by Jeanne Safer
I had a sense from the unshakable ring of conviction with which she described her self-imposed isolation that her swearing off the support of others was actually the endpoint of a process that had begun before her friends deserted her—that it was a confirmation rather than a revelation, with roots in her experiences of intimacy and its dangers to the self.
Two sources, one inspiring, the other tragic, predated Rachel’s decisive retreat from friendship after her journalistic debacle. She saw in her own family both a positive example of the rewards of self-sufficiency and a negative one of the dangers of craving companionship. Her mother was proudly independent. “She was a loner, busy all the time, and the housewives in the neighborhood couldn’t relate to her.” But her older brother had slid into addiction and death. “He was a golden boy in high school, the student council president. It was the seventies, when everybody started taking drugs. He couldn’t stand being all by himself, so he became a drug user and went rapidly downhill; a lot of people who do that right themselves later, but he never did. His death convinced me that I needed my friends too badly and that I had to change and rely only on myself.”
She clung to the conviction that she could protect herself from becoming her brother by emulating her mother and never needing another peer. Her brother, she believed, was destroyed by his hunger to belong, not by his inner demons. Resisting her own similar desire for companionship was her way to inoculate herself against sharing his downfall; she would be strong where he was weak. While the logic may be suspect, taking these stringent steps fortifies her and gives her the illusion that he too might have been saved by self-sufficiency and willpower. It is a calculation that has paid off for her even as it has limited her ability to be comforted.
* * *
There is no simple explanation why anyone turns away for good after betrayal by a friend, but a tragic end to an admired sibling, as well as an exacting nature, a dread of dependency, and unwillingness to take the risks of engagement can make intense human bonds seem too dangerous. Someone who associates emotional connection with mortal danger cuts off the possibility of proving her pessimistic notions of friendship false and makes it impossible ever to have a corrective experience. Suppressing her wish for companionship, she keeps inviolate space around her innermost self, asserting all the while that “if I had to do it over, I’d do it the same way.”
To seek friendship anew after a violation of trust, you must be willing to expose yourself once again to unpredictable losses, to take another chance on strangers who are not under your control, to accept new influences that might cloud your judgment, or even subjugate your will. These were risks that Rachel dared not take, so she retreated, proud and alone, forever more.
I CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU
Rachel’s reaction to unfriendly friends was extreme. Equally radical is the opposite response: clinging to the perpetrator ever more tightly the more outrageously you are treated. Friendship can feel like a trap to be avoided at all costs or a haven worth any price.
Why would an appealing, vivacious fourteen-year-old allow herself to be brutally humiliated and violated by a charismatic classmate and her cronies, never resisting or processing what they did to her, continuing to crave her tormentor’s company, adoring her, living for their moments together, for years afterward? Because it was the only time she had ever felt loved.
There are many unconscious layers lurking beneath the functions that a friend, particularly a thrilling one encountered at an impressionable age, fulfills, and these go well beyond somebody to talk to, hang out with, or emulate. Such a person can provide—very much like a beloved does—a reason for living or be a substitute for parental care or for a sense of self. Miriam Higgins came from the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks in rural Indiana. “My parents were the ‘crazy people’ in town,” this forthright forty-five-year-old woman recalled. “Mostly, we ate the game my father shot; there’s no way you can make squirrel taste good.” It was a background of destitution and emotional squalor that could have turned her into the kind of kid who gets sent to reform school (her brother is a career criminal) or becomes a porn star, but instead she became a psychiatrist and, not surprisingly, a vegetarian. From an early age, her allure was her most dangerous asset, which she used but which also caused her suffering, because her father desired her and her mother hated and envied her. There was nowhere to turn. “My father molested me when I was five years old,” she told me. “My mother sacrificed me to stay married to him.” She is one of the very few people I have known, including my patients, who have ever described her parents so starkly.
Miriam needed somebody to look up to, and Donna—“athletic, competent, rich, manic, and popular”—filled the bill. In addition to offering the trappings of affection, Donna gratified that most potent of desires and provided a commodity as precious and compelling as passion: “gilt”—prestige, reflected glory—by association. “She was it to me, my first love,” said Miriam. “She thought I was smart and deep. I developed an intense attachment to her, and we became best friends.” Hers was an early adolescent crush based on idealization, not sex. “She was always the first pick for teams, and I was the last,” Miriam recalled, that common gym class humiliation of the clumsy still rankling. “Donna knew how to get ahead, and she could do whatever she wanted; I couldn’t do anything, and she could do everything. I wanted to be her.”
This self-described “lost kid” basked in the warmth of her idol’s attention and appreciation, things she was starved for and that no one else had ever given her. Donna—who, unbeknownst to her acolyte, had serious problems of her own—hungered for adoration as much as Miriam needed someone to adore. Miriam describes, still rapturous, the dawn of their passionate friendship. “Her family had a huge house with land and horses. We’d get up early and ride together and then watch the sun rise as we ate chicken soup with buttered crackers, the most delicious food in the world to me”—particularly after a diet of squirrel. “My need to have her love was so intense; when we were getting along, it was the best high I’d ever experienced. She was my sun, the center of my world, and everything revolved around her.” The comparison with her own wretched home life made Donna’s charms especially compelling. “She was just so much better than my family that I clung to her, or the idea of her, for many years.”
