The Golden Condom (26 page)

It was essential for Anna Schneider that a man seek her out. Forty-year-old Lisa Deutsch took the opposite approach to finding a mate: she needed to be the one to do the choosing. For this born entrepreneur who recently started her own company, the product she is proudest of—the one that had the longest, most difficult launch and required the most intensive marketing efforts to make successful—is herself. She is the female Horatio Alger of the altar.

Pleasure and enthusiasm, tempered with a tough-minded assessment of what she had to overcome within herself to be genuinely receptive to marriage, emanate from her as she describes how she mounted a campaign that was a triumph of will, insight, diligence, and nerve. In Churchill's words, she never, never, never gave up.

Lisa's career, like Anna's, came first in her twenties, and she, too, found professional success easier to achieve than a lasting relationship. “I was part of corporate America. I only had three boyfriends in the whole decade, and every one broke my heart.” These rejections devastated her. “It took me forever to get over them,” she told me. “I was not interested in dating for a year after the last breakup—it was really hard; I'm a loyal person.”

It was not until she turned thirty that she began to consider that she herself might be the problem. She discovered that she was gun-shy and more demoralized by these failures than she had let herself know. “I would brush off opportunities. Once I was at the airport with a colleague, and she said, ‘Did you see that hot guy checking you out?' and I hadn't noticed. I was just not aware. I needed to do something about this.” Unlike my patient the cynical architect, Lisa did not conclude that men were the problem; her own blindness was.

Characteristically, she took matters into her own hands. She joined the Internet dating site Match.com “and started doing two dates a day”—a slightly manic solution, but one that certainly beat feeling like a victim or sitting at home alone. Lisa also cleverly arranged to protect herself from rejection and to manage the disappointments inevitable in such a project. When a candidate did not work out, she went right back on the computer, where, she announced gleefully, “there would always be at least four other men waiting to ask me out; it helped with the heartbreak.” Even though she never did find the right match in seven years of online searching, she met two appealing men, one who was her old type (“Fascinating, but ultimately unavailable”) and another who was a real possibility (“Successful, my own age, so nice”) but whom she wrote off at the time because he was divorced—one of her arbitrary negative criteria.

Eventually, with help from a therapist, she figured out what was really going on. “I was afraid of real intimacy; I passed up some really good guys because I was looking for the wrong things.” She had been energetically pursuing external solutions to an internal problem, with roots in her past that had not yet been explored. This was the beginning of wisdom.

The sources of Lisa's fear turned out to be, as they usually do, her relationship with her father (“He was successful, but I couldn't feel comfortable or confident in his consistency. Trying to get his attention and approval led me to be attracted to unreliable older men. It was easier to be with someone mysterious and intriguing.”) and her parents' marriage (“I was afraid of repeating their relationship and divorce—they enjoyed common interests but didn't really connect.”). She saw that she had spent years seeking men like her father and trying to transform them into real partners—a popular but thankless project, even for somebody as hardworking as she.

Although Lisa had close male friendships, she put lovers in a different category. “I did not believe that I could confide in a person I was dating—I always discounted that,” she said. She was never at ease with her boyfriends because she had to work so hard to win and keep them, and she could never speak her mind for fear of the consequences. “I never had to put that much effort into friendships,” she observed. “I didn't believe it was possible to have a comfortable, deep friendship with a man I loved until I met Jerry, and then
OMIGOD
!” I asked her if Jerry, her fiancé, whom she finally met when she was thirty-eight, was different from the other men she knew. “Very,” she said with joyful relief.

Finding Jerry, a fifty-two-year-old divorced father of three—the divorce taboo evaporated when she met him—was no lucky accident. In addition to her therapy, a TED Talk entitled “Thirty Is Not the New Twenty,” which Lisa heard when she was thirty-seven (“It explained everything I did wrong with men”) galvanized her to reconsider her dating strategy and get serious about finding a mate. She identified with the deluded twentysomethings in the talk who rationalized killing time in relationships that were going nowhere, and she decided to try a different, more focused approach, very old but new again: she went to a matchmaker. “I was open to any way to meet people,” she said. And she went with the top of the line, hiring the equivalent of an executive spouse-search firm that charged male clients $35,000 a year for introductions. This, she concluded, was an indication of their seriousness, as well as their net worth.

“I met him at a networking event—I didn't put much weight on it because everybody they had set me up with was nice and successful, but I felt no connection. I was seeing somebody else when I was introduced to Jerry. I decided just to have a drink, because he could be a good business contact; I was feeling jaded at that point. This happened two years ago, and we fell in love in a few months.” Lightning often strikes when least expected, even when you are on the verge of giving up hope after trying everything you can think of. But when you are ready—at thirty-nine or eighty-nine—a mate may suddenly appear with the very qualities you ignored or overlooked or wrote off before and have now come to prize.

Even after Lisa found her soul mate, obstacles to their union remained; in this case, it was he who was gun-shy. They went to counseling together. “He realized he was holding back because of a bad divorce, and he wanted to be really careful,” she said. “He cried in a session. ‘Why am I holding back?' he said.” His emotion moved her; in every other relationship, she had been the one to cry, and only in private. “We worked through our fears. It freed us. We've been engaged for eight months.”

Late marriers, especially if they are women in early middle age marrying men who are considerably older, often have to accept that they are forfeiting having children. If the man is not a first-time groom, he often does not want another family. I asked Lisa whether this was an issue for her. “I was more interested in finding a soul mate,” she replied, “and my fiancé's children are grown, so I had to mourn the decision I didn't realize I was making.” But she feels amply compensated by the ease of their intimacy, something she never imagined would be possible with a man and that her parents never had together.

