Insecurity

Limerance: The Obsessive Love of Love (or that time a famous guy dumped me)

Posted on by egoandorgasm

Sloan: In July, I started dating a semi-famous person. I say “semi” because he’s more famous in Europe than here in the U.S. At first, it was terrific. In fact, it was too perfect. He was handsome, funny, smart and quick with his retorts, and fun. We enjoyed each other’s company. The first date lasted 4 hours. The second lasted 9 hours. The third lasted 48 hours.

There were dinners and walks for ice cream. There were phone calls. There were text messages. There was banter. There was sexiness. There was HEAT.

I started falling for him fast. For the first time in forever, I felt actual butterflies in my stomach at the prospect of seeing him. I started to sweat every time I was on my way to see him. I was jittery for the first few minutes when I was with him.

On the third date, he took me to a special childhood place for him. And we spent the weekend together. It was magical. He gave me a massage and the best oral sex of my life. We showered outdoors together after frolicking on his private beach all day. We went out to dinner and talked about everything that mattered in our lives – parents’ deaths, lost loves, career fears. I felt like we were two sides of a zipper syncing up that weekend. I let myself go.

The last night, there was a full moon on the beach. We stood there, gazing out over the Atlantic, and I knew I was in serious trouble. I was speeding toward full entanglement. And because of where he was in his life, and his fame, I knew this wasn’t a good idea. But I did it anyway.

A few days after our return to the city, I got a text from him saying that while he had a lovely and intimate time with me, he just didn’t feel like he wanted to get into anything more serious right now.

When I got this text, I was out with a 27-year-old tech guy. I was drunk. You can guess what happens next. I have revenge sex, and then, once this wonderful guy leaves, I cry my eyes out. I get into my tub at 1am and feel very, very sorry for myself. And then I entirely lose my mind and text the famous person 12 times. YES. TWELVE. Each an escalation of sadness and despair and patheticness. I basically *begged* him to stay friends with me and still see me.

Needless to say, this wasn’t my proudest moment. I woke up in a sea of shame and regret. And I never heard from him again.

In the following weeks, I’ve thought a lot about why I felt so rejected. I felt like I had offered my best self to him and he had shoved it back in my face. And that hurt. I reacted badly. But I was/am determined to learn from this and not to repeat it.

I mean, I didn’t really know this guy at all. Three dates, no matter how intense, do not a relationship make. So what was I reacting to? What loss was I experiencing? I started to realize that there might be a bigger problem at stake in all of this. I began wondering:

Are certain people prone to being in love with love?

Analysis:

It’s taken me 25 odd years of dating and marriage to finally realize that the men who were jerks, who disappeared, who cheated on me, who broke it off, who didn’t want to be in a relationship with me in the first place, who ignored me, were all doing me a huge favor.

I shouldn’t have spent so much time being sad or angry or hurt, I should have been grateful and relieved.

In actuality, they all saved me from being with them – either at all or for one minute longer, thereby wasting more of my limited time on this planet and probably saving me years of future regrets.

I’ve been divorced twice, and in more long-term relationships that were marriages in all but paper, but I didn’t realize what real regret looked like until I started talking to people who had been married for 10-20-30 years before separating. That loss and sense of regret and failure is a lot harder than anything I’ve gone through – by magnitudes.

I think the early loss of my family (they died in an accident) primed me for limerance. As Barthes wrote, “it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.” The object of my love has always been absent, even when I have had a body in bed beside me. No wonder, then, that I have cycled through love affairs the way others change their overcoats with the seasons. No wonder that I have sought out not requited love, but the type of love that is always already receding and ungraspable. I find pleasure in the pursuit of love and in the pain of rejection because it is familiar. I have loved best the people who did not love me back.

But I think this last relationship’s end, with the deep soul searching it instigated (one may substitute “life crisis” here, since it is just as accurate), has produced something new. An emerging awareness, at least, of old patterns. A tallying up and closing of old romantic accounts. An instigation of apologies to the men I have hurt (because hurt is never just something one receives, but also something one doles out – however unintentionally).

I’ve come to see that even the worst of the men in my life have been beneficial in some ways. And I’m suddenly thankful for the ones who broke up with me or rejected me before things got too far. I can honestly appreciate that they gave me a huge gift in their going.

Viv: This is a beautiful moment of reflection, Sloan.  Limerance.  It explains so much that is culturally complex (and cheap) about love today: “the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one’s feelings.” This is not “true” love, I have decided, only the approximation (“puppy love”), and, sadly, as close as some people get to love (as we become consumed by social narcissism).  Fortunately, we know that so much more exists (for me, Love has as much to do with community and family and world as it does for me individually).  But does ones partner know that? That is another question in itself.

Sporgulation: Waiting for a Guy to Text You

Posted on by egoandorgasm

Sporgulate (verb): to become preoccupied over the fact that the person you texted two days ago, one day ago, several hours ago, ten minutes ago has not yet texted you back.

Sporgulation can begin immediately after sending a text, or it can manifest itself over time as it slowly dawns on you that the textee has had plenty of time to read the text and is making a choice not to text you back in a timely fashion, or worse, to not text you back at all.

