The Golden Condom (4 page)

One night, her provocation was almost too much to bear. “She got really drunk at a party and asked me to take her home. I did—she trusted me. When we got to her room, she let me come in at last. She sat on my lap and then took off her clothes in front of me and got into bed. I lifted the sheet and kissed her stomach, and away I went; I was such a good boy. I felt both aroused and excluded; I was not in the inner ring, but I had a box seat. This was abject behavior. I was her love slave.” The role of the ethical romantic hero had its gratifications and its drawbacks.

I wondered why David never even considered asking Anna to leave her boyfriend while they shared her or made any overt move to win her back later on. “I never said, ‘You've got to choose between us,'” he admitted. “I never said, ‘I love you. I want you to be mine only.' Passivity and timidity silenced me. It was impossible at that point in my life to believe that I could ever do such a thing.” Instead, like Maggie, who sought to win her beloved's attention by the self-improvement strategy of trying to be “a little bit sexier or smarter,” David relied on being a good listener and a mensch rather than the more dangerous direct approach. “It was clear that she wouldn't do it, and that would have been the end,” he said. Losing her entirely was a risk he dared not take. “You're so tied to this person that you'll tolerate anything. Half a loaf, even a crust, is better than no bread at all.”

Obsessed lovers fear, with good reason, that they will be abandoned if they say or do anything that can be construed as a demand; if a relationship is already foundering, making waves is the last thing you want to do. Pessimism about one's own power and desirability is intrinsic to the experience of a one-way love affair.

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As much as he railed against them, David needed his rivals because he needed to be chosen over them. The excruciating position that a lover like him finds himself in with a partner who rejects him or ignores him or prefers another actually fulfills an unconscious need.
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He not only tolerates the pain built into the situation but seems relentlessly to seek it. “I felt triumphant when she wanted me,” he said. Being the man Anna wants, even for the moment, overrides everything. It confirms his desirability, lays fear and doubt to rest. It is the antidote to having been traumatically rejected as a child by the parent who is the center of your universe, which is worth any humiliation to achieve. What is obvious to any onlooker is opaque to the needy one: this was a competition he was never going to win.

David had been the center of his mother's universe when he was a boy, almost her auxiliary husband—but everything changed when he grew up. His mother felt betrayed and considered every potential girlfriend a hated rival. He never fully regained his special position with her, and it took years for him to understand and work through the reasons for his exile.

As a young man on the cusp of maturity, who had once been the protected darling of a volatile and enthralling mother, David was still unsure of his masculinity and his ability to assert himself. All questions vanished when he held Anna in his arms. All rivals were vanquished, and she was his alone. Such is the compelling, if tragically evanescent, nature of sexual passion;
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it gives us the illusion that we have what we need or what we needed in the past. It is validation by proxy.

Anna's ever-changing bevy of suitors provided David with multiple chances to prove to himself that he was powerful and desirable. The price he paid, however, was that they also provided multiple opportunities to have his self-esteem deflated and his hopes dashed. The harder objects of desire are to snare, the more gratifying it is to win their dubious affection, and the harder it is to give up the prospect, even if you secretly know it is transient at best.

David didn't realize that Anna needed what he called “a solar system of men” revolving around her in order to shore up her own self-esteem, which had been seriously battered by a charming alcoholic father who severely disappointed her. They revolved around her while she revolved around the withholding and controlling boyfriend who was her father's latter-day representative. Equality with a man was impossible for her; she had to be controlled or in control.

The urgent need to be the special one that consumed both David and Anna had roots in their pasts; just as Anna was acting out an old scenario with her father, David was enacting a parallel scenario with his mother. Those who compulsively seek the role of the special one with an unavailable lover are usually trying to undo a childhood experience of a fall from grace, of being rejected by a parent who once seemed to favor them and then inexplicably turned away and chose someone else—typically a spouse or another sibling (or, in Anna's case, alcohol). This is a terrible blow to self-worth, because children tend to blame themselves and have very limited understanding of the motivation of the adults they depend on.

