The Golden Condom (23 page)

After that, Rachel rejected friendship (at least the kind in which you confide in and rely on others) but continued to pursue journalism with gusto for the rest of her life. “The experience made me wary. Even at the time, I saw that I was okay by myself, and since then, I've never counted on friends emotionally; I don't trust them, and I don't need them, and I'm too afraid to get hurt again. But when I went to college and worked on a paper with a real organization to back me up, it was nirvana.” A well-functioning institution proved more reliable than other people.

Now she is sociable but guarded. She maintains strict limits on what she seeks and what she gives; her connections with colleagues sound more like arm's-length acquaintanceships. “I do more listening and less opening up. I don't want to be dependent on anybody, so I tend to deal with stuff myself,” she says. Rachel recognizes that she is missing something and that her self-containment creates barriers. (“When I disclose, I'm vulnerable, so I avoid being intimate. It makes relationships one-way—I fear I'm a lousy friend as a result.”) Still, she never questions the need for such drastic measures. Her reticence extends even to her “unemotional” husband, whom she turns to only for advice, not consolation.

Rachel understands that the perfectionism that has served her well professionally also makes her prey to depression and insecurity and that she has forfeited forever the antidote to self-criticism that a real friend can offer. “I'm my own worst critic, and not having anybody to temper that can get really difficult,” she admits. “I can get pretty depressed, and I don't see a way to accept help, so I really try not to be needy. The prospect of hanging hopes on another person and not getting enough, or any, help back just seems awful to me. I wouldn't trust anybody else with my happiness, even though the loss makes me feel empty. It's much safer to cultivate inner strength instead.” The deepest part of a loving friendship is never to be hers, a price she willingly pays for self-protection.

It is as though she became, at an early age, a fervent adherent of the principles Ralph Waldo Emerson enunciated in his 1841 essay
Self-Reliance
: “Trust thyself,” “Live wholly from within,” “The voices which we hear in solitude … grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world,” “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” I found that essay thrilling when I read it as a seventeen-year-old, but I interpreted it as a paean to individualism, not solipsism—charting your own course rather than traveling alone.

Assertions of self-sufficiency aside, Rachel never forgot the dark days at her high school newspaper and was gratified when the opportunity arose to show the culprits that she was beyond caring. “One of my nemeses came up to me at our twenty-fifth reunion and apologized, and I just laughed it off,” she told me proudly. It reminded me of someone having to demonstrate to a former boyfriend who had left her that she was perfectly happy without him.

Why did Rachel view her wretched experience with the other budding journalists not as a result of immaturity, bad luck, or poor judgment but as a defining moment, a calamity to be avoided forever after, even at the risk of a lifetime of unassuageable loneliness and self-doubt? Such an abandonment would haunt anyone, but most people her age eventually take another chance on friendship, just as they do after an excruciating early love affair and accept the loss as a natural and inevitable part of growing up, not a peril so devastating that it should never be risked again. Most of the women and the men I have known have endured things like this and worse, but they all have rebounded rather than retreated. For her, however, eschewing friendship was the only possible conclusion. It seemed automatic—almost predestined by her character—as though she had forearmed herself by embracing a tough, fundamental truth. “It was soul crushing, but it really doesn't hurt anymore,” she claimed. “I made it not hurt even then; walls went up. A door closed. I'll never let anybody get through that door again. Even though I know it's a little sad, I'm really glad to know I learned the lesson that friends are crutches, the enemies of my autonomy.”

I had a sense from the unshakable ring of conviction with which she described her self-imposed isolation that her swearing off the support of others was actually the endpoint of a process that had begun before her friends deserted her—that it was a confirmation rather than a revelation, with roots in her experiences of intimacy and its dangers to the self.

