Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession

by Lisa A. Phillips

If I hovered on the margins of his life often enough, one day he might return my gaze and announce that he was free to love me back.

The weekend came and went. I waited until Monday evening to call him. She was still there. They had decided to stay together. I fell into deep despair. I woke up each morning with a tremendous yearning I was certain I would not be able to endure. My days were shaped by my efforts to distract myself. I could not stay still. I swam lap after lap at the gym. I rode my bike for miles through the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, sweating up the long, steep slopes of Bloomfield, Greenfield, Polish Hill.

I fell behind in my work, faking my way through classes I hadn’t prepared to teach.

I found another one, but the sessions with her didn’t seem to help. And when she told me I was “going too far” in my efforts to win B., I canceled my next appointment and didn’t go back to her.

I woke up one morning so overwhelmed by the prospect of facing another day that I checked myself in to the psychiatric ward at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

You might say I was lovesick. The psychiatry resident didn’t give me a specific diagnosis, though he told me in a matter-of-fact and not unkind way that I wasn’t the first woman to check herself in over a guy she couldn’t stop thinking about. He gave me a prescription for tranquilizers, which brought me stretches of relative ...

Historically, it has been used more as a means to control the unwanted woman than to help her. Lovesickness has been a label of shame, used not to heal but to put women in their place.

The myth behind the founding of Rome, in fact, is a cautionary tale about the value of property over passion.

Dido pleads for him to stay with her, but he won’t. She drags their bed and some of his belongings, including a sword she gave him, into a courtyard and sets them on fire. She climbs to the top of the pyre, falls on Aeneas’s sword, and perishes as his ship sails away.

If Dido had succeeded in keeping Aeneas by her side, the myth suggests, then Rome, the world’s first big city, would not exist. Her all-consuming passion was a threat to progress and greatness.

In a similar fashion, the jittery longing that Iustus’s wife felt for Plyades, who was likely a slave or a freedman, presented a threat to Iustus’s hold on his property and the social order that protected it.

the nameless wife’s desire was an emotional rebellion against the rigid social order. She dreamed of a life in which she was more than property and a womb, a life in which she had erotic agency that reached across stringent class divides and defied the constraints of what was likely a less than satisfactory marriage. Galen’s diagnosis took none of this into account. It reduced all her feeling, and its social context, into an illness to be cured.

The stories of Antiochus and of Iustus’s wife are repeated in medical treatises and literature from ancient times through the Renaissance. Their contrasting fates—the prince who gets what he wants and the nameless wife who doesn’t—underscore a double standard for male and female victims of lovesickness.

Antiochus’s lovesickness was righteous, the cure increasing his personal power and justifying the demise of his father’s royal union. Iustus’s wife gets nothing but a diagnosis, a label put on her insubordinate heart. For men, lovesickness had heroic and erotic power. For women, the disease emphasized their degradation.

In the nineteenth century, romantic obsession took on a dual identity. It was seen as both a form of lovesickness and glorified as a spiritual and creative force.

The French physician Jean-Étienne Esquirol saw romantic obsession as a form of monomania, a condition in which the sufferer focuses exhaustively and exclusively on one thing. Though monomania in a clinical context was considered a “partial insanity,” it was also associated with art, learning, and great achievement.

The monomaniac, then, might end up in an asylum, or he might end up making a great discovery or creating a superlative work of art. The blurry distinction between the productive obsessive and the ruined one was an endless source of fascination in the Romantic era, played out most prominently in the character of Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist obsessed with bringing life to the dead.

Fictional female characters—chief among them Catherine in Wuthering Heights—swept up in this “partial insanity” fascinated readers. Lovesickness could be painfully glorious, a badge of honor rather than a label of shame.

The labels, however, obscured what may have been a much more important symptom: women’s discontent with their limited opportunities in love and life.

She was unhappy in her marriage but had no real options outside of it. She described her husband, a businessman who traveled frequently, as an “unpoetic soul” with a mean spirit. She was an intellectually curious and well-read woman who questioned religious authority and toyed with the then-radical ideas of atheism and evolutionism. She scribbled her illicit feelings for Dr. Lane in the pages of her diary, a volume meant to be private. But she also saw her passion as a force that exposed the limitations of her marriage.

In a different world, she would be free to pursue a better, more mutual relationship instead of being trapped in an oppressive marriage. In her diary, she pleaded for understanding from her imagined audience: “You see my inmost soul. You must despise and hate me,” she wrote. “Do you also pause to pity?”

Romanticism presented a lasting emotional dare: How intense can you be? How powerfully can you love? Romantic obsession was no longer pathological. Love was supposed to consume and complete us.

