The Golden Condom (24 page)

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Miriam's tie to her beloved tormentor did not dissipate quickly, even after years passed and she completed a lengthy psychotherapeutic treatment, became a physician, married a caring if self-contained man, and established her psychiatric practice in another state. Even when her identity was far more solid than it had been in adolescence and she had friendships not based exclusively on desperate neediness, the old tie to her wire-mother-surrogate still had a hold on her. She felt compelled to impress Donna by sending her copies of the two books she published, but she never got a response.

Then, years later, Donna, now married with four children, friended her on Facebook. Miriam forwarded the request to me:

I know, in the past, that you have tried to get in touch with me. The reason I didn't respond was selfish on my part. I just felt too busy with life to really invest in a friendship with you. Let's just be friends on a “Christmas Card” level. I am very happy with my busy busy life. I hope you understand.

The thrill was not entirely gone, but this time, at last, Miriam's response was not masochistic enthrallment:

I don't want to be “friends” with someone who won't actually talk with me. If you want to have a real conversation, let me know. I am readily available. To be honest, I feel that you have been really cruel to me. For us to even interact socially, I would need to talk with you about it. I realize that I had my own issues in becoming attached to people who did not treat me well, and certainly I had my own problems with aggression. But some of the things that you did, some of the things that I allowed, make it really hard for me to think of you as a superficial friend. For me, history is not so erasable.

Now that she finally has a sense of self, Miriam no longer needs to cling to Donna or tolerate her cruelty. She also sees through her former friend's self-promoting attempts to make her feel inferior; a person with a genuinely full and productive life is no longer awed by someone who touts her own “busy busy” one. Now she has nonsadistic sources of sustenance, when before there had been only Donna. Miriam can finally think and speak clearly, confront the truth, and demand to be treated with respect. Her eyes are open, and she is fully awake. “I see my relationship with Donna as a distant but important dream,” she said. “My attachment to her was irrational.” Is there any love—even one with far fewer sinister elements—that is not?

Unlike Rachel, Miriam craves intimacy and is not totally satisfied with her current friendships, which, not surprisingly, tend to be with people who are “safe” rather than seductive. “Since Donna, I have been careful,” she says. “I usually choose passive-aggressive people who don't express anger directly.” Considering how the actively angry person treated her, this is a step up. Her desperate quest for love once led her to accept victimization and never protest, protect herself, or reject her tormentor. Now that she has an identity of her own, she has freed herself from bondage. Remarkably, she continues to acknowledge, and to prize, the love and admiration that was priceless amid the pathology.

THE OCNOPHIL AND THE PHILOBAT

Why did Miriam's tumultuous affair with Donna not make her phobic about friendship? Objectively, humiliation and sexual molestation seem far worse than being left by your friends to publish the high school newspaper by yourself. But trauma is as subjective as desire, and the meanings we attribute to experiences, as well as the context in which they occur, determine their ultimate effect on our lives.

Miriam craves loving companionship. “I appreciate friendships a lot,” she told me. The misery of her childhood (and lots of hard emotional work) made her resilient and taught her to seek the positive even in dreadful situations. She cultivates a talent for intimacy, while Rachel mistrusts and rejects it; the solipsistic journalist feels more in control, and more herself, when she is by herself. Paradoxically, Rachel's tragic and talented brother proved a worse example than Miriam's criminal sibling; since Miriam never looked up to him or identified with him, his fate was not something she worried that she would share. She never imagined that he was led astray by his desire for human contact.

Miriam concluded—and I agree—that Donna did her more good than harm. Their passionate attachment was a source of real love, not just torment. Donna, with all her dangerous flaws, buoyed Miriam up at a critical time in her youth when she had nothing else, when her parents rejected and exploited her. Now she has learned to seek sustenance from safer sources. It is counterintuitive but true that you can get precious things from someone who treats you badly, that the wonderful is often mixed with the terrible in human relationships.

