by Frank Tallis
‘I don’t understand how it happened. I just don’t understand.’ I noticed his foot tapping impatiently. ‘Can you give me any answers?’ His emphasis converted an innocent question into a challenge that also carried with it a subtle slur, the imputation of impotence.
‘That rather depends on your questions,’ I replied.
His pale cheeks acquired some colour. ‘What’s it all about? I mean… life, love. What’s it all about?’
Love and life are often linked together because it is almost impossible to think about life without love. In a very real sense, when we ask questions about the nature of love we are also asking very deep questions about what it is to be human and how to live.
My young patient threw his arms out and kept them suspended in the air: ‘Well?’
Chapter 1
The Barrister’s Clerk
Love that accepts no denial
We were seated on two high-backed armchairs, facing each other across a small table. Within easy reach was the indispensable tool of the professional psychotherapist, a box of tissues—perhaps the most underwhelming of all occupational accessories. I’ve spent many, many hours of my life watching people cry.
Megan was a woman in her mid-forties, conservatively dressed, with soft, rounded features. Her hair was dark brown and styled in a neat bob—the straight sides curled inwards under her chin. She had a kind face. In repose, her features retained the suggestion of a deferential, self-conscious smile. The hem of her skirt descended some way below her knees and her shoes were of the sensible variety. An uncharitable person might have described her as dowdy.
Her GP had sent me a referral letter summarising the key facts of her case. Referral letters (typically dictated onto a recording device and later transcribed by a secretary) are neutral in tone. The short, clipped sentences tend to stifle drama: name, age, address, circumstances. Yet, Megan’s history had retained its theatrical heat. The GP’s bullet-point delivery had failed to refrigerate the essential elements of a tragic love story: emotional extremity, reckless abandon, passion and desire.
Before Megan stepped into my consulting room I’d studied the referral letter and, naturally, wondered what she would look like. My brain was quick to cast a suitable romantic heroine. I had imagined someone lean, tall, with wild hair and haunted eyes. I have to admit I was a little disappointed when Megan walked in.
At some level all clichés are true and appearances can be very deceptive. We rarely see each other when we first meet. It takes a lot of looking to see who is really there. At that early juncture, I could see only a barrister’s clerk. In reality, the creature sitting in front of me was far more exotic, but I couldn’t see past the obstruction of my own prejudices.
After a few introductory remarks, I explained that I had read her doctor’s referral letter. Nevertheless, I still wanted to hear her version of events.
‘It’s difficult,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I’m sure it is.’
‘I can tell you things,’ she continued. ‘I can tell you what happened—but it’s so difficult to express how it feels.’
‘There’s no rush,’ I replied. ‘Just take your time.’
Other than a few episodes of mild depression, Megan had never suffered from any significant psychological problems. ‘My depression was never very serious,’ she said. ‘I mean, not like some people I know. I just used to get a bit moody, that’s all. And after a few weeks my mood would lift and I’d feel okay again.’
‘Did you identify any triggers?’
‘The barristers I work for can be demanding. Perhaps it was stress.’
I nodded sympathetically and made a few notes.
Megan had been married for twenty years. Her husband, Philip, was an accountant and they had always been happy together. ‘We don’t have any children,’ she volunteered. ‘It isn’t that we made a decision not to have children—it was just never the right time. We kept putting it off until eventually it didn’t seem an issue any more. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, to have had children, to be a mum, but I can’t say it’s one of life’s big regrets. I don’t think I’ve missed out. And I’m sure Phil feels the same way.’
Two years earlier Megan had had to consult a dentist who specialised in complicated extractions.
‘Can you remember meeting him for the first time?’
‘Daman?’ Her use of the dentist’s given name was a little unusual. It needn’t have been significant, but in this instance it was.
‘Mr Verma.’ I wasn’t correcting her, merely confirming that we were talking about the same person.
She looked at me quizzically and I made a small gesture, encouraging her to continue. ‘He examined me—told me that I should have the tooth removed—and I went home.’
‘Did you find him attractive, did you feel anything?’
‘I thought he was quite handsome. He had a pleasant manner. But…’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. You see, this is why it’s so difficult. These things are so hard to describe. Perhaps I felt something—right at the beginning. Yes. I probably did. I just wasn’t sure what was happening. I was confused.’
I detected a note of distress in her voice. ‘It’s okay…’
Daman Verma performed the operation. There were no problems and everything went to plan. When the general anaesthetic wore off and Megan woke up, she felt different. ‘I was aware of people moving around me—the two nurses… There were sounds, voices. I opened my eyes and looked up at a light on the ceiling and I remember thinking: I’ve got to see him. I wasn’t frightened or worried. I didn’t want to know how the operation had gone. All that I wanted was to see him.’
‘Why?’
‘I just… had this need. It felt—I don’t know—necessary.’
‘Did you want to say something to him?’
‘No. I just wanted to see him.’
‘Yes, but why?’ I pressed her for a more precise answer but she was either unwilling or unable to give me one.