But there was a horrific dark side that emerged early in their courtship. When the girls were in eighth grade, Donna gave a slumber party and deigned to invite Miriam, who was ecstatic. “I was very excited to go. There were six of us in her finished basement—it was not a dank one like ours.” All of a sudden, the atmosphere changed from delightful to ominous, and Miriam found herself pinned down and stripped naked by Donna and her posse. “They started making fun of my flat chest and laughed at how small my breasts were—I developed late. They called my nipples ‘chocolate chips.’ They poked and touched me everywhere.” Because she had everything to lose, she kept silent and stayed rooted to the spot, and the party continued as though nothing untoward had occurred. “Then we watched movies, ate popcorn, and went to sleep,” she said, her voice now flat. “It was clear in my mind that she had abused me. I think of it as rape, really. I don’t remember a lot of things from that period—I dissociated—but this I remember. She took advantage of me. It was a classic sadomasochistic relationship, and I think it was sexual for her, but not for me.” Much of her childhood suffering became a self-protective blur, but the excruciating details of this episode she could not obliterate.
I was appalled and incredulous when Miriam told me that they remained best friends throughout high school, but her explanation of her ongoing attraction to Donna made sense. “It was having the attention of a very exciting object; I was like a dog chasing a car. I really needed her. Everything that seemed important to me she had and she was. Of course, I knew that all the sadistic stuff was bad, but she cared about me, and my parents hated me, and I couldn’t do better than that. I was focused on the addictive drug of her affect
ion, and I would do anything to get it—like a crack addict. When Donna’s with me and she’s telling me, ‘I love you; you’re so stunning’—that’s my fix.”
The power of her longing is still so potent that she switches to the present tense when she describes it. She got something essential that she needed—the authentic, even if inconsistent and unpredictable, loving appreciation of someone she admired, and it sustained her; unlike Rachel, she did not consider the price exorbitant.
Miriam’s description reminded me not so much of a compulsively car-chasing dog but of a desperately clinging baby rhesus monkey, the kind psychologist Harry Harlow studied in the 1950s in a series of experiments3 on the effects of maternal deprivation that were both compelling and controversial because they were so cruel. I have never forgotten the photographs of these little creatures with their despairing humanlike faces holding tightly to the awful wire surrogate mothers Harlow fashioned and that he named “Iron Maidens.” They provided milk but shot out sharp spikes, administered electric shocks, and blasted the babies with cold air. No matter how they were tortured, the babies would not let go, because these mothers were all they had.
The dynamics between the troubled teenage friends changed dramatically when Miriam finally no longer had a flat chest and became popular with boys. She also acquired another considerable asset: a driver’s license. “By the time I was sixteen, I had more capital—I looked older than I was, so I could buy liquor, and I had a car. I developed new confidence,” she said. Her final victory, which reveals the sadistic streak in every masochist, was to leave town at age seventeen with Donna’s former boyfriend. She soon ditched the boyfriend but never went back. Donna became seriously depressed for some time after her departure, demonstrating that their needs were more enmeshed than they appeared on the surface.
* * *
Miriam’s tie to her beloved tormentor did not dissipate quickly, even after years passed and she completed a lengthy psychotherapeutic treatment, became a physician, married a caring if self-contained man, and established her psychiatric practice in another state. Even when her identity was far more solid than it had been in adolescence and she had friendships not based exclusively on desperate neediness, the old tie to her wire-mother-surrogate still had a hold on her. She felt compelled to impress Donna by sending her copies of the two books she published, but she never got a response.
Then, years later, Donna, now married with four children, friended her on Facebook. Miriam forwarded the request to me:
I know, in the past, that you have tried to get in touch with me. The reason I didn’t respond was selfish on my part. I just felt too busy with life to really invest in a friendship with you. Let’s just be friends on a “Christmas Card” level. I am very happy with my busy busy life. I hope you understand.
The thrill was not entirely gone, but this time, at last, Miriam’s response was not masochistic enthrallment:
I don’t want to be “friends” with someone who won’t actually talk with me. If you want to have a real conversation, let me know. I am readily available. To be honest, I feel that you have been really cruel to me. For us to even interact socially, I would need to talk with you about it. I realize that I had my own issues in becoming attached to people who did not treat me well, and certainly I had my own problems with aggression. But some of the things that you did, some of the things that I allowed, make it really hard for me to think of you as a superficial friend. For me, history is not so erasable.
Now that she finally has a sense of self, Miriam no longer needs to cling to Donna or tolerate her cruelty. She also sees through her former friend’s self-promoting attempts to make her feel inferior; a person with a genuinely full and productive life is no longer awed by someone who touts her own “busy busy” one. Now she has nonsadistic sources of sustenance, when before there had been only Donna. Miriam can finally think and speak clearly, confront the truth, and demand to be treated with respect. Her eyes are open, and she is fully awake. “I see my relationship with Donna as a distant but important dream,” she said. “My attachment to her was irrational.” Is there any love—even one with far fewer sinister elements—that is not?