Two sources, one inspiring, the other tragic, predated Rachel's decisive retreat from friendship after her journalistic debacle. She saw in her own family both a positive example of the rewards of self-sufficiency and a negative one of the dangers of craving companionship. Her mother was proudly independent. “She was a loner, busy all the time, and the housewives in the neighborhood couldn't relate to her.” But her older brother had slid into addiction and death. “He was a golden boy in high school, the student council president. It was the seventies, when everybody started taking drugs. He couldn't stand being all by himself, so he became a drug user and went rapidly downhill; a lot of people who do that right themselves later, but he never did. His death convinced me that I needed my friends too badly and that I had to change and rely only on myself.”

She clung to the conviction that she could protect herself from becoming her brother by emulating her mother and never needing another peer. Her brother, she believed, was destroyed by his hunger to belong, not by his inner demons. Resisting her own similar desire for companionship was her way to inoculate herself against sharing his downfall; she would be strong where he was weak. While the logic may be suspect, taking these stringent steps fortifies her and gives her the illusion that he too might have been saved by self-sufficiency and willpower. It is a calculation that has paid off for her even as it has limited her ability to be comforted.

*   *   *

There is no simple explanation why anyone turns away for good after betrayal by a friend, but a tragic end to an admired sibling, as well as an exacting nature, a dread of dependency, and unwillingness to take the risks of engagement can make intense human bonds seem too dangerous. Someone who associates emotional connection with mortal danger cuts off the possibility of proving her pessimistic notions of friendship false and makes it impossible ever to have a corrective experience. Suppressing her wish for companionship, she keeps inviolate space around her innermost self, asserting all the while that “if I had to do it over, I'd do it the same way.”

To seek friendship anew after a violation of trust, you must be willing to expose yourself once again to unpredictable losses, to take another chance on strangers who are not under your control, to accept new influences that might cloud your judgment, or even subjugate your will. These were risks that Rachel dared not take, so she retreated, proud and alone, forever more.

I CAN'T STOP LOVING YOU

Rachel's reaction to unfriendly friends was extreme. Equally radical is the opposite response: clinging to the perpetrator ever more tightly the more outrageously you are treated. Friendship can feel like a trap to be avoided at all costs or a haven worth any price.

Why would an appealing, vivacious fourteen-year-old allow herself to be brutally humiliated and violated by a charismatic classmate and her cronies, never resisting or processing what they did to her, continuing to crave her tormentor's company, adoring her, living for their moments together, for years afterward? Because it was the only time she had ever felt loved.

There are many unconscious layers lurking beneath the functions that a friend, particularly a thrilling one encountered at an impressionable age, fulfills, and these go well beyond somebody to talk to, hang out with, or emulate. Such a person can provide—very much like a beloved does—a reason for living or be a substitute for parental care or for a sense of self. Miriam Higgins came from the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks in rural Indiana. “My parents were the ‘crazy people' in town,” this forthright forty-five-year-old woman recalled. “Mostly, we ate the game my father shot; there's no way you can make squirrel taste good.” It was a background of destitution and emotional squalor that could have turned her into the kind of kid who gets sent to reform school (her brother is a career criminal) or becomes a porn star, but instead she became a psychiatrist and, not surprisingly, a vegetarian. From an early age, her allure was her most dangerous asset, which she used but which also caused her suffering, because her father desired her and her mother hated and envied her. There was nowhere to turn. “My father molested me when I was five years old,” she told me. “My mother sacrificed me to stay married to him.” She is one of the very few people I have known, including my patients, who have ever described her parents so starkly.

Miriam needed somebody to look up to, and Donna—“athletic, competent, rich, manic, and popular”—filled the bill. In addition to offering the trappings of affection, Donna gratified that most potent of desires and provided a commodity as precious and compelling as passion: “gilt”—prestige, reflected glory—by association. “She was it to me, my first love,” said Miriam. “She thought I was smart and deep. I developed an intense attachment to her, and we became best friends.” Hers was an early adolescent crush based on idealization, not sex. “She was always the first pick for teams, and I was the last,” Miriam recalled, that common gym class humiliation of the clumsy still rankling. “Donna knew how to get ahead, and she could do whatever she wanted; I couldn't do anything, and she could do everything. I wanted to be her.”