Michael Balint,
4
a founder of the British object relations school of psychoanalysis and an innovative and profound clinician with a quirky mind, invented two cumbersome—even comical—words to describe the opposite temperaments exemplified by Rachel and Miriam: “ocnophil” and “philobat.” These terms never caught on—they do not trip off the tongue like other Latin-based neologisms like
id, ego,
and
superego
—but they perfectly describe basic attitudes toward intimacy central to the way people experience friendship and its discontents. Philobats are loners who retreat when anxious. They consider relationships more dangerous than comforting. The close-binding ocnophils cling when they are anxious and seek human contact to assuage their fears. Relationships are comforting and safe for the ocnophil, but the lonely space between them and others is fraught with danger; the self-sufficient philobat prefers to cope with danger and uncertainty alone.

For every ocnophil and philobat—as well as for those of us who are an amalgam of both or who vacillate between the two extremes—friendship's end is shattering. It leaves us differently bereft than passion does, but just as bereft. How we recover, and what course our lives take after such a loss, may differ depending on life circumstances, history, and personality, but there is no avoiding the anguish of losing a precious companion at any age.

No matter whether we seek it or flee from it, friendship has its dark side, like every other kind of love. But I believe, as Miriam does, that you still get more from friends than you lose, even when you factor in the emotional devastation and self-doubt that their leaving causes. Trauma, like so much else, is in the eye of the beholder. Despite the pain I have experienced as well as any pain from betrayal still in my future, I'm not canceling my ocnophil membership anytime soon.

 

PART III

FULFILLED LOVE

 

9

LATE FIRST MARRIAGE

The Triumph of Hope over Resignation

AT LONG LAST, LOVE

Mieczyslaw Horszowski, last of the great romantic Polish piano virtuosos in the tradition of Chopin and Arthur Rubinstein, married for the first time in 1981 at the age of eighty-nine. He wed Bice Costa, an Italian concert pianist (a fan and first-time bride) forty years his junior. Why did he wait so long? “I didn't find the right girl until then,” he explained wryly, adding, “It only goes to prove that there is no such thing as a confirmed bachelor.” They had twelve satisfying years together until he died a month before his 101st birthday.

Whenever it happens, late first marriage is qualitatively different from second marriage. It is not, as the renowned eighteenth-century English author Samuel Johnson quipped about second marriage, “the triumph of hope over experience.” It is the triumph of hope over resignation, a resignation fraught with bitterness, envy, shame, sorrow, and—occasionally—relief. Marrying for the first time later in life means defying the verdict—false, as it turns out—that you are destined to live out your days alone. This requires overcoming the inner obstacles to identifying, let alone pursuing, a partner capable of lasting love. Becoming authentically emotionally available, which involves expressing feelings and responding to other people's, is a prerequisite, and it is often an arduous, time-consuming job. Self-created impediments and unconscious residual wounds from the past are far more daunting than the outer obstacles (such as the absence of available partners within a fifty-mile radius) that I have frequently heard patients and acquaintances cite for remaining single.

Older first-time brides and grooms feel a depth of emotion that contradicts jaundiced assumptions about matrimony, spouses, and themselves. Most can hardly believe their good fortune. Vanished is the cynical bravado and seeming indifference to their singlehood that masked the anxiety and despair they can only acknowledge fully in retrospect. “I was spectacularly lucky,” a still-astonished fifty-seven-year-old recent bride told me, “but I helped myself to become lucky. I had come to the conclusion long ago that there might not be anyone out there for me. There was a huge amount of emptiness and loneliness. When you're in it, it's almost an addiction and a drug; you can't let it go.”

“He has my back; nobody ever had it before,” a forty-seven-year-old woman celebrating her first anniversary told me, still amazed that it was so.

Quietly, with deep emotion, a sixty-one-year-old man in the ninth year of his first marriage said, “This relationship allows me to give of myself, and I can receive now—things come in, they resonate.”

And a forty-year-old bride-to-be said simply, “He's home.”

I have never before conducted interviews in which every one of my subjects was joyous.