The dentist was called and he came to the recovery room. He held Megan’s hand and probably said some words of reassurance. She couldn’t remember, because she wasn’t really listening. She had become entirely absorbed by his face, which struck her as being unnaturally beautiful, a face that in her view expressed the prime virtues of masculinity—strength, competence, accomplishment—and she discovered in his eyes something quite extraordinary, something that was so unexpected that it almost made her gasp: mutuality, reciprocation. He wanted her as much as she wanted him. It was obvious. Why hadn’t she seen it before? When he tried to move away she gripped his hand a little tighter. He looked embarrassed. Of course, he would be embarrassed. He couldn’t show his feelings, not there, not in front of the nurses. How could he make a declaration of love in the recovery room? He had his reputation to consider, he was a professional. She was mildly amused by his play-acting, his clumsy attempts to conceal the truth. She released his fingers, knowing, with absolute certainty, that the love they felt for each other was so strong, so utterly overwhelming, that they would spend the rest of their lives together and very likely die together.
A princess wakes from a deep, enchanted sleep and gazes into the eyes of her Prince Charming. This scene appears in Little Briar Rose by the Brothers Grimm, but the Brothers Grimm were preceded over a hundred years earlier by Charles Perrault, who wrote The Sleeping Beauty.
Is it possible to fall so deeply in love, so quickly? Or is that something that happens only in fairy stories? Judgements concerning attractiveness are made in a matter of milliseconds, and, if they are positive, they are followed by congruent inferences. We assume that beautiful people are more likeable, friendly and interesting. It’s a well-documented phenomenon that psychologists call the Halo Effect. Megan, however, had experienced something much more profound. It seems improbable that strangers can form an instant, meaningful and enduring bond. How can it possibly work out? The parties don’t know each other. Yet, a high proportio
n of the general population claim to have experienced love at first sight, and many love-struck couples stay together. Some psychologists have suggested that instant attraction confers certain evolutionary advantages. For example, it hastens sexual contact so fewer opportunities for reproduction are wasted. This increases the probability of genes being transferred to the next generation, which is good for the individual (or at least their genes) and ultimately good for the species. Proneness to falling in love at first sight might be a very fundamental biological predisposition.
The fact that Megan started falling in love with Verma the instant she met him might not be so very remarkable; however, her insistence that her feelings were reciprocated was something quite different, as was her certainty. People often talk about being on the same wavelength and knowing each other’s minds, but few would say that they have certain knowledge of someone else’s thoughts and feelings, especially after such a short acquaintance.
‘How did you know that Daman Verma had fallen in love with you?’
‘I just knew.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘I just knew.’
The repetition of this single phrase created a conversational stockade. I paused to consider how I might best negotiate the impasse. From Freud’s time to the present, psychotherapists have made much use of a technique known as Socratic questioning. It is used to challenge assumptions and help patients think more critically. Socratic questioning tends to work best when it isn’t interrogative, but gentle and oblique. The approach is consistent with a nugget of oriental wisdom that advises: ‘Flow around obstacles, don’t confront them.’
‘Why is it,’ I asked, ‘that we believe some things and not others?’
Megan squinted at me as if I’d suddenly gone out of focus. ‘Because we have reasons…’
‘So what were your reasons; your reasons for believing that Daman Verma had fallen in love with you?’
‘It’s not something you can analyse.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. But I’d still like to talk about this for a while. Just to see if we can learn anything?’
Megan remained silent. Sometimes—during therapy—a silence descends that seems to arrest the passage of time. Everything becomes still. So still, in fact, that even asking a question seems clumsy and coercive. I changed position. This simple expedient broke the spell and time began to flow again.
‘I could see it in his eyes.’
‘What could you see?’
‘His need. You can see things in people’s eyes, can’t you?’ Defensiveness had made her voice brittle.
‘We interpret expressions all the time. But do we really know what someone’s thinking just from how they look?’
‘Not always.’
‘You were Daman Verma’s patient and you’d asked to see him. Is it possible that you misinterpreted his expression? That what you saw was actually something closer to caring or concern?’
‘What I saw was more meaningful. They say there’s a look—you know?—the look of love…’
People do indeed talk about the look of love. What they are actually referring to is something that scientists call the copulatory gaze: the eyes lock for several seconds before one party looks away. It occurs when prospective lovers first encounter each other and this intense, probing stare usually signals sexual interest. Apes do much the same thing.
‘You’re certain.’
‘Yes.’
‘There aren’t any alternative explanations?’
‘No, not really…’
‘It was in his eyes.’
‘I know what I saw.’ She raised her hands, showed me her palms and gave me an apologetic smile. What was she supposed to say?
In reality, there had been nothing exceptional in Verma’s eyes. Not even the faintest glimmer of desire. Megan was just another patient. He was a busy dentist with several affiliations and a large private practice. As far as he was concerned, they had met, he had operated on her and now they would part company. When he left the recovery room, he might have reasonably supposed that, apart from a few follow-up appointments, he would never see her again. But if he did think that, his supposition would, in the fullness of time, be proved wrong. Very wrong.