What classical Freudians call the Oedipus complex—a child's desire to have sex with the opposite sex parent by besting (or even wishing to destroy) the same-sex rival parent—is but the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the fantasy of romance with a parent is a longing for merger, for protection, for a secure sense of being prized, and for assurance that you will always be able to get what you need from someone who can in fact only inconsistently provide it. The fantasy of an Oedipal victory that drives so many wretched love affairs is frequently an attempt to undo an original Oedipal defeat, a rivalry for an exclusive love that you have already lost to another; we attempt to rewrite history when the truth seems unbearable. Trying to make an unsatisfying past come out differently is a very popular human project, even if it is doomed; sexual conquest is one of the most popular ways to create an illusion of success in this endeavor. The only real way to transform things that have already happened is to learn from them.

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The nadir of David's doomed romance occurred in his senior year. “As soon as I came back to school at the beginning of the semester, I went to her room and sat there waiting for hours for her to come back, looking like I had nothing better to do. I figured her boyfriend would be coming later on, but I needed desperately to see her. I couldn't bear to be cast out; it would have meant that I was worthless as a man in her eyes.” This time, however, the familiar situation did not feel at all exciting; it only felt humiliating. By the time she finally appeared, he had lost all hope of even a Pyrrhic victory. “Sitting there like that was a symbol of my exclusion and degradation—I wanted so badly what I couldn't have.” He felt worthless in his own eyes.

Waiting Godot-like for a lover who could never be his had the same effect on David that the heroin/anal sex–request combo had had on Maggie: it opened his eyes. He could no longer deny the hopelessness of his passion, the impossibility of possessing someone who wasn't there physically, psychically, or sexually. As the chances of succeeding faded, the self-abnegation of his role in her life became more than he could bear. His desperate desire did not wane immediately, but he began to face reality. “Time helped me realize that I could never, ever, really have her—nobody could; she seemed in charge, but she turned out very much not to be.”

Only after graduation, when they moved to different cities to pursue their adult lives and he no longer saw her regularly, did David fully understand his ensorcellment and extricate himself from it. Gradually, his ardor cooled along with his jealousy, and they were able to maintain affection for each other.

Their destinies radically diverged. Anna had a disastrous first marriage with a man who not only had another lover simultaneously but fathered a child with her. Soon after college, David met and married his (monogamous) soul mate. Their relationship was as enduring, as satisfying, and as mutually admiring as Maggie's with her husband.

As naive college students, Maggie and David felt compelled to pursue unattainable—and unworthy—mates unable to love, or at very least unable to love them, who shared character traits with their parents, including ones that drove their children crazy. Maggie sought someone with a beautiful body, a strong will, and a selfish streak. David was looking for a passionate but insecure woman with a need to dominate and hidden contempt for men. They both wanted to make relationships similar to the ones that had once disappointed them come out differently.

Both lovers idealized their objects while underestimating themselves and overlooking serious obvious character flaws (lack of basic consideration in Maggie's case, inability to be faithful in David's) that were insurmountable obstacles to lasting intimacy and satisfaction. The intensity of their sexual desire for the wrong people had unconscious roots in their histories, but at the time, it was so overwhelming that they lost all perspective. What looks like sex and feels like sex can have nonsexual origins. These deeper, earlier longings are often obscured by ignorance of oneself and the urgency of the body's demands, particularly in late adolescence. They were both exceedingly fortunate to grow up and out of obsessive love.

Graduation ends many a frustrating relationship by imposing a natural separation that often brings people to their senses and exposes them to a larger world of choices. With luck and with effort, reformed obsessive lovers can discover that being involved with someone who loves them back is a lot more gratifying—and actually more passionate—than the most ardent one-sided affair.

THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

There is one thing that no man of fifty-five, no matter how fit or attractive, has any control over: he is no longer young, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. This is a fact that José Sanchez could not bear and spent five tumultuous years denying, almost destroying himself and everything that mattered to him as he wildly pursued a hopeless love affair with a woman half his age. He is the kind of man—strikingly handsome, rich, and successful—who, if surfaces were all-important, you would think could have any woman he wanted, except for the one on whom he felt his destiny depended.

