappointment in his marriage and his own life left serious psychic scars and led to his compulsive womanizing by the time I entered my teens. His own woes interfered with, and ultimately curtailed, his emotional availability. Although both my parents loved me, neither one consistently provided a sense of fundamental emotional safety.

  I had turned to my father when my mother failed to comfort me, but when he too failed me, there was nowhere else to turn. Then I met Michael.

  I finally understood that I had been seeking a new edition of my maternal father, but why hadn’t I picked a consistent one? What made me recruit Michael and then refuse to fire him when he fell down so disastrously on the job? Martha Stark’s revelatory study of obsessive love, “Transformation of Relentless Hope,”6 provided the answers. It explained why, against all odds, I felt compelled to seek blood from this particular stone, and why so many others do the same.

  “Relentless hope” is Stark’s poignant phrase for the state of mind that drives a person to pursue a relationship that feels simultaneously unsatisfying and indispensable. The mission of the relentlessly hopeful lover is to convert a disappointing parent-substitute into one who meets his or her fundamental needs. It is fueled by a passionately held conviction that it is possible—indeed, necessary—to persuade another person to change. Relentless hope differs from “normal” hope because it is actually the denial of hopelessness, the refusal to acknowledge and to mourn for the irreplaceable, traumatic loss of a parent’s love in childhood, which feels unbearable to contemplate. Trying to reproduce the Golden Fantasy leads inevitably to relentless hope, the driven perversion of optimism.

  The typical scenario is to choose someone who shares essential characteristics with the lost parent and to labor ceaselessly to transform him—whether by turning oneself into the kind of person he would respond to, by getting him to act or feel differently, or by some combination of the two. The underlying fantasy is that the object7 is unwilling, not incapable: That it “could give [if it wanted to] … and would give [if you] get it right.” “If only I could get the words right, so I can get a loving or comprehending response,” I had written in my diary, as if the fault for failing to get it were mine. Every time I had gotten a glimpse of how limited my power actually was, I had cautioned myself in my diary to “expect nothing, be prepared for indifference, for his saying he is incapable—but that would be the end of hope.”

  I found Stark’s formulation eye-opening because it demonstrated that the unrequited lover does not simply suffer passively but actively attempts to control the object of her affection. Suffering is not the goal; it is an unfortunate but necessary by-product of urgent efforts to force one’s will on an unwilling other—a far more active role than is usually ascribed to so-called masochists. The gratification one seeks is to wield the power to get essential needs met, not just to endure bad treatment as a perverse source of pleasure. This felt closer to the truth than any other explanation of the behavior of obsessive lovers that I had ever seen, and points the way to changing it through understanding.

  The way I acted with Michael had every characteristic of the maddening, desperate, and ambivalent ties that Stark depicts. As she says, “Choosing a good object is not a viable option. A good object does not satisfy. Rather, the need … is to re-encounter the old bad object—and then to compel [it] to become good.” Why do you endlessly pursue modern-day equivalents of the “old bad object”? Because it was the only one you had to rely on as a child, and is the only model you have now. Without it there is nothing. By attempting to undo a trauma, you guarantee its endless repetition. Only recognition, grieving, and insight rob it of its power.

  The author offers as a grimly funny example a woman with a recalcitrant alcoholic father who chooses to love not a teetotaler but another recalcitrant alcoholic. She then tries to reform him, even though “a panel of 10,000 ‘objective’ judges would probably have been able to predict” that it would never happen. You override even the best advice if taking it leads to conclusions you cannot bear to know.

  The problematic beloved frustrates you not only by withholding himself but also by intermittently giving himself; this fosters the illusion that he could be consistently available if only the conditions were right. As Stark says, “[He] initially tantalize[s] by offering the seductive promise of … relatedness, but … later devastate[s] by rescinding that enticement.”

  The beloved’s ambivalence is a prerequisite for his being chosen. We have uncanny radar for people who meet our unconscious needs; it is part of the universal human compulsion to relive and remake the past through intimate relationships in the present.

  Although the enticement keeps you coming back, it also makes you hate the perpetrator and yourself. Stark describes the rage that this behavior provokes as the compulsion to punish the disappointing object whenever the impossibility of converting it becomes undeniable. The golden condom and the disastrous seduction were my attempts to punish my object when I could no longer deny the impossibility of changing him into what I needed him to be. No masochist—all relentless lovers are masochists�
��likes to be reminded that she is also a sadist, but this fact must be confronted if she ever hopes to break the cycle.

  The costs of holding on to the illusion of control are obvious, but the relentless lover has reasons for clinging to it. Pursuing an unrequited love is an attempt to achieve “belated mastery” by making the past come out differently. According to Stark, relentless hope wards off unbearable helplessness and despair. If you believe that accepting the truth cannot be endured, you have no other choice. Questioning that foregone conclusion—and identifying what you are doing to maintain a fantasy—is an important step toward eventually refuting it.

  How does anyone ever break out of this all-engulfing, self-destructive, tragic pursuit of relationships that offer, as I lamented in my diary, “at least thrice the pain as pleasure”? It starts with making the choice to look at reality—both past and present—rather than to look away from it; you must force yourself to acknowledge that changing another person is both your secret desire and a doomed enterprise.

  This decision is an act of will, which is under your control, unlike the original traumatizing parent or the current unloving lover. Exercising will builds esteem from within through action on one’s own behalf; it disproves the premise that only another person can provide it. The result, long in coming and always worth the effort, is the experience of authentic agency in your own life, a sense of self that cannot be destroyed because it is not dependent on anybody else. You are putting your destiny in your own hands.

  This can lead to requited love with someone who can give wholeheartedly. Grieving over relentless hope allows real hope to be born.

  THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

  I don’t remember when the dreams started, but I know that they troubled and perplexed me for at least thirty years. They made regular appearances, at least bimonthly, for all that time. They were so much a part of my nocturnal life that I named the series after the city in which they inevitably took place—the city where I went to college and where my relationship with Michael unfolded. Each one had the same theme, expressed the same emotional content, and provoked the same reaction in me on awakening, which was to be greatly relieved to discover that it was “only” a dream.