The Eros Monster
harpers.org
harpers.org
> Once, before our eighth meeting, I had gotten desperate enough to create a PowerPoint for him about our relationship. One of the slides said, “I cannot go on like this. Please help me.” We sat side by side at a sports bar, facing my laptop. I ordered tea; he ordered nothing. As I clicked through the slides, I noticed that he seemed to be creeping away from me.
… no, really?
In another time, the unrequited lover may have written a note to share. I've heard tell of people using cue cards, writing it on their hands, practicing in front of mirrors. The need to get ones painful feelings out of the head and onto something physical is common. The most common is just telling your friends and family about it. The author mentions doing this, and note how their advice to end it is just flat ignored. There is nothing more bittersweet than unrequited love. The bitterness is painful but the sweetness is just too valuable.
I now wonder whether this is a known psychological phenomenon.
To read something like this as a human being (if you can at all relate) is thoroughly rattling. How close are any of us to sinking into such "base" forms of self-flagellation? Base and yet thoroughly universal. It is very uncomfortable, especially if you are no longer in such a state but vividly remember being in the throes of it. I won't lie, it almost resembles the way others describe having recovered from drug addiction.
I am not like this. That hasn't happened to me before with any writing. I'm rattled indeed.
I first quite related to this, as I've experienced that to extract myself from unsolvable passion I had to "make a dignified sense of it all", and notably force myself to rebase the relationship onto a very polite and detached one (and God is it hard and painful).
But then this quite made it suspicious :
Even after he knew I had met someone else, he continued to contact me periodically
..so she might have solved it through a new relationship after all.
So you chose to have an affair with a married man. Pay attention: that's not a romance, nor a relationship, it's an affair. It went poorly. Big surprise. Now what exactly is it that you want? Sympathy? To pseudo-philosophize about it? Just take responsibility for your bad choice, a thing you should have done from the start.
The whole thing brings to mind the saying "you have to pretty smart to be this stupid" and "you can't con a honest man".
We can get into frankly interesting philosophy and literature studies, and reflect on the downsides of our evolving social order.
But there's also empirical evidence that attachment styles are stable across the human lifespan, from birth, shifting only gradually in response to our own decisions and experiences.
The author is a textbook case of an anxious attacher relating with an avoidant attacher.
The beauty of empirical science is that it can greatly simplify that which we might otherwise struggle our whole lives with. I hope the author finds and attunes herself to a secure attacher and moves on to more novel problems.
The author then goes on to remark on the uses of conventions.
But later, it becomes clear that the wife actually demonstrated the means of her salvation!
Anyway, the article was good.
It seems like an interplay of both peoples trust issues. The author has been betrayed in the past. Why pursue a married man? Some may say she wanted the resulting and predictable pain. Both people are too scared to end it for various reasons. Not to hurt the other? Worried about suicide?
Who ever knew it would be this hard?
That's what makes the piece more interesting, that she made this work instead of just telling of her protracted, intermittent affair with a married man. Which is candid and has an element of voyeurism for the reader, but there's lots of places to read of sordid tales and gossip for their own sake.
Heck I've been someone a couple of women have come back to in between relationships that they wouldn't hold on to in the end, but didn't want one with me, something I'm grateful for looking back, and that's about as much as it's worth saying on those relationships of mine. If I were somehow to tie it to a few thousands of years of literary history on the subject, it'd be a different matter.