Unlike Rachel, Miriam craves intimacy and is not totally satisfied with her current friendships, which, not surprisingly, tend to be with people who are “safe” rather than seductive. “Since Donna, I have been careful,” she says. “I usually choose passive-aggressive people who don’t express anger directly.” Considering how the actively angry person treated her, this is a step up. Her desperate quest for love once led her to accept victimization and never protest, protect herself, or reject her tormentor. Now that she has an identity of her own, she has freed herself from bondage. Remarkably, she continues to acknowledge, and to prize, the love and admiration that was priceless amid the pathology.
THE OCNOPHIL AND THE PHILOBAT
Why did Miriam’s tumultuous affair with Donna not make her phobic about friendship? Objectively, humiliation and sexual molestation seem far worse than being left by your friends to publish the high school newspaper by yourself. But trauma is as subjective as desire, and the meanings we attribute to experiences, as well as the context in which they occur, determine their ultimate effect on our lives.
Miriam craves loving companionship. “I appreciate friendships a lot,” she told me. The misery of her childhood (and lots of hard emotional work) made her resilient and taught her to seek the positive even in dreadful situations. She cultivates a talent for intimacy, while Rachel mistrusts and rejects it; the solipsistic journalist feels more in control, and more herself, when she is by herself. Paradoxically, Rachel’s tragic and talented brother proved a worse example than Miriam’s criminal sibling; since Miriam never looked up to him or identified with him, his fate was not something she worried that she would share. She never imagined that he was led astray by his desire for human contact.
Miriam concluded—and I agree—that Donna did her more good than harm. Their passionate attachment was a source of real love, not just torment. Donna, with all her dangerous flaws, buoyed Miriam up at a critical time in her youth when she had nothing else, when her parents rejected and exploited her. Now she has learned to seek sustenance from safer sources. It is counterintuitive but true that you can get precious things from someone who treats you badly, that the wonderful is often mixed with the terrible in human relationships.
Michael Balint,4 a founder of the British object relations school of psychoanalysis and an innovative and profound clinician with a quirky mind, invented two cumbersome—even comical—words to describe the opposite temperaments exemplified by Rachel and Miriam: “ocnophil” and “philobat.” These terms never caught on—they do not trip off the tongue like other Latin-based neologisms like id, ego, and superego—but they perfectly describe basic attitudes toward intimacy central to the way people experience friendship and its discontents. Philobats are loners who retreat when anxious. They consider relationships more dangerous than comforting. The close-binding ocnophils cling when they are anxious and seek human contact to assuage their fears. Relationships are comforting and safe for the ocnophil, but the lonely space between them and others is fraught with danger; the self-sufficient philobat prefers to cope with danger and uncertainty alone.
For every ocnophil and philobat—as well as for those of us who are an amalgam of both or who vacillate between the two extremes—friendship’s end is shattering. It leaves us differently bereft than passion does, but just as bereft. How we recover, and what course our lives take after such a loss, may differ depending on life circumstances, history, and personality, but there is no avoiding the anguish of losing a precious companion at any age.
No matter whether we seek it or flee from it, friendship has its dark side, like every other kind of love. But I believe, as Miriam does, that you still get more from friends than you lose, even when you factor in the emotional devastation and self-doubt that their leaving causes. Trauma, like so much else, is in the eye of the behol
der. Despite the pain I have experienced as well as any pain from betrayal still in my future, I’m not canceling my ocnophil membership anytime soon.
PART III
FULFILLED LOVE
9
LATE FIRST MARRIAGE
The Triumph of Hope over Resignation
AT LONG LAST, LOVE
Mieczyslaw Horszowski, last of the great romantic Polish piano virtuosos in the tradition of Chopin and Arthur Rubinstein, married for the first time in 1981 at the age of eighty-nine. He wed Bice Costa, an Italian concert pianist (a fan and first-time bride) forty years his junior. Why did he wait so long? “I didn’t find the right girl until then,” he explained wryly, adding, “It only goes to prove that there is no such thing as a confirmed bachelor.” They had twelve satisfying years together until he died a month before his 101st birthday.
Whenever it happens, late first marriage is qualitatively different from second marriage. It is not, as the renowned eighteenth-century English author Samuel Johnson quipped about second marriage, “the triumph of hope over experience.” It is the triumph of hope over resignation, a resignation fraught with bitterness, envy, shame, sorrow, and—occasionally—relief. Marrying for the first time later in life means defying the verdict—false, as it turns out—that you are destined to live out your days alone. This requires overcoming the inner obstacles to identifying, let alone pursuing, a partner capable of lasting love. Becoming authentically emotionally available, which involves expressing feelings and responding to other people’s, is a prerequisite, and it is often an arduous, time-consuming job. Self-created impediments and unconscious residual wounds from the past are far more daunting than the outer obstacles (such as the absence of available partners within a fifty-mile radius) that I have frequently heard patients and acquaintances cite for remaining single.