The Golden Condom (11 page)

I flung myself into passion because of my dark emotional state at the time. This was the nadir of my life. I was almost unimaginably lonely before I met Michael, beyond even the usual late-adolescent angst. In addition to my disappointment with the university, my beloved roommate had taken a year's leave of absence, and nobody had replaced her as my confidante. I was living alone in a tiny dormitory room that seemed like it was on the edge of an abyss; one weekend when I was sick I didn't speak to a soul. My last high school romance had been so excruciating—my boyfriend was both unstable and unfaithful—that I hadn't sought another in two years.

The most unsettling thing of all was that my family, which had seemed a bastion of stability, was disintegrating. At the age of sixteen, I had been the one to discover concrete proof of my adored father's infidelity—I found two women in our house alone with him one night. Even worse, my mother never left him. I felt there was nowhere I belonged, nobody I could rely on. Utterly unmoored and in dire need of a haven, I turned to Michael to provide it. He was my remedy for emptiness, my bulwark against hopelessness, and it worked—at least when I was with him and he smiled at me. In that cold desert where it always seemed to be winter, it was easy to mistake charm for warmth and desire for love.

Our romance began promisingly enough. In addition to his endlessly patient help with my homework, we played in the snow and rode his motorcycle to the zoo, to coffeehouses, and to concerts—I didn't care that it was freezing—and talked into the night. We had so many interests in common, and he had such a lively mind and clever tongue that I didn't realize he revealed hardly anything significant about himself other than that he was afraid of the dark.

Michael seemed to be welcoming me into his world. He showed me the lab where he did his research, and he cooked for me, the first time a man had ever done so. We kissed for the first time while we were baking a cake. I found his combination of domesticity and sensuality both comforting and alluring. At the time, I never consciously made the connection between our frequent after-hours trips to Michael's lab and having accompanied my father, who was also a wry, self-contained scientist—a doctor—on his nightly hospital rounds, but the subliminal link between the two was compelling.

Much too soon, though, unpredictability crept into this routine, and Michael's elusiveness began to trouble me. Every moment of our time together was on his schedule; he rarely made a date in advance and failed to show up at events at which we'd planned to meet. He spent hours with me one day and then disappeared for a week without any explanation or acknowledgment. I never considered calling him myself, much less objecting, because I felt so lucky to have him at all, so overjoyed to be alone no longer.

Ominous premonitions appeared in my diary. I wrote, “I feel myself rushing into something I'm not at all sure is there or can be there, and my recklessness terrifies me. I have no idea how to control it or to keep any kind of balance.” I noted anxiously what was happening to me, but the good parts felt far too good for me to heed my own internal warnings. All the symptoms of unrequited love were there—one-sided preoccupation with the beloved's every move, legitimate anxiety about reciprocity, a willingness to tolerate bad treatment just to be near him.

I spent undue amounts of time and effort trying to interpret his motives—a favorite pastime of the besotted. When he didn't call or show up, I became preoccupied with figuring out what I could possibly have done to alienate him. The problem had to be me, not him; otherwise, I was helpless to do anything about it.

“Is there someone else, here or elsewhere? Is he still interested in me?” I asked myself early on. When I went to his apartment the first time, I noted that my dorm was one of the “frequently called numbers” listed by the phone; I was overjoyed.

Soon, however, I had all the proof I needed that my fears were justified. One moonlit night, a month after we started spending time together, we walked to the frozen lake. Michael stopped suddenly, turned to me, and said with a serious edge in his voice I'd never heard before, “Jeanne, how vulnerable are you? The more time I spend with you, the clearer it becomes that I want to share my bed with you—but I may take that very pleasant situation more lightly than you. I'm not sure how much I can give. You may be more involved than I am.” Then he put his arms around me and said in a far more insinuating tone, “But I do think we should be lovers.”

When I read what he said to me, I wanted to rush back in time and yell “Don't do it!” to my younger self.

At the time, I was so aghast that I didn't say a word in response, although I wrote it all down verbatim afterward.

This is where my memory began to fail. Until I reread my diary, my version of this monologue had been heavily edited. I recollected the unadorned declaration of desire—it felt frank and adult, cool rather than cold, at the time—but I had erased the caveats that accompanied it. I was too frightened by what they implied: I could not stand to know my effort was doomed from the start, that no matter what I did, he would never be mine.

Michael's declaration of intent, which seemed like openness and candor, was actually his way to manage his guilt preemptively. It put me off balance from that moment on, intensifying my insecurity, confirming all my dread. Despite this, I plunged ahead. I stayed overnight with him, barely chaste, a week later. It was the first time I spent an entire night with a man. “A glad night,” I reported in my diary, “but something says that I will never have his love, never at the level I want.” All the warning signs were there—I enumerated them in my diary, railed against them, and proceeded to ignore them. Acting consciously and wisely on what you know to be true, overriding inner compulsion on your own behalf, requires far more self-possession than I had at that point in my life.

Michael's behavior toward me really was confusing. There were times when I clearly interested him—I made him laugh, and I was a worthy sparring partner—and times when he withdrew from me or rejected me, sometimes in close succession. Since I idealized him, I assumed he knew what he was doing, when in fact I see now that he had to have been as buffeted about by his emotions as I was by my own.

I longed for consistency, merger, and ardor, while he wanted occasional interludes of diversion, amusement, and pleasure. What drew me to him was obvious to me—he sparkled so—but why on earth he selected someone like me, so utterly unsuited to his wishes for minimal involvement, I still cannot understand. I can only assume that my attentiveness and emotional intensity appealed to him as much as they caused him to flee.

