The Golden Condom (6 page)

The repetition compulsion is the universal tendency to keep making the same mistakes and re-creating problematic relationships ad infinitum. Freud, a notorious pessimist, understood this self-defeating behavior as a response to traumas that people cannot extricate themselves from, which condemns them to relive their worst moments forever.

Modern psychoanalysts appreciate the tragic magnetic pull of trauma, but they understand this urge not just as a need to reiterate painful experiences but as an attempt to master them retrospectively. People become stuck in self-defeating habits of relating either because they fail to understand the causes or because they are trying to change the effects. Like a dream, reenacting
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is an unconscious communication to the self about unfinished business. By actively seeking what they originally passively endured, victims of trauma are searching for a sense of control. Finding new relationships that mimic the old ones is a way to work through suffering, not just to reproduce it blindly. Recognizing the affinity between a current problematic relationship and the traumatic original can be a revelation, and the first step to creating a new outcome.

BY LOVE POSSESSED

This man, this nobody, this lowlife—this man is loved, and rules a woman's soul.

—BIANOR, FROM
THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
, AD FIRST CENTURY

When David and Maggie were in college, lonely lovers had no trouble making themselves miserable waiting for their elusive objects of desire to come to them. They sat by the phone, hung around the person's dorm, or “casually” showed up at events, fabricated excuses to meet, inquired about their beloved's activities or whereabouts from unsuspecting third parties, and got updates from sympathetic friends who stood helplessly by. When I was their age and became inextricably entangled with a maddeningly inconsistent boyfriend, I recall feeling a burning need to borrow records from his collection, to attend a concert he might be at, or to solicit his help with an inexplicable math problem at 1:00
A.M.
Desperate lovers become shameless.

The Internet has changed the means, if not the motivation, for such behavior. It is now possible to act like a person possessed 24-7 and to comfort yourself with the simulacrum of unlimited, secret access to the minutiae of another's life without his or her knowledge or consent, infinitely prolonging the agony and effectively guaranteeing that you will never have the distance to understand why you are frantically pursuing an intimacy that can never be anything but two-dimensional.

Forty-year-old advertising executive Monica Grey has subjected herself to eight years of very, very partial reinforcement—and an enormous amount of anguish and self-hatred—in cyberpursuit of a man for whom she feels both unquenchable passion and withering contempt.

By her own admission, Monica is an Internet stalker; she calls it “going down the rabbit hole” like Alice in Wonderland, because her compulsion distorts her sense of reality and disables her will. She goes online not to menace a celebrity or settle scores with an enemy or to reconnect with old acquaintances or flirt with new ones. Mesmerized by his Instagram feed, she tethers herself to her computer, immersing herself in the fantasy of sharing in what looks to her like the normal family life of her sometime lover, something she never knew as a child and hungers for desperately. She has trapped herself in the cycle of illusory connection—she cannot bear disconnection—and long-term torture, because even as she spies on him, she is constantly reminded that she is only an outsider looking into his life, not a real participant. “When I see his whole life played out online, I call it ‘digital cutting,'” she said, with chilling accuracy. The instant gratification is always followed by long-term mortification. She hates herself for loving him.

The man whom Monica “follows” is divorced, but he and his ex-wife and their two children still live together in the same house, although his relationship with Monica is no secret. For years, he and Monica have been on-again, off-again lovers. She runs to him whenever he feels like seeing her, which is rarely; most of their affair has been conducted unilaterally by her on her laptop. “I'm a welcome light distraction for him,” she said bitterly, “an occasional fun, flirty dinner.”

Even if theirs was a more typical relationship, they are ill-suited for each other and have little in common. With justification, her friends accused her of “dating down”; they were appalled to see her in thrall to a man whom she dismissed as “a part-time construction worker and fan of mixed martial arts.” He was barely responsive and showed no concern for her welfare, failing to call her even when she was seriously ill. He was not even a good lover. “He was terrible in bed. It was the worst sex I ever had. He never satisfied me or tried to” was her withering assessment of his erotic talents. Still, she insisted, “I've never been more attracted to anyone in my life.” Gratification and desire are not necessarily related.

Monica was astute enough to realize that his unappealing qualities were part of his attraction. “This guy won't run—he'll never find anyone else who would put up with him,” she declared, demeaning them both. This was security of a kind; she could have him, more or less, forever.

Last year, Monica finally allowed her friends to persuade her to go into therapy. That interrupted her computer mania temporarily and jump-started the process of self-examination, but twelve months of “abstinence” left her feeling so bereft that she called him and arranged a meeting. “I reached out to him in a weak moment,” she confessed. “I felt such a high when he responded. I had to go wherever it took me; I had to lessen the pain I felt at being without him.” Of course, seeing him did nothing of the sort. We spoke a few days afterward, when the high from her adventure was already beginning to fade.

A seemingly logical rationalization had allowed her to act on what she must have suspected was a terrible idea—that seeing him in person would be a test of her resolve. “I had built up an image of the power he had over me, and I wanted to see if he still had it. It was a constant battle to control following him online. I felt like an addict waiting for my next fix, when maybe I didn't even need the fix anymore.” That her urge to see him still seemed entirely beyond her control should have been a warning signal, but she ignored it. “I'm always just one step away from a relapse; it takes a huge amount of effort to fight this,” she said. “If I look now, I'll go through a whole year of stuff nonstop. Why haven't I learned that I could end it? There should be something like AA sponsors to keep people like me ‘sober.'”

