Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession

by Lisa A. Phillips

Celebrity crushes are a form of what social scientists, since the rise of television, have called “parasocial interaction”: one-sided intimacy, at a distance, with someone famous. However compelling the fantasy, there’s no significant obligation or responsibility.

Ancient Greeks believed the god of Eros was created out of these disparate forces. He was the offspring of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and Ares, the god of war.

Eros embodied the creative and destructive power of love in the figure of a mischievous child who struck lovers and poets with the “divine madness” of romantic obsession. The same kind of energy, the myth suggests, lies behind both the urge to create and the urge to love.

“The creative urge that is channeled toward another person can be taken back and owned,” she said.

A main preoccupation of her poetry, which survives mainly in enigmatic verse fragments, is the Socratic idea of pothos, translated as yearning, longing, or regret for “that which is elsewhere.”

Yet accomplishment is often what rescues the unwanted woman from ruin and gives her an outlet for her restless longing. One reason why people love someone who doesn’t love them back is so they can be inspired by love. Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron call this the “Don Quixote situation.”

In Miguel de Cervantes’s early-seventeenth-century novel, Don Quixote devotes his chivalric quests to his unrequited love, a neighboring farm girl he renames Dulcinea. Even though she never responds, his adoration allows him to experience heightened emotion, focus his life goals, and enjoy being inspired to act heroically in someone else’s name.

The neurochemistry of passionate love makes us feel that this ideal is within our grasp. The release of dopamine in the reward center of the brain causes euphoria and exhilaration. Activity in the amygdala, where the fear response is generated, quiets down, promoting feelings of bravery. There’s less blood flow to areas of the brain associated with judgment and negative emotions.

These spinsters seem to have made a bargain with Eros: Strike me with your arrow, and I will make art instead of love. This sort of deal frees them to dwell on the imagined perfection of ideal love instead of mutual love’s faulty lived reality. In this way they are like Dante and Werther, yet the spinster artist has even more at stake.

Mutual love almost inevitably led to domesticity, and babies, and far less time and space for a creative mind. The unwanted woman, historically, was a freer woman. We still contend with this legacy.

The pop singer Adele wrote the Grammy-award winning “Someone Like You” and the rest of her smash-hit album 21 in response to the end of a “rubbish relationship.” When she fell in love again and got pregnant, she offered a satisfying resolution to her woe. One of my daughter’s friends, at age nine, proclaimed exuberantly: “Adele has a new boyfriend and she’s going to have a baby and she’ll never be sad again!” (Her mother sagely warned her that life has no such guarantees.) There was one immediate drawback to Adele’s happy ending: less of her music. Adele announced that she would need to take a break fro...

One recent study shows that for people who have a high need to feel unique (a common characteristic of artists and innovators), social rejection causes them to score higher on tests of creativity. The outsider identity, which rejection reinforces, nurtures their ability to innovate.

Finally, she thought in ecstasy, she would know what love was. But the man backed away, evidently fearful about taking her virginity, and sent her home in a cab. “This last shock,” she wrote in her 1927 autobiography My Life, “had a decided effect on my emotional nature, turning all its force toward my Art which gave me the joys which Love withheld.”

Even if artistic perfection can be as elusive as perfect love, the cycle of reward seeking, dissatisfaction, and satisfaction in making art depends on what the unwanted woman can accomplish herself—not how the beloved responds to her.

I know from my own experience that the shift from one reward system to another is no magic bullet. There’s no recipe for turning the energy of longing into something productive, only examples showing us that it’s possible.

“You can’t want anyone who isn’t good to you,” I decided, with the corollary that I had to be able to be good to that person in turn.

He wasn’t paying much attention to her, and she pointedly told him so. He made an effort—flowers here, compliments there—but he also said he didn’t have much time for her. He was too busy making the money she was spending, he explained.

After he passed away, she resolved to never let herself love so deeply again. She couldn’t stand the thought of being that vulnerable with someone else.

Dorothy Tennov would have called what I went through starvation—the lack of consistent attention and caring from B., on top of all the accumulated evidence that a relationship wasn’t going to happen.

Finding distance, in real miles or metaphorical ones, can be crucial to ending romantic obsession.

When unrequited love gets out of hand, the moral dilemma of the beloved boils down to this: Rejection is mercy.

ONE OF THE legs that unrequited love stands on is the importance of the beloved—all the goals and dreams you’ve imbued him with. The goals and dreams don’t have to end, but their association with the beloved does.

Renowned physician Ibn Sina realized this back in the tenth century, when he prescribed refuting the lovesick patient’s idealized notions as “nothing but a delusion” and pointing out the beloved’s character flaws.