Sporgulating can take many forms.  The most common form consists of repeatedly checking the phone to see if the textee has replied.  The best time to sporgulate in this way is when you are supposed to be focused on something else that is far more important.  Other common forms of sporgulation include sending multiple follow up texts to the textee even though they have not replied to the initial text, talking at length to your friends/coworkers/roommates about the fact that the textee has not yet replied to your text, and imagining a variety of hypothetical scenarios that might explain why the textee has not yet replied to your text.

Sporgulation is a waste of time.  We repeat, it is a waste of time.  But we do it anyway, even though we know better.

Viv: I have been dating someone for about a month, lets call him Doug, and it all started with me asking Doug out on a mobile dating site.  I gave him my phone number via the site, and he immediately texted me to find out when we could meet up.  Since that initial prompt response, however, it has been a total sporgulation game.  We meet up and have a good time. We have beers. We make out in public. We have great, healthy sex.  And then one of us leaves in the morning and I wait a couple days.  Silence.  I text something cheerful, like, “That was so fun last Thursday.  Are you free for more fun later this week?”, and then the real sporgulation sets in.  Doug can take hours to respond, sometimes over 24 hours.  I check my phone every 15 minutes.  I am convinced I will never see him again. I begin to chastise myself for even texting him at all. Isn’t it the man’s job to ask me out? But didn’t I set the precedent by asking him out? Who is attached to normative gender roles anyway? Its 2015!  And then he gets back to me and suggests a date and we meet up and repeat the good time and I assume he was just busy…… Until I start to sporgulate all over again a couple days later.

Sloan: I’m juggling 7 guys right now, which basically means I’m texting them or we’ve gone out on at least one date and there is potential for more. All of them text me. Some of them text me a lot, some a little, some almost never, some just enough. When it comes to texting, we’re all like Goldilocks – there’s a perfect amount of texting for each one of us. The problem is that no one but us knows exactly where that sweet spot is located, so we’re that much more likely to sporgulate, get really, really irritated at someone, or, you know, piss off a lot of bears. One of the men I’m currently juggling, let’s call him Mike, is driving me to sporgulate. I like him more than the others; so much more than I’m forcing myself to keep dating everyone else right now just so I don’t obsess over Mike. I met Mike in real life and our first meetup was fantastic. Except that I wasn’t sure whether or not it was a date – it was “coffee”. The second time we met up it became more clear that we were in “more than friends” territory, but I’m still not sure how interested he is. So. Sporgulation. I send a text to Mike and then put down my phone and try not to obsess about when he’ll text me back. Meanwhile, 6 other men are texting me and I don’t spend more than a minute thinking about their messages or my responses.

Analysis:

Sporgulation is clearly more about the sporgulator’s mental state and emotional needs than about the actual conversation taking place via our handheld devices. It has nothing to do – whatsoever – with the person sending (or not sending) the texts in question.

But what drives us to sporgulate?

Is it human to sporgulate? Is sporgulating even a new phenomenon, or has it simply intensified with our new technologies? Certainly, people sat by their landlines hoping for the phone to ring. They also waited impatiently for the postman to deliver a potential letter from a beloved. So what’s new?

The speed and level of connectivity is new. Social scientists and psychologists have been researching whether or not we feel more or less connected in the era of Facebook, Twitter, and texting. The answer is ambiguous. On one hand, we use social media and mobile technology to stay on the grid, to connect with far-flung friends, and make plans. On the other hand, social media and mobile technology can drive us to compare our lives to others’ lives (and come up short), spark #FOMO (fear of missing out), and drive up our anxiety to peak levels.

So sporgulation is, at its root, about our own insecurities and our attempts to connect with people we do not yet know if we can trust.  It is a side effect of our experimentation with attachment via technology.

Viv: I like Doug but I don’t know Doug yet.  I am in the process of moving away and getting a divorce and this means I do not ask Doug searching personal questions.  I don’t reveal much that is deeply personal about myself either.  Doug and I do not have a level of trust built up that can sustain long periods of comfortable silence.  Each time we see each other may be our last time together.  But we are connecting on intimate physical levels that can lead to attachment the more we sleep together (he spooned me last week and it felt like nestling in a bed of kittens), so the situation can reach high levels of emotional confusion.  Unless we break it off or we choose to have a more personal conversation about what we are doing together, the sporgulation is likely to continue.  I am OK with this.  Like Sloan, I am also dating several other people, in part to mediate the attachment I might feel for Doug.  And again, like Sloan, I don’t find myself sporgulating while texting with other men.

Sloan: I can relate to you, Viv. I like Mike a lot – but I don’t really know him. We haven’t had sex yet, though we’re on that track and it’ll probably happen soon. Once that happens, I’ll be in sporgulation central. The only hope for me is to work on my own insecurities and try to remind myself that I’m great whether or not Mike likes me back. I’m going to have to have a conversation with Mike, eventually, about what this is, expectations, etc. But for now, I’m riding this wave. Whenever possible, I’m going out without my phone, i.e. actually spending time by myself without the baby blanket of instant connection with my network of friends. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating. The bonus is that it really seems to lessen sporgulation. Note that I said “lessen” and not “get rid of.”