This self-described “lost kid” basked in the warmth of her idol's attention and appreciation, things she was starved for and that no one else had ever given her. Donna—who, unbeknownst to her acolyte, had serious problems of her own—hungered for adoration as much as Miriam needed someone to adore. Miriam describes, still rapturous, the dawn of their passionate friendship. “Her family had a huge house with land and horses. We'd get up early and ride together and then watch the sun rise as we ate chicken soup with buttered crackers, the most delicious food in the world to me”—particularly after a diet of squirrel. “My need to have her love was so intense; when we were getting along, it was the best high I'd ever experienced. She was my sun, the center of my world, and everything revolved around her.” The comparison with her own wretched home life made Donna's charms especially compelling. “She was just so much better than my family that I clung to her, or the idea of her, for many years.”

But there was a horrific dark side that emerged early in their courtship. When the girls were in eighth grade, Donna gave a slumber party and deigned to invite Miriam, who was ecstatic. “I was very excited to go. There were six of us in her finished basement—it was not a dank one like ours.” All of a sudden, the atmosphere changed from delightful to ominous, and Miriam found herself pinned down and stripped naked by Donna and her posse. “They started making fun of my flat chest and laughed at how small my breasts were—I developed late. They called my nipples ‘chocolate chips.' They poked and touched me everywhere.” Because she had everything to lose, she kept silent and stayed rooted to the spot, and the party continued as though nothing untoward had occurred. “Then we watched movies, ate popcorn, and went to sleep,” she said, her voice now flat. “It was clear in my mind that she had abused me. I think of it as rape, really. I don't remember a lot of things from that period—I dissociated—but this I remember. She took advantage of me. It was a classic sadomasochistic relationship, and I think it was sexual for her, but not for me.” Much of her childhood suffering became a self-protective blur, but the excruciating details of this episode she could not obliterate.

I was appalled and incredulous when Miriam told me that they remained best friends throughout high school, but her explanation of her ongoing attraction to Donna made sense. “It was having the attention of a very exciting object; I was like a dog chasing a car. I really needed her. Everything that seemed important to me she had and she was. Of course, I knew that all the sadistic stuff was bad, but she cared about me, and my parents hated me, and I couldn't do better than that. I was focused on the addictive drug of her affection, and I would do anything to get it—like a crack addict. When Donna's with me and she's telling me, ‘I love you; you're so stunning'—that's my fix.”

The power of her longing is still so potent that she switches to the present tense when she describes it. She got something essential that she needed—the authentic, even if inconsistent and unpredictable, loving appreciation of someone she admired, and it sustained her; unlike Rachel, she did not consider the price exorbitant.

Miriam's description reminded me not so much of a compulsively car-chasing dog but of a desperately clinging baby rhesus monkey, the kind psychologist Harry Harlow studied in the 1950s in a series of experiments
3
on the effects of maternal deprivation that were both compelling and controversial because they were so cruel. I have never forgotten the photographs of these little creatures with their despairing humanlike faces holding tightly to the awful wire surrogate mothers Harlow fashioned and that he named “Iron Maidens.” They provided milk but shot out sharp spikes, administered electric shocks, and blasted the babies with cold air. No matter how they were tortured, the babies would not let go, because these mothers were all they had.

The dynamics between the troubled teenage friends changed dramatically when Miriam finally no longer had a flat chest and became popular with boys. She also acquired another considerable asset: a driver's license. “By the time I was sixteen, I had more capital—I looked older than I was, so I could buy liquor, and I had a car. I developed new confidence,” she said. Her final victory, which reveals the sadistic streak in every masochist, was to leave town at age seventeen with Donna's former boyfriend. She soon ditched the boyfriend but never went back. Donna became seriously depressed for some time after her departure, demonstrating that their needs were more enmeshed than they appeared on the surface.