Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession

by Lisa A. Phillips

I seemed to have sacrificed my entire being to an impossible love.

MANY OF THE women I’ve surveyed and interviewed about unrequited love testify to this dark shift when they became someone they couldn’t recognize. They neglected their work. They isolated themselves. They ate too much or too little. They smoked, drank, took drugs, cut themselves, and engaged in other risk-taking behaviors.

Unrequited love, as we’ve seen, often revolves around what we imagine the beloved to be and how loving him makes us see the world in new ways.

The revelatory potential of unrequited love lies in our ability to step back and recognize what is motivating our yearning.

When the unwanted woman loses herself to unrequited love, she can’t separate herself from her fantasies about the b...

In this state, the love means everything to her, and seems to merit every effort, no matter how hurtful or self-destructive. This can seem like martyrdom. She feels she’s doing it all for him. But this state of abjection is a profoundly narcissistic one. It’s all ab...

Three weeks later, Nowak drove nine hundred miles from Houston to Orlando, wearing an adult diaper so she wouldn’t have to stop to urinate.

“She went to court yesterday and was released on her own incontinence.”

The unrequited lover is like a junkie, willing to do anything for a fix. She is flooded with feeling: fear, anger, guilt, shame, jealousy, and sadness.

So the expression becomes suspect, raising the question: What exactly is it that you’re sacrificing yourself for?

as if all the affection he’d expressed while he was behind bars had never existed.

Her obsession with him has turned her life into an emotional version of the Groundhog Day movie. Every day she hopes he will change and be fully hers.

“How can she evolve or grow when her validation comes from a beloved who gives her so little?” Her hunger for attention is often rooted in her past. An unavailable father, for example, can lead a woman to fall for an unavailable guy later.

It’s a phenomenon that psychoanalysis calls transference—the redirection of feelings from a prior relationship, usually in childhood, onto a new person. “The reason you are doing it is out of a desperate hope for that person to repair that rupture within you,” Lachmann said. At the same time, women who have sunk deeply in an unrequited obsession “don’t feel deserving of reciprocity.

What both kinds of narcissism have in common is the tendency to use other people to fulfill parts of the self.

When people with narcissism “feel like something is missing inside, they will look for it in another person, someone they idealize,” he said. “And in the narcissist’s mind, that person is experienced as an extension of the self. When that person disappoints the narcissist or fails to meet his or her expectations, the narcissist may savagely devalue the person they formerly idealized.”

“The narcissist’s behavior cries out, ‘Complete me!’” The unrequited lover overlooks her impact as she martyrs herself to love.

When the unwanted woman cries “I can’t help it,” she abandons her free will and her judgment, fundamental aspects of her humanity.

The distance between them and the additional limits of his illness left a lot of room for her fantasy to grow.

“To open up to someone again and have him kill you was hard.” She was swept up in what Meloy calls the “sense of entitlement” that can emerge from fantasies about the beloved.

If the unwanted woman gets mired in the delusion that her beloved’s attention is the only thing that validates her, the lack of it could send her into a precariously fragile state.

What exactly she desired was hard to define.

“I fantasized about us living together and having a close intimate relationship, but not a sexual relationship. I would be his one true friend.

Carolyn’s self-destructive impulses were at the center of many risk factors: She was socially isolated and had a tenuous connection to her family. She was impulsive and sensitive and struggled with depression. She was drinking. And she took Gus’s silences as a rejection of who she was.

The person she’s attracted to, she now realized, won’t complete her—and with her more reflective approach, she might be able to see that person more clearly.

Even now, I suspect that wanting anything from him might come across as invasive—even (perhaps especially) the answer to the question of what my obsession felt like to him.

Being cared for when you are sick is a classic marker of intimacy and commitment—“in sickness and in health,” the wedding vows say. But that’s also what good friends do.

One side values the growing friendship; the other reads it as a buildup to romance. Yoselin’s misreading grew to surreal proportions—to the point where she deluded herself into believing that Renzo wanted to kill himself and needed her to save him. This is where she lost herself.

“It was difficult for me to see a person crumble like that, and become something so small,” he said.

Yet he also mourns for the Yoselin he knew before she lost herself.

Patricia knew she was hurting her husband, but she couldn’t stop herself from her chase. “It was all about me,” she said.

She took her husband and son to the opening. “People were looking at me like ‘This is your son, and he’s looking at this?’” she remembered. “I was so self-absorbed. I failed to realize anyone else’s feelings.”

Pursuers may tell themselves that their stalking is a form of love or courtship, she allowed, but that’s “just like we used to talk about a rapist as the guy who is overwhelmed with passion.”

“It made me angry that someone could try to control me that way, that someone could make me feel that I was not in total control of myself.”

Crushes seem to threaten that process of becoming. And I certainly did not want my daughter to lose herself to someone the way I did.

The song she sings, “Part of Your World,” is about her desire to rebel against her overprotective father, the king of the sea, and be “where the people are.”

“Relationships and crushes have gone very public in one way, and then in another way, they’re under the radar because people don’t show their affection as much in person,” she said.

Romantic relationships in high school and early adolescence are linked with lower grades and standardized test scores.

The more relationships that adolescents have, and the younger they are when they start them, the greater the probability they will suffer from depression.

But dating relationships are their single greatest source of stress.

“If they like each other and he is happier, why should I waste my time being sad about it? There’s a world of other males out there.”

“I know what you’re going through,” threatens a teen’s sense of identity. “They believe no one has ever felt the way they do, because it’s so intense,” she said.

What Marissa went through is what Pickhardt would call an “identity crush”: unrequited love for someone who embodies what an adolescent wants to become.

It’s the impulse at the heart of the status-leaping crushes on popular peers, authority figures, or celebrities.

I want this person because I want to be like him.

I did want to be someone else. My desire for the boy from camp was entwined with a desire not to be subsumed by the boredom and smallness of exurban adolescence. My infatuation with him made me feel my life had taken a wrong turn.

As a young girl, I’d been an avid reader and an involved student. In middle school, I began to spend hours gossiping on the telephone with friends and cared a lot less about my schoolwork. The specter of David (and he did seem to be a specter, as I dreamed about him often) made me want to be cultured and aware, to live in the world as he did.

His obliviousness ended up hurting me terribly, but my feelings for him pushed me toward beco...

Writer Barbara Ehrenreich heard the shrieks of Beatles-obsessed tweens and teens in the mid-1960s as the first stirrings of the sexual revolution. “It was rebellious . . . to lay claim to sexual feelings.

It was even more rebellious to lay claim to the active, desiring side of a sexual attraction: the Beatles were the objects; the girls were their pursuers,” she wrote in a 1992 essay on Beatlemania. In this light, “crush” becomes an active verb, something girls do; they crush standards, social ideals, their own former notions of themselves.