Even after he made his position perfectly clear, I continued to cherish the fantasy that I would find a way to get through to him. Like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White in reverse, I would awaken his ability to love me; I believed that I held the magic key to his heart. The seductive grandiosity of this conviction was unshakable. When you are in the throes of this kind of desire, “never” is an unutterable word, because it is the death of hope; obsessive lovers strive to keep hope alive at all costs, even when it is clearly a lost cause.

One thing I tolerated silently but found disquieting was that Michael told me about his attraction to other women the first time I stayed overnight with him, and he continued to do so, often when we were in bed together. I wasn't yet savvy enough to realize that recoiling from this wasn't prudishness on my part, that his behavior was at the very least offensive and off-putting, an indication of faithlessness, in thought and deed. There were echoes of my father's conduct in it as well that I must have willed myself to overlook but could clearly see when I read the diary.

Although my elusive beloved often behaved coldly toward me, he never struck me as an inherently cruel man. He seemed motivated by self-protection rather than perverse pleasure in causing pain. However, as a teacher of mine when I was in analytic training years later said, “You don't need a sadist to have a sadomasochistic relationship.”

*   *   *

My Golden One vanished once again after our first night together. I couldn't conceal my tension when I saw him later on. “There's been a lack of humor lately,” he chided me. It is a reflection of my emotional state that I took this not as a failure of empathy on his part but as a legitimate criticism of me.

Michael wanted to keep things between us in a major key at all times. Light banter was his preferred form of expression, and it had to become mine if I wanted to avoid estranging him. Cultivating irony, what he approvingly called “our wit and repartee,” became my main task. I felt as though I were playing a role in a surreal comedy of manners in which I had been cast against type. Only he had the script, and I had to improvise my lines.

My subservience—being on call and amusing on demand—took a toll on me because it was so unnatural. I wasn't a passive or compliant person even then; in fact, I was the opposite—strong willed, opinionated, outspoken and direct to a fault. That I suppressed my real personality so dramatically reflected my urgent mission to keep the relationship afloat.

Michael eventually explained the reason for his increasing aloofness; there was “a conflict about another relationship” with a former girlfriend in another city. He did not elaborate, and I asked no questions, such as why this conflict had not kept him from me in the first place or why, since full disclosure seemed so important to him, he had not told me up front. I also didn't let myself consider what it said about his character that he was being unfaithful to her, as well. Having a shadowy rival made me even more insecure than before.

Why did I remain silent? Contemporary psychoanalytic attachment theory and trauma studies provide clues.
1
It has long been known that creatures in danger can defend themselves by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. Freezing is a radical self-protective state caused by shock, the psychic equivalent of playing dead in the face of an existential threat. In my case, the threat was not being devoured by a predator but being abandoned by someone I needed and dared not risk displeasing, who also left me feeling helpless and alienated (the technical term is “dissociated”) from my authentic self. I performed a desperate act of emotional survival by putting my intolerable feelings away in cold storage.

My performance must have improved subsequently, because he became my lover two weeks later. For a moment, I was happy.

He had shown up at a dance and taken me home with him. “Never have I felt so abandoned, so possessed,” my diary says. “I spent much of the night watching him sleep beside me, hardly believing I was with him.”

This magical interlude was immediately sullied by doubts. I urgently wanted reassurance that I meant something to him beyond our second “glad night” but never dared to ask. Why, I wondered, did he turn away from me when he slept? Why did he never call me just to talk? Why did I know nothing about his past? I never pressed these questions in the interest of not rocking a very leaky boat.

I could not understand how a man could be passionate and sensually connected but then wake up in the morning eager to separate and go about his business, the openness fleeting and confined to the darkness. I didn't have enough experience to know that this wasn't the case with every man.

I waited by the phone—these were the days before cell phones and texting, but I'm sure the state of mind hasn't changed materially since then—afraid to do anything or go anywhere in case he called. Every once in a while he did, and we would share another unbridled night, the illusion of connection revived once more. “When I am with him I feel, ‘Love is embodied in you,'” I wrote. I would endure anything for this.

Right before spring break, when we had spent a rare day together as though we were a normal couple, he told me he was flying to Philadelphia to see an old friend. For romantic atmosphere and to combat his fear of the dark, he lit candles in the bedroom at dusk. He was unusually tender and expressive, emerging smiling from the shower to lay his damp golden head on my breast, only blowing out the flames at daybreak.

When we woke voluptuously at noon, he told me, obliquely, the real reason he was going—“to see the dog” that his not-so-former girlfriend had inherited from him. He would not be coming back for several weeks.

I was crushed rather than outraged. What did I do with my anger at him for tantalizing me and then treating me so callously? I had a dream of being fondled by a man with green-and-blue hair whom I was trying to kick. While I couldn't express it in waking life, my rage seeped into my dreams.

Every once in a while, I wrote something in my diary that was not about Michael. I had deep conversations with other people, sang and played my guitar, wrote poetry, and learned ancient Greek. I also forged a close friendship with a man whom I did not desire, who would remain an integral part of my adult life for many years. My most encouraging observation, because it became the foundation for my future vocation, was “How I love to see words balance and sing. Writing does more for my ego than making love.” An obsession with a problematic lover, as intense and disabling as it seems and as much as it colonizes one's consciousness, often coexists with normal life.

*   *   *

I assumed Michael had left me for good, and I felt desolate, but after he returned from Philadelphia, he came to see me again. “I'm not ready for intense monogamy,” he told me. “I can't split my personality, and I don't want to lie.” I asked whether he had told his old girlfriend about me. He had not; telling the truth in matters of the heart seemed reserved for my ears only.

Then I asked something I never should have asked. “But what about our last night together—wasn't that good?”

“Good,” he said, “but not good enough.” He added, as if to soften the blow, “It's not as fatal as you seem to think. I'm simply asking for my freedom.”