José has cheekbones to die for, the physique of the athlete he still is, and the allure of the soap opera star he was in his twenties, when his smoldering, dark, Latino good looks got him frequently cast as alluring villains. He parlayed his early acting success into an international real estate fortune; we met long ago when I was looking for an apartment, and we stayed in touch. He has been married for years to a cabaret performer, and they have a picture-perfect family on whom he dotes—and yet, he was wretched and miserable amid all the trappings of an enviable life.

José was looking for someone in whom to confide his secret, and I found myself regaled with the details of a crazed passion for his twenty-five-year-old former receptionist that would have seemed absurd if he hadn't been so desperate and wasn't taking such appalling risks to satisfy; in most cases of impossible love that I was familiar with, the lovers mostly only damaged themselves. Being a middle-aged husband and father who is carrying on like an adolescent ups the ante for disaster.

He talked about her in a way that only the obsessed do. It was always a pressured monologue, and it was always the same. He had to relate every detail, interpreting and seeking meaning in her every utterance or action, like a fundamentalist minutely analyzing a biblical text. I feared that his misadventure would be exposed and would jeopardize not only his marriage but his children's welfare, and I told him so, but it made no impression; he was, and wanted to remain, entirely heedless of consequences.

José was single-minded to a degree I had never encountered before. It was as though the reflective part of his brain was switched off, and he had no interest in switching it back on. Simultaneously ecstatic and tormented, he did acknowledge in rare moments of sobriety that his aspiration to spend the rest of his life with her might be unrealistic, but he could not stop chasing his dream girl, because it was only when he was with her that he felt fully vital for the very first time. She was the answer to his malaise, the meaning of his life.

He seemed to be living in an alternate universe.

At the beginning of his courtship, José laid the world at his young lover's feet, whisking her off to romantic hideaways all over the Pacific Rim when he had business there, taking her to the best restaurants and introducing her to all the opulence, glamour, and sophistication at his disposal. He was forever thinking of their last encounter and planning the next one. He had never felt this way before, he assured me, sexually or emotionally. I got the impression that she was dazzled as well as genuinely taken with him, although she felt guilty that he was married, and she was uncomfortable with the idea of being somebody's mistress. His sense of their future together was much more definite than hers.

José always talked as if he had just seen or communicated with his beloved, but he was really reporting his stream-of-consciousness thoughts about her, even when they hadn't had any contact for months. She was omnipresent in his consciousness, the only real thing in his life, with the occasional exception of his son and his daughter. When he described their actual interactions, I got only the most superficial impression of what she was actually like and a great deal of information about how he felt when he was with her—a sure sign of self-absorption masked as love.

One indication of how distorted by his own desire his perceptions of her were is that he saw qualities in her that she did not actually possess. He extolled her simplicity, her spontaneity, her beat-up motorbike, all of which made her seem pristine and unpretentious, a welcome contrast to his world-weariness, his driven work ethic, and the materialism that surrounded him. It became clear to me, if not to him, that in fact she had no real direction in her life or much motivation to find one. He was overly impressed when she enrolled in film school, which demonstrated her artistic ability, and he was thrilled at the prospect of “helping her in her career” but had no reaction when she dropped out after one semester, after which she went back to her hometown in Washington State and worked in a convenience store trying to figure out what to do next. He saw talent and spiritual purity where there was mostly naïveté, confusion, and the desire to find someone to take care of her, as her father, with his girlfriends as young as she, never did. Like Maggie, who interpreted the risky behavior of the man she desired as daring individuality, José never seemed to reconsider who his lover really was even as she continued to demonstrate that she was not who he wanted her to be. She was a projective screen for his Pygmalion fantasies and his lost youth. When I remarked that the disparity between their ages and perspectives might not be easy to breach, he answered, “What do those things matter when you're soul mates?”