One prerequisite to finding a mate in midlife and beyond is admitting to yourself that you want one, that you need lasting intimacy to feel fulfilled. Many people are too afraid to say so because they cannot bear their own longing or have shut themselves off from it altogether. When you are shut off, you are blind to possibilities, no matter how numerous or fetching they may be.

A sharp thirty-five-year-old woman architect whom I saw in therapy for two years had only had a few relationships, and these were exclusively with men who were not really interested in intimacy; the previous one had lived in a distant city and had expected her to do all the traveling, and the current one, whom she clung to despite ample evidence of his ambivalence, was a guilt-ridden divorced father who insisted on arranging their time together entirely around his children's schedules. She complained with contempt and bitterness that no man she had ever known wanted a woman who was his intellectual or professional equal, and she doubted whether such paragons even existed. She insisted that her only options were men who were either beneath her or otherwise engaged, and she refused to consider that anything she might be communicating unconsciously contributed to her predicament; the male ego and sexism in society were the sources of her solitude, and she was convinced that these problems were insurmountable. In fact, her entire childhood and much of her adulthood had been spent trying to get her parents' attention—an impossible task, since they were completely absorbed in caring for her younger brother, who had been paralyzed by a fall when he was an infant, an accident for which they held themselves responsible and spent their lives trying to remedy. She had learned early on to fend for herself and to neither ask for nor expect help from anyone, hoping in vain that her hard work and professional success would someday earn appreciation, but nothing she did was ever enough. She never could acknowledge that being intimate with a man and wanting him to prize her made her feel more threatened than being alone made her feel bereft.

The willingness to take emotional risks—humiliation, rejection, disillusionment, revealing your needs, and letting yourself be vulnerable when you cannot control the outcome—can make all the difference, as it did for another patient of mine, who began seeing me when she was twenty-eight and stayed for the next twenty years. For the first five of those years, it certainly looked like she, too, was destined for a solitary life. But she hungered for love and was determined to seek it even though she initially despaired of ever finding it. Intense shame about her own neediness and fear of rejection inhibited her; she kept herself more aloof than she realized lest she reveal her naked longing for closeness, which caused her to exude a false aura of self-sufficiency and unapproachability.

She, too, had been forced from childhood to rely only on herself. Her shockingly neglectful, childish mother envied the bond between her capable daughter and the charming, workaholic father who doted on her but never protected her or compensated for his wife's deficiencies. Although the family was prosperous, the house was dark and dirty, there was never food in the refrigerator, and her mother was always late to pick her up from the deserted suburban train platform, leaving her to wait in the dark alone. Somehow, despite her upbringing, she managed to avoid cynicism if not depression and was less rigid and more open than my patient the architect was. Even as hope ebbed, through multiple disappointments with self-involved men, she persisted.

We never discussed it directly, but witnessing her misery and seeing the opportunities she was too blind or paralyzed to pursue made me decide to become her relationship coach as well as her therapist. I felt that a woman with a mother as inadequate—and a father as enticing but limited—as hers needed hands-on instruction about how to navigate the world as much as she needed insight into herself.

Although “life coaching” has now become ubiquitous, offering direct guidance was an unusual role at the time for someone who had been trained, as I had been, in the classic psychoanalytic tradition of not giving advice or talking very much in order to keep the focus on the patient's experience. Fortunately, my own analyst had violated both these directives, and I naturally emulated his hands-on style.

Therefore, while my lonely patient and I were investigating her history and her current struggles to express herself and to feel she deserved to be heard in her professional life—she was a lawyer who was afraid to speak up even when arguing a case before a judge—we also discussed in detail the rudiments of how to interact with men. I showed her how she came across to the opposite sex in social situations. I pointed out how she communicated, what she concealed, and what she had to learn to reveal. I detected that male colleagues and acquaintances were attracted to her long before she did and made sure it did not escape her notice. I advised her explicitly about how to converse with men who intrigued her, translating or interpreting nuances that were initially lost on her. I showed her how to recognize and return subtle advances no matter how much she wanted to bolt and even if she assumed, incorrectly, that someone was not interested romantically and wanted only her companionship. Afraid and hesitant as she was, she drank it all in.