Take the magic away. Unlink the goals, dissolve the crystals. He also advised strenuous distractions: hunting, intellectual debates, and other physic...

CBT helps people identify and change the beliefs that direct self-destructive and self-defeating thoughts and actions.

How, for example, could your beloved be the only man who can give you the love you need if he doesn’t text you back?

Several CBT-based approaches emphasize disrupting the unsatisfying cycle of the reward-seeking behaviors of obsessive love.

Cognitive behavioral therapy essentially guides patients to recognize the craving as misguided urgings of their brain—not the call of a truly essential need—and then directs their attention to an activity or thought that’s more beneficial.

“People think that if they have a desire, they need to act on it. They think it’s cathartic to send an email or talk about the person. But that’s a myth,” she said. “If you change your behavior, you can change the way you feel. If you don’t talk about him, your feelings may pass faster, and you’ll surely live better.”

She teaches a tool called “Opposite to Emotion Action.” Instead of giving in to the urge to satisfy your desire to connect, you “gently avoid” it and do the opposite: Put away the pictures, delete the person’s number, and refrain from talking about him.

Key to Taitz’s process is having her patients focus on values. She asks them to assess what they want out of life. Her therapeutic approach helps them move toward a...

Assessing values helps them see that their struggle is for something bigger and better in their life—not the particular person they’ve been obsessing over. “If people realize that they care about taking care of themselves and having compassion for themselves, they’ll see that they are not going to get those things by seeing someone whose love is not reciprocal.”

Taitz’s approach struck me as a concrete way to dismantle goal linking by guiding the patient to see how her higher-order goals have little to do with the lower-order goal of a relationship with the beloved.

Taitz emphasized that moving beyond the fixation on the beloved can be a “really tortuous and really brutal” process, but keeping your values in mind can help. “It’s almost like a firefighter goes into a building and i...

For several of the women I interviewed, the beliefs they once had about their beloved dissolved in an abrupt epiphany, as if the curtain had been drawn back on their Wizard of Oz and he was revealed to be nothing ...

but he always pulled away from her when he sensed she wanted too much.

She greeted him warmly. “This is my son,” she said. “You’re not going to believe what I named him!” “Rick?” “What?” she gasped, startled. In that moment, she told me, she saw him for who he really was in a way she never could when she was in love with him. “There was something so heinous and narcissistic in his belief that I would actually name my child after him! I saw how ludicrous he was—he thought I still had that much unresolved feeling for him.

It was a good apotheosis and really allowed me to let go.” She didn’t need him in order to become the performer she wanted to be, and the idea of him no longer held the same power.

The monastery had a strict rule for newcomers: no relationships for the first six months. “They’ve seen that when people first move in, they are very sensitive and more vulnerable than they normally are,” Emma said.

The more she held back, the more Jack pursued her. There were no locks on the bedroom doors, and he would wait naked in her room for her. But she didn’t give in. She began to see him more clearly.

Her longing for him, she realized, was about an ideal, not a reality. “The more I felt I had to be with him, the more I was not really seeing him,” she said. “I was focused on how I was finally going to feel once I was with him. I was finally going to be really myself. I was finally going to land in the world.”

“It’s always simpler, the way you fantasize about it,” she said. “You don’t fantasize about the messiness of intimacy. It never includes the stuff that really gets on your nerves. It filters all that out. I took what was attractive about him and purified it and imagined that being with him was somehow going to make me feel whole.”

What Emma learned—to sit with her feelings instead of acting on them—is part of the strategy behind dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).

DBT emphasizes both self-acceptance and the need to change de...

“A lot of people are very impulsive. Something happens, and then they do something to react. We are trying to break that chain and get people to tolerate feeling bad and not go right into action to stop feeling bad.”

Rather, she urges them to stop compulsive pursuit and regain self-control. Her core message is an important one: You have to learn to tolerate your distress. Otherwise, you’ll become masochistic, offering yourself up again and again to the pain of rejection.

And so I return to the question that launched this book: Why did I ever give him all that power? Why did I get so obsessed? My outsize reaction to being unwanted didn’t, as far as I can determine, stem from an early psychological wound or malfunction of attachment.

What sent me into the psychological and neurochemical maelstrom I’ve detailed in these pages was nothing that exceptional: I was lost.

MEETING MY HUSBAND so soon after B. cut me off gave me what I was chasing so hard: the self-esteem that comes from being wanted by a good man, followed by love, marriage, and a family.

For our love to endure, I had to shake off the illusion that his attention was going to take care of my well-being as I sorted my life out. As a girl who came of age in the era of The Cinderella Complex, I had never bought into the idea that a man should provide for all my material needs. Yet until this turning point in my life, the myth persisted that a partner would provide completely for my emotional security.