Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession

by Lisa A. Phillips

Chemistry, she points out, causes you to ignore work, compulsively check your email, and act foolishly—and often doesn’t lead to anything lasting.

The meds may help ease the devastating pain of rejection in situations when the anguish doesn’t seem to cease. Yet serotonin-regulating drugs also may diminish people’s ability to feel deep human attachment and sexual desire, forces that spur reproduction and make the human experience richer, albeit more challenging and complex.

When an essay she wrote about her limerence diagnosis was published in a popular women’s magazine, she felt confident enough with him to tell him about it. When he stopped calling not long after, she had no idea whether the article had scared him away or if he’d been put off by a recent weekend trip that hadn’t gone as well as she’d expected.

She was disappointed but not distraught. She had been careful, she told me, not to “give myself to him,” as she felt she’d done with Jim. She had no regrets. It was part of who she was to write openly about her life. She sounded wise and cautious, enviably self-possessed.

But she was terrified of being without her husband. She called Slater and pleaded with him to make her stop feeling what she was feeling. “Block me from your email, block me from your number,” she begged.

Slater protested that he didn’t know how to do that—and insisted there was nothing to stop. He was just being friendly, he explained. “I’m committed to my wife,” he said.

She related her infatuation to the Jungian notion of the anima and the animus, the respective feminine and masculine aspects of our collective unconscious. Men tend to repress the anima, the emotional, receptive, sensitive, caretaking feminine side.

Women will do the same to the animus, which represents physical power, creative accomplishment, action, public expression, and the search for meaning.

Jung’s wife and colleague, Emma Jung, helped develop these ideas. Her two classic papers, published together as Animus and Anima in 1957, detail a phenomenon very much like the romantic obsession Alice described. A woman projects the animus onto a man she loves because her masculine side feels dangerous t...

“We’re always looking for that missing piece in ourselves,” said Jungian analyst Jacqueline Wright. “That ideal lover or person that we’re looking for holds a quality that we don’t recognize or express in ourselves.”

Powerful aspects of her self—her rebelliousness, her sexuality, her need to create and have purpose in her life—had been tamped down to keep her mental illness in check.

But the depth of her obsession raised questions about whether the tight restrictions on her life might have backfired in sexual, emotional, and creative frustration.

Alice wasn’t really obsessed with Slater. She was obsessed with what was missing in her life. The real romantic possibility here—of a more fulfilled existence—was one that might very well be within reach.

In our eagerness to categorize yearning, we may neglect to ask what we are truly yearning for. If we dismiss romantic obsession as nothing more than a tumor to be excised from our psyche, we’ll see no reason to heed what our longing might be trying to tell us.

I want you enough to break the rules.

Testosterone, the hormone associated with sex drive and aggression, goes up in women and decreases in men.

The more thinking you tend to do about the relationship, one study found, the more cortisol levels increase. In a reciprocated relationship, the cortisol rise happens along with stress-reducing responses: an increase in positive emotions and the release of oxytocin and vasopressin.

Hippocrates cautioned that longing and sexual frustration could literally transform a woman into a man;

She tried to get Pinson back, only to discover that his affections had waned. Her unrequited love for him would define the rest of her life. In the pages of her diary, she expressed her love in terms that reflected the self-absorbed privilege of unilateral desire: her effort to assert her selfhood through the idea of her beloved. “You are . . . a man of the past who loves a woman of the future,” she wrote.

“I love you as the sculptor loves the clay.”

Her pursuit of Pinson was about much more than winning his love; it was about escaping her father’s grip and seizing control over her own destiny.

Yet our culture still sees as not quite female the woman who takes the initiative in the quest for love. She’s somehow manly, a behavioral cross-dresser, like the horny she-to-he of Hippocrates’s imagination. And like Adèle Hugo, she’s doomed to fail.

She advises women to stop thinking that women’s equality means they can act like men in the dating game.

Valerie dares to strike up conversations with men, call and text them, and ask for dates. “After a decade of dating ‘equally’ she is in a long-term relationship with exactly none of the men she has pursued!” McMillan gloats.

The notion that men are the natural chasers in the mating game is rooted in the “parental investment theory” of evolutionary psychology. Because of their biology, men and women put vastly different levels of investment into perpetuating their genes.

Men don’t have to spend much time and energy on reproduction. But they do have to compete for a scarcer pool of female mates—scarcer not because there are fewer females but because women are available for reproduction less often than men.

It seems no coincidence that for college women, becoming more professionally successful is also connected to diminished mating prospects;

He kissed her. His assertiveness “marked him as a good beacon” for her, she remembered—he was what she thought she needed to feel more settled. And then she was smitten.

From an evolutionary perspective, Angela’s dramatic journey was a demonstration of commitment, of the time and attention she was willing to devote to him: See how much you mean to me? See what I can give you?

Men, they hypothesize, stalk for those reasons as well, but they are more likely than women to engage in “pre-relationship” stalking as a strategy to win a mate in the first place.

women reacted more strongly to emotional infidelity, in keeping with the evolutionary psychology theory that a partner’s involvement with another woman siphons off his resources and attention.

Men reacted more strongly to sexual infidelity, which could trick them into providing resources for o...

Without Heinrich, she remembered, the unmoored feeling in her life returned. “I had to get him back,” she said. “It was an existential fear. I thought he was my lifeline. He really wasn’t, but it sure did seem like it during that time.”

Romantic love holds out the promise of connection to a person who, in an echo of the parenting role, can provide an interchange of caregiving and attachment.

One study revealed a majority (58 percent) of pursuers were classified as insecurely attached. The markers of insecure attachment are obsessiveness, insecurity, and moodiness in relationships.

People with an insecure attachment style have high expectations of love. When they’re in a relationship, the partner’s attention is never quite enough.

They have trouble making relationships last, or they’re given to serial unrequited attractions, always se...

“More anxiously attached people place a lot of importance on relationships and place their ident...

Relationships are more significant to them than to someone with a secure attachment style.”

researchers speculate that, despite all the changes in women’s social and economic status, a woman’s identity and self-worth may still be overly tied up in having a man.

Her gesture was a traditionally male one, but she didn’t think about it that way. “I believed in the power of music. I wanted to come back with that redeeming quality,” she said. “I thought, ‘If I don’t try, I’ll never know if I could have gotten back with him, and the worst thing that could happen is that I’ll feel as awful as I’m feeling now.’”

She waited in the parking lot until he emerged at sunrise. The moment she walked toward him with her mandolin, she realized her plan wasn’t going to work. She began to play anyway. He stopped her. “I can’t hear that right now,” he said. “It’s over.” He got in his car and drove off.

The Line is the often blurry boundary between trying hard and trying too hard. It’s the divide between courtship and aggression, between striving and violating someone else’s life.

However well intentioned Maggie’s idea was, she was so absorbed in her plot that she couldn’t see that confronting her ex alone in a parking lot before dawn might come across as disturbing rather than romantic.

They had a similar sense of humor, both silly and cutting. What was missing with her French fiancé, that sense of common interests, was there right away with Joseph.

She was never going to learn the truth about Joseph’s life. He was never going to acknowledge the pain he’d caused her.

When Sylvia thinks back to the confrontation with Joseph, she is struck by the rage she felt at her powerlessness.

The Psycho Bitch embodies both the fierceness and the shame of being a woman who can’t accept rejection and move on.

Unfulfilled expectations can make us furious and aggressive; animals denied an expected pleasure will bite or attack.

My future seemed incomprehensible. My pride was gone.