‘I couldn’t stop thinking about him. And I could sense him thinking about me.’
‘What do you mean? Sense…’
Megan ignored my question. ‘It was so unfair. We both wanted to be together, but he couldn’t work out how to deal with his situation.’
‘If he’d really wanted to be with you, wouldn’t he have left his wife?’
‘No. He’s a kind person—a really kind person. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings.’
‘Did he ever say that to you?’
‘He didn’t need to.’ She looked at me with a weary expression. It was obvious that she didn’t want to justify herself again. Even Socratic questioning gets tiresome.
After her operation, Megan obsessed about Verma day and night. Her sleep was disturbed and when she returned to work she couldn’t concentrate. She yearned to be near him.
‘Was the attraction sexual?’
‘No,’ she protested. Then she sighed. ‘Well, yes. That was part of it. But it was only a small part. It’s misleading—sex. I mean, if it had been possible for us to be together, and the physical side hadn’t happened, that wouldn’t have mattered. Not really. We’d have still wanted each other.’
Her husband had noticed that her mood was deteriorating. There was no obvious cause. He tried talking to her, but she was distant and withdrawn.
Weeks passed.
Megan’s desire to contact Verma mounted day by day. Separation was becoming intolerable, a kind of torment. She found the courage to telephone him. ‘It was an awkward conversation. I gave him a chance to tell me how he felt but he was obviously scared. The experience had been too overwhelming for him.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘At first we talked about my recovery—how it was going. Eventually I had to say something more direct. I suggested that we meet up for a coffee, to discuss what we were going to do. Temple isn’t that far from Harley Street. I said I’d get a cab.’
‘And how did he respond?’
‘He pretended he didn’t understand. I persevered, but he was evasive. He made some excuse and hung up.’
‘He was frightened by his own feelings and had to end the call.’
‘Exactly…’
‘Is that the only interpretation?’
She shrugged.
Megan wasn’t discouraged. She phoned Verma repeatedly, sometimes several times a day. The dental secretaries became frosty and asked her to stop. After conducting a little detective work she was able to obtain his home number. When his wife, Angee, picked up the phone, Megan did her best to explain the situation as sympathetically as she could—because that’s what Daman would have wanted—but the dentist’s wife became irritable.
‘She told me to get help.’
‘What did you think of that?’
‘I was expecting it.’
‘So you could see how your behaviour might have looked to others?’
‘Mad, you mean?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ I was being disingenuous. That’s exactly what I meant.
‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I could see…’
‘Didn’t that make you pause to reflect—reconsider what you were doing?’
‘It wasn’t important to me what other people thought.’
‘What about now? Does it matter now?’
We stared at each other across the small table.
Megan wrote letters to Verma every day; long, detailed letters suggesting solutions, begging him to recognise that their love could not be disowned or denied. He would never be happy unless he accepted the truth. What was the point of pretending otherwise? He wasn’t to blame, neither of them was to blame, how could they be? Something remarkable had happened, something wonderful and miraculous, and there was no going back. T
hey had to be brave and embrace their future together. Their lives would never be the same. And if they attempted to live apart they would live as shadows, wretched and incomplete. And it wasn’t only their future at stake. They had to think about their spouses’ futures too. It was wrong to deceive Philip and Angee, to perpetuate a lie. They were good people and deserved more than a sham marriage.
‘I waited outside his practice. I waited for hours. And when he came out I ran over to him.’
She paused and bit her lower lip.
‘What happened?’
‘He didn’t want to talk. I told him I understood, that it was all happening so fast that maybe he needed more time. But in the end I said to him you’re going to have to accept that this is real.’
Verma contacted Megan’s GP, who contacted Megan’s husband later the same day.
‘What did Philip say when he found out what you were doing?’
Megan looked at the ceiling and placed her fingers over her mouth. Her speech was muffled but still intelligible: ‘He wasn’t very happy.’
What was wrong with Megan? Before meeting Daman Verma, her life had been fairly routine—a steady job, holidays and hobbies, the company of her husband. All that had suddenly changed.
Megan was suffering from a rare but well-documented mental illness called de Clérambault’s syndrome, which was first described in detail by the French psychiatrist Gaëten de Clérambault in 1921. Typically, the affected individual, usually a woman, falls in love with a man (with whom she has had little or no prior contact) and comes to believe that he is also passionately in love with her. In many instances, the sufferer alleges that it was the man who fell in love first. This perception arises in the absence of any actual stimulus or encouragement. The man—sometimes also referred to as the victim or object—is often older, of higher social status or a celebrity. His inaccessibility may act as a spur. A hapless and unwelcome pursuit follows which is experienced by the victim as extreme harassment. Men can also develop de Clérambault’s syndrome, although women are much more vulnerable. The exact ratio isn’t known, but it is thought to be about three to one.