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