In fact, Monica had all the support she needed in her sympathetic and very patient friends, but this time, she didn't call any of them for help in controlling herself. No external support in the world can restrain someone hell-bent on surrender. “I didn't tell my friends; they would be concerned after all the times they've picked me off the floor,” she said. They might even be frustrated and furious with her, but she didn't let herself think about that. The obsessed tend to think of themselves as victims rather than as perpetrators of their own unhappiness and rarely consider the toll of their folly on those who truly love them and want to help them. This unconcern for the feelings of anybody else but the object of desire is an indication of the self-absorption that otherwise sensitive and caring people fall into when they give themselves over to obsessive love.

When they met at the trendy restaurant she picked, he behaved as he always did. “I noticed that he didn't look that great when he walked in,” she said, both relieved and disappointed. Over his resistance, she tried to bring up how she felt, but as usual, he wasn't interested. “He said, ‘I never meant to hurt you. You've got to understand my situation'—it was all about him. We sat in the bar kissing a long time, and then I put him in a cab. He held my hand. At least, for the first time, I didn't ask him to come home with me.”

Soon afterward, as always, the high dissipated, and the cycle of self-hatred, desire, and contempt began all over again.

Talking to this tormented woman was a sobering, painful immersion in the world of someone so deeply possessed by a timeless fantasy that she cannot see how much she is actually living in her own shocking past. At the root of Monica's compulsion is a history of extraordinary trauma and terror. “My mother left my father for another man, and he never forgave her but became insanely jealous and murderously vindictive. My father stalked my mother, constantly threatening to kill her, and those threats were real. I'm much closer to him than my mother, whom I never believed ever loved me, so I heard all about it. When he was supposed to pick up my brother and me for visitation, she left us alone on the street corner, because we were terrified that he would stab her or shoot her to death or hit her over the head with a baseball bat if their paths crossed. It was a constant battle between them; I've never had a nuclear family.” Her lover's family situation, as peculiar and dysfunctional as the arrangement is, is not a waking nightmare for his children, and he and his ex-wife do not expose them to constant threats of horrific violence. Monica is seeking to acquire, or co-opt, a saner version of what she knew.

With the unerring instinct of the unconscious, Monica found the one man ideally suited to meet her need to redo her past. Every time she turns on her computer and sees her lover's two children smiling and waving with their parents at an amusement park, she dismantles the horror of her own childhood and becomes one of them. The horrors she endured still possess her because she has not fully experienced or grieved for—what Freud once called “abreacted”
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—them. She still feels buffeted by her parents' madness, which was so gripping that they exposed their children to its fallout.

At the deepest level, Monica wants her beloved and his ex-wife to be her family; she wants to be their child, not his lover—the child of amicably divorced parents who are still providing a secure home for their children and a semblance of family life, parents who do not force their children to participate in their murderous mutual rituals of hatred. It is a perfect fit with her unmet needs. Desires can have different goals from what they appear to have, and what takes the form of sexual desire may have an entirely different underlying motive.

Another indicator that Monica is stuck in her past is her constant refrain that she has no sense of control over her life (she is prone to say variations on “I don't know why I choose the men I do—they choose me,” “I'll accept any kind of treatment,” and “Men always leave me when I was just beginning to feel comfortable”), which was tragically true in her relationship with her father, who sacrificed her welfare to his vendetta against her mother even though she loved him. She sees marriage as a chamber of horrors; it is no wonder that she is attracted only to unmarriageable men. Like José, she feels no sense of agency and, like him, believes she has no choice but to give in to her feelings, no matter how destructive she knows them to be. In order to live in the real world as an adult with some control over her own life, she has to realize that it is she who chooses the men who choose her.

A poignant image from one of Monica's dreams indicates some of the themes that may liberate her if she pursues them seriously. “I find myself in my lover's mother's beautiful kitchen, but there is no place for me to sit.” She believes that she can never have what other people have—and, secretly, that she does not deserve to have the comforting joys of domestic life that this woman's kitchen epitomizes, where healthy appetites of all sorts are satisfied. Being nurtured feels forever off limits for her, and care is not something she deserves by right. This is a deduction from her childhood experience; children often hold themselves responsible for the way their parents treat them.

*   *   *

When she is not invading her lover's life online, Monica reads all the self-help Web sites the Internet has to offer and tries to follow their recommendations, but to no avail. “I wrote down ten things he said that should stop me from seeing him. I remind myself how selfish he is, that he has no empathy. I still cry when I think about his coldness. But when he was silent for two weeks after I last saw him, he seemed to regain the power that he used to have over me.” Despite all this effort, she still thinks of him constantly. Advice, even sensible advice, changes nothing unless the recipient is receptive.

There are some indications, however, that Monica is taking the first steps toward disengaging with him online, without which nothing can fundamentally change. She has now texted him to request that he stop “liking” her posts. “I think it is finally becoming clearer to me how much pain I'm in when I watch his life from afar,” she said. “It is taking a long time to accept that I can never be part of his life. If I'm honest, I have to admit that the real reason I contacted him was that I hoped his situation had changed and that he might be ready to have me in his life. That will never, ever happen.” Saying the truth can lead to believing it.

Is freedom within Monica's reach? I believe that there is hope for her, with resolve, support, and continued commitment to therapy. She already knows the outlines of the unspeakable terror that she is trying to undo, but she has to recognize that she will be trapped as long as she continues to hope that it can be magically altered by having the man she covets—a universal theme in obsession. In her case, reenactment and self-soothing by Internet stalking are symptoms of a serious post-traumatic stress disorder and must be identified as such to be treated effectively. She needs a profound, emotionally alive understanding of what she endured and how it affected her. Reexperiencing the terror in the nurturing holding environment
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of a therapeutic relationship—the “kitchen” with a place for her—and a caring therapist, as both guide and witness, salves the deepest wounds.