the solipsist in love

The epidemic of unrequited love

It amazes me how many of my friends are currently involved in an unrequited love relationship, in which they are the ones pining after emotionally unavailable jerkfaces. Is this just me – do I attract this kind into my circle? It makes sense that I would feel a sense of camaraderie with them; I’ve been susceptible to the same disease all of my adult life. For the most part I’ve weaned myself off the long-term version (my longest bout was 10 years), but the story of my love life has repeatedly featured me me throwing myself at guys who couldn’t match my commitment. Examples?

Current: I’m possibly becoming interested in a guy who is already seeing someone else and is hesitating in making legitimate space for me in his life, even though he says he wants to.

Spring 2008: Jon, a guy I’d been chasing off an on for almost a year (who originally told me that even though he had no prospects he would rather “play the field” than date me – but we should keep having sex!) finally decided he would like to try out a relationship. Within literally 3 days, he told me it was too much work for him and that he didn’t think he wanted to do it anymore. Please note that this guy lived about a thousand miles away from me at the time I started courting him, though we had just moved to the same city when we started our “relationship.”

Winter 2008: I met a guy who was crazy about me (this would be Travis). He lived 3000 miles away. He also had no prospects and hadn’t in quite a while (almost a year?). We got along fantastically and were crazy about each other. But he wanted to “play the field.” Even though I offered to move to the East Coast to be closer to him. He was just not ready to be in a relationship with any one person.

Summer 2007: Gus, the boy of the 10-year infatuation, came back in a flurry of toxic romanticism to try one last time to make things work. We had already broken up (fled from each other, really) at least four times by then. He arrived for a two-week visit (again, he lived 3000 miles away); afterward he stopsped returning my calls. Finally I called to break up with him since he didn’t have the balls to do it, and he confessed that he simply wasn’t ready to uproot his life to be with me. Never mind that his life at that moment consisted of trimming hedges professionally and occupying his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house. (Note that almost exactly one year later he called me to say that he was afraid he had made a terrible mistake and he hoped he hadn’t lost me forever. We can all see where this is going.)

Spring 2007: I started an intense romantic relationship with a guy who initially was all about sharing a life and being completely open. Within two months he announced he wanted to move three states over, and knew there was no way I could join him because I have commitments where I lived. He begged me, though, to “pretend” he wasn’t leaving until he actually moved. (I refused, thank god.)

I know I sound bitter, but honestly none of these guys were bad people. For the most part I still think fondly of them and I don’t blame any of them for how things went down. In all examples, you could say the external circumstances were just not compatible with the pursuit of a long-term relationship. But underlying that in every case was some kind of psychological resistance on the guy’s part to laying himself open. Maybe that was related only to some temporary emotional state that made it impossible at that moment to get involved. Or maybe these guys were just more willing than I was to admit that the pairing didn’t feel right on some level. That’s another problem I have: I compromise my needs and desires too much. I am always willing to work and work at a relationship even when it’s best just to let it go.

I’m inclined to believe that a lot of women have this complex of compromising, settling, taking responsibility. After all, we’re socialized to bear the burden of smoothing out the rough patches in our partnerships and marriages; we are the tenders of our relationships.

But the repeated pursuit of clearly doomed, poisonous relationships with emotionally distant partners is another beast. It requires a special brand of masochism. What is it about people like us who hurt themselves this way? A few theories have floated through my head over the past several years.

We’re reenacting a childhood trauma. Having a father who neglected or abandoned us seems to be a common theme. Maybe we’re unconsciously seeking out people like our dads (who were themselves emotionally unavailable) in an attempt to create a different ending to the story. But this is a generous interpretation. Are we really trying to do things differently? Maybe we’re just compulsively replaying the event in our minds and our lives because we want to try to make sense of it. And maybe, anyway, we’re giving ourselves too much credit by thinking we might be able to do things differently – after all, the only model we have represents failure.

We are, ourselves, emotionally unavailable. Finding a partner who mirrors our own defect allows us to then blame him for holding back, when in fact if we were with someone who didn’t have this problem, we would be the ones shutting down or running away.

We don’t really want a relationship right now. Slightly different from the above possibility, maybe we are not entirely committed to the idea of getting serious with anyone, so we naturally draw in a partner who is equally ambivalent. Since this isn’t pathological, if we were to discover that we wholeheartedly wanted to be in a serious relationship, we would find ourselves with a compatible partner. (I actually shared this thought with a friend who was going through a period of meeting a lot of guys who wanted sex but nothing serious. She had convinced herself she was all right with this, but when I questioned it, she relented. I suggested she write out exactly and honestly what it was that she wanted in a relationship. Within a couple of weeks, she met a man who was completely smitten with her from the beginning; they got married last summer. Aww.)

All of these theories revolve around the central idea that in some way we are lying to ourselves about what we’re doing, what we want and/or what we’re capable of. There is nothing for it, really, except to perform the arduous task of reflection upon our deepest desires and fears, and try to exorcise our own demons. This is a great example of why I think having a therapist can be such a gift. It’s often much too difficult to see our own behaviors objectively, and it’s rare for our friends to have the insight and detachment to be able to guide us consistently. Moreover, it can be very difficult for us to believe even our best friends when they try to tell us how we’re hurting ourselves and how we might stop. We have so much invested in these compulsive patterns of behavior. I think for many of us it has become a part of our identity, this special kind of burning agony that is the mark of unrequited love. Dismantling that identification often requires the help of a professional.

If that is not a practical option, then at the very least, women with this affliction need to read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women who Run with the Wolves. Seriously. It will change your life. Do it.

Then come back here to discuss.

Photo by Scented_mirror.