How does their thirteen-year age difference affect her, since this had been a deal breaker earlier in her quest? “I have a fear of him dying, even though he's very healthy and he has more energy than I do,” she admitted. “I'm afraid of losing him now that I've found him.” The fact that it took so long and that she worked so hard to do it makes him even more precious. “I finally chose the right person—that's why it feels so good. If my radar had been better earlier, it's possible that I could have found somebody else, but I'm glad I didn't because I wouldn't have met Jerry.” For someone who has “worked hard for everything in my life,” the effortlessness of their rapport is a huge relief. “I'd always heard that relationships are work, but living with Jerry does not feel like work at all; when something feels like too much work, then maybe it is. I love caring for him, and he for me. We get each other. He's mine,” said the corporate cat that ate the canary. “And he paid $35,000 to meet me!”

She was worth every penny.

*   *   *

A problematic father—like Anna Schneider's distant one or Lisa Deutsch's inconsistent one—makes it difficult for his daughter to find a man who can love her wisely, but a father whose child calls him a “cockroach” would seem to make it almost impossible. How can anything sustaining be built around such an image of maleness? And yet, Wendy Myers overcame her treatment at the hands of a father as repulsive as he was reprehensible to marry a man she esteemed and who made her laugh, at the age of forty-six.

Wendy's cockroach father was no Gregor Samsa, the tragic hero in Kafka's story
Metamorphosis
, who was tormented and neglected by his family; rather, he was the one who tormented, exploited, and ultimately abandoned his family, including Wendy, his youngest and most responsible daughter. Early on, Wendy had been designated—and allowed herself to be designated—as the caretaker of her inadequate, overwhelmed, and selfish parents. By the time her two older sisters were marrying and starting families of their own, this highly organized and competent young woman (she was director of human relations at a major company) took over running their household. When her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Wendy became her nurse and surrogate mother until she died when Wendy was thirty-seven. “I served my parents,” she said without self-pity. “I never said no. They couldn't handle themselves, didn't like each other that much, and wanted me to act as a buffer between them; nobody ever took care of me.”

Wendy started to have suspicions about her father's character during her mother's illness, but she could not have imagined that he would shamelessly flirt with women at her mother's wake until she witnessed it. Three weeks later, announcing that he'd “started a new chapter,” he moved in with one of them and sold the family home, leaving only a box of mementos for her. “I was dumbfounded,” she said. “He dropped the whole family. The last straw was when I overheard a conversation he had accidentally recorded on his phone in which he said that we meant nothing to him, that we were worthless, and that he never wanted to see us again.”

He was a man of his word. Over the next several years, Wendy discovered that her father had never even made a living—her mother's parents had surreptitiously paid their bills—and that he had squandered the inheritance her mother had bequeathed to her and her sisters. Then, in his final act of abandonment, hatred, and self-hatred, he committed suicide in his girlfriend's bedroom, “leaving a huge mess, as usual.” Wendy had cut herself off from him so completely by then that when I asked if she had any reactions to his death, she replied coolly that she was shocked that he died, “because I viewed him as a cockroach, and I thought cockroaches lived forever.” She added, “I considered him dead long before.”

Despite everything, this tall, striking, and tart-tongued woman never became sour or depressed. She kept busy with her career and her friends. There was never a lack of male attention—when I met her at a mutual friend's wedding a decade ago, she was surrounded by a bevy of admirers—but although she attracted many men, she never got close to any of them.

Soon after she was freed from family obligations, Wendy realized that taking care of her parents as a young, single woman had served another purpose for her than simply doing her duty. It had provided her with an excuse to avoid involvement with a man, which she implicitly feared would be a reprise of her parents' relationship. To make up for lost time, she, too, joined Match.com, and, like Lisa Deutsch, searched it avidly with an adventuresome spirit and a head for business. “I was a big dater in my late thirties,” Wendy recalled. “If you asked me out, I went out. I had three first dates in one weekend—it was fun! I'd go into interview mode; it helped being in HR and having a recruiting mentality. I got a gem from everyone I met—either he said something clever or he took me to a new restaurant. I tried to be open and optimistic and think, ‘Let me see if this works.'” But for years nothing ever did, because her father stood in the way.

During her speed-dating days, Wendy did make one deep and enduring commitment: she began seeing a therapist right after her mother died and stayed through her midforties. Her father, though still alive, had already become a “nonentity” to her. “I needed to figure out what I did and did not want,” Wendy said. “I had no male role model.”

In fact, she had a very potent but poisonous one: her father was a perfect negative role model, an ideal counterexample of what a loving man should be. Conventional wisdom says that positive role models of parents—or parent-surrogates—are critical in making good choices in relationships, but it is possible to make judicious use of a terrible one. Of course, much more mental effort is involved in learning from a father for whom you have only contempt than from one who, though flawed, loves and cares for you. To come to terms with a despicable parent, you also have to grieve for what you never had, make some sense of his personality, and recognize that you did not cause or deserve mistreatment. And even if you do not forgive such a man—a legitimate choice—nursing hatred for him exacts a toll. The relationship lives on inside you, so hating a parent always involves hating a part of yourself. Years of intensive therapy were necessary for Wendy to accomplish these feats.

Wendy learned how to extrapolate from her father's repugnant character and shocking behavior; she discovered what to flee in a man, and, conversely, what to seek. “Not all men treat women the way my father did. I had to look for his opposite,” she said. “I had to make comparisons: this is what a crappy man does, and this is how a good man acts.”

However, seeking a mirror image is not enough. By itself, it is a reflexive, behavioral solution that addresses only the overt part of the problem. In order to create inner receptivity to loving and being loved in the aftermath of being exploited and discarded, you also have to change how you feel about yourself. “Therapy gave me self-esteem and belief in myself,” she said. Once she knew she had a right to be cherished, she could seek somebody who could cherish her, and only then could she recognize and respond to such a man.