Obsessive love was as close as we could get to enlightenment, particularly as old mating systems—arranged marriages, formal dating rituals, rules of sexual conduct—fell away.

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov’s 1979 bestseller Love and Limerence reflected these shifts. She criticized the psychologists and sociologists of her time for failing to fully acknowledge passionate love.

Tennov argued that passionate, obsessive love—what she called limerence—was a distinct yet common form of love, not an abnormality.

As the century drew to a close, the era of romantic practicality was dawning. Obsessive unrequited love became not a grasping for transcendence but a sign of weakness.

Women should stay cool and distant in the mating game. Romantic disappointment and obsessive love became problems women needed to stifle, as efficiently as possible, in the Machiavellian search for a mate.

In 1998, the year of my obsession, I could have been a case study for everything a single wo...

Around the same time, researchers began to gain unprecedented insight into the neurochemistry of love and attachment, and how pharmaceuticals might ease the impact of rejection.

“He apologized because he wanted to get laid,” the friend said flatly.

She didn’t want her friends to know what she was putting up with.

Her mental state swung from one extreme to another. She fantasized about running into him at a moment when she was looking and feeling so great that he couldn’t resist her. They’d start over and he would finally be hers. Then she would think about how much his behavior hurt her, and she would sink into a depression.

The situation became so distressing that Samara gathered the courage to cut off all communication.

After they broke up, her thoughts returned to Jim. She emailed him, thinking he might be up for one more whirlwind weekend together. He wrote back to decline. He and Wonder Woman were engaged.

Samara’s story is something of a parable for every woman who ever believed her beloved is an incurable Lothario, or somehow psychologically broken, incapable of loving any woman in a lasting and real way.

Such emotional cripples exist, but too often the reality is that he hasn’t met his match yet, a woman whose powers of attraction seem, to the unwa...

For Samara, the realization that she would never be that woman magnified and darkened her obsession with Jim. She was so distraught that she woke up every morning with dry heaves and felt a pressure “like a hippopotamus on my...

She didn’t understand why her reaction was so extreme, far beyond what she would consider a normal response to unrequited love. She had a happy childhood. She is very close to her family, particularly her father, whom she describes as steady and committed, “the opposite” of Jim. The only thing that seemed to be wrong with her was that ...

She went to a therapist, who told her she likely had a disorder she’d nev...

Limerence still meant the involuntary state of being in love and experiencing an overwhelming and preoccupying need to have those feelings returned. But it was no longer considered a “normal human experience” in the way Tennov described it. Instead, limerence described a disorder.

You can’t stop thinking about the beloved. You’re euphoric yet insecure, always in need of his attention. Your energy is up.

Yet while new love settles down after six to twenty-four months into a calmer, more contented mutual relationship, people with limerence are stuck in this state of amour fou, which persists no matter whether the relationship breaks up or never forms at all.

Limerence can plague even a relationship that lasts, when one or both partners are perpetually needy, obsessed, and insecure about the partnership—a condition also known a...

Wakin says limerence has features of both OCD and substance addiction. Addicts need more and more of their drug of preference to get high and spend more and more of their time getting it. People with limerence are never satisfied with the attention they get; if they’re not getting any, they can’t stop themselves from seeking it. Both addicts and people with limerence suffer physically and emotionally if they can’t get their fix, and both struggle to kick the habit—or know they should. OCD sufferers live in a state of anxiety and obsession, whi...

“Limerence can likely become the strongest kind of OCD and addiction that can be felt,” Wakin told me. “Although alcohol and gambling can consume you, casinos and liquor don’t have a life of their own. They don’t remind you that they are still alive. They don’t make you wonder what they’re doing when they’re not paying attention to you. So when you’re obsessed with another living person, the obsession is even stronger.”

Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who studies romantic love, says that “romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.”

What makes matters more intense is that being in love causes a decline in the levels of another neurotransmitter, serotonin, which is involved in regulating aggression, mood, and anxiety.

While couples in the tumult of romance can find refuge in the soothing effects of oxytocin—the so called “cuddle chemical”—and vasopressin—believed to foster attachment—the unrequited lover can’t catch a break from anxious obsession.

After romantic rejection, blood flow increases not only to the VTA, but also to brain areas related to deep emotional attachment, addictive behavior, and physical pain. We become even more enamored. Our longing for contact worsens. We literally hurt. And we try to figure out what happened.

need to love more sanely, argues psychiatrist Frank Tallis, and not overvalue passion and romance. He’s one of the many thinkers who extol the satisfaction rates among couples in arranged marriages, which rival or exceed those of couples in marriages of choice—the takeaway message being that our own faulty hearts aren’t very good guides to marital success.