I love these articles where you’re not quite sure whether it’s a parody:
> Once, before our eighth meeting, I had gotten desperate enough to create a PowerPoint for him about our relationship. One of the slides said, “I cannot go on like this. Please help me.” We sat side by side at a sports bar, facing my laptop. I ordered tea; he ordered nothing. As I clicked through the slides, I noticed that he seemed to be creeping away from me.
In another time, the unrequited lover may have written a note to share. I've heard tell of people using cue cards, writing it on their hands, practicing in front of mirrors. The need to get ones painful feelings out of the head and onto something physical is common. The most common is just telling your friends and family about it. The author mentions doing this, and note how their advice to end it is just flat ignored. There is nothing more bittersweet than unrequited love. The bitterness is painful but the sweetness is just too valuable.
All those people at sports bars who I naively assumed were managing wagers on their laptops were actually just using PowerPoint to keep their romantic relationships alive the whole time???
I am surprised at how my contempt for the author grew as I read. The author bares her soul in this beautiful piece. I have been in similar situations where irrationality completely takes over my being; and yet, I feel almost disgusted at the lack of self-respect displayed by the author (writing to the wife!? really!?). I'm curious as to why this happens. I would expect more sympathy towards her from myself. But no.
I now wonder whether this is a known psychological phenomenon.
It seems to be an uncanny valley of sorts. I experienced quite a similar feeling of revulsion -- not because the author was so different from me but rather the opposite. You want to see her pull away but instead you see a slow motion train-wreck, and the triumph of the chthonic depths of the subconscious over the generally relieving, agency imbuing aspects of rationality.
To read something like this as a human being (if you can at all relate) is thoroughly rattling. How close are any of us to sinking into such "base" forms of self-flagellation? Base and yet thoroughly universal. It is very uncomfortable, especially if you are no longer in such a state but vividly remember being in the throes of it. I won't lie, it almost resembles the way others describe having recovered from drug addiction.
Your insight is spot-on. I recognized myself in her tale and was thoroughly revolted by the fact. I still don't understand why I wouldn't want to associate with her, even though I have gone through similar experiences and I know that she's a bright U Chicago professor. I even googled her so I could see her photo so I could put a face to my feelings of disgust.
I am not like this. That hasn't happened to me before with any writing. I'm rattled indeed.
My responses to him grew shorter, and I started to build a cocoon of politesse around myself. Inside it, my taste for life started to return. As more of the outside world came back into view, it got easier and easier to back farther and farther away.
I first quite related to this, as I've experienced that to extract myself from unsolvable passion I had to "make a dignified sense of it all", and notably force myself to rebase the relationship onto a very polite and detached one (and God is it hard and painful).
But then this quite made it suspicious :
Even after he knew I had met someone else, he continued to contact me periodically
..so she might have solved it through a new relationship after all.
You chose to have an affair with a married man. Stop torturing everybody from your friends, therapist, readers, etc with your ridiculously overdeveloped rationalizations.
So you chose to have an affair with a married man. Pay attention:
that's not a romance, nor a relationship, it's an affair. It went poorly. Big surprise. Now what exactly is it that you want? Sympathy? To pseudo-philosophize about it? Just take responsibility for your bad choice, a thing you should have done from the start.
The whole thing brings to mind the saying "you have to pretty smart to be this stupid" and "you can't con a honest man".
Executive Summary: Professor of ethics fucks married guy, creates a few thousand words of tortured solipsistic rationalization, manages somehow to get it published.
We can get into frankly interesting philosophy and literature studies, and reflect on the downsides of our evolving social order.
But there's also empirical evidence that attachment styles are stable across the human lifespan, from birth, shifting only gradually in response to our own decisions and experiences.
The author is a textbook case of an anxious attacher relating with an avoidant attacher.
The beauty of empirical science is that it can greatly simplify that which we might otherwise struggle our whole lives with. I hope the author finds and attunes herself to a secure attacher and moves on to more novel problems.
Yes! There was an interesting contrast. Slightly earlier, she writes of the wife, “In retrospect, it’s possible that she did as much for me as anyone could have.”
But later, it becomes clear that the wife actually demonstrated the means of her salvation!
And the t is about half the size of the h. I found the font trying too hard to be unique, and the content just boring. I gave up on both after about the fourth paragraph.
I too was so upset about the font choices I made a prezi presentation about the obvious problems and took them to show to another developer during lunch at our favorite cafe, it was as I was on the third slide comparing the h with letters h of other more conventional fonts that I could feel them sliding away from me.
It’s hard to remain rational when in love. This writing captures that. It shows the immense frustration you feel when you’ve felt such warmth from another person, only for them to flag, then rally again, and on and on… The good times are a pain-killer and keep you from holding onto the full extent of the bad times. This can be on the frequency of a couple of days. 3 great days, your world is suddenly real, your partner is there for you, cares about you and loves you. 3 days where you are shattered, your partner is distant and cold, is angered by discussion, chides you for being upset, takes your contributions for granted. This cycle makes you DUMB. The good times keep you going though.
It seems like an interplay of both peoples trust issues. The author has been betrayed in the past. Why pursue a married man? Some may say she wanted the resulting and predictable pain. Both people are too scared to end it for various reasons. Not to hurt the other? Worried about suicide?
It's well written, but really just reads like the over-intellectualised self-justification of a quite warped mind, when one really thinks it through. Surprised Harpers didn't send them advice to go and speak to a therapist, rather than publishing this. The only monster in the article is the writer, Eros has nothing to do with it. The whole scenario is a bizarre construct projected onto the man she's lusting after to fulfil an unmeetable need in her, and he is clearly happily married and not particularly interested, outside of the thrill of being the object of someone's desire and obsession.
The author is quite transparent in that her bond with that man was an unhealthy obsession. But it's an interesting exercise in tying it to older conceptions of romance and lust, instead of settling for the view that it's just a peculiar, pathological form of something normal as we convene today, and we're doing in this subthread. We don't have to agree with her on that argument either.
That's what makes the piece more interesting, that she made this work instead of just telling of her protracted, intermittent affair with a married man. Which is candid and has an element of voyeurism for the reader, but there's lots of places to read of sordid tales and gossip for their own sake.
Heck I've been someone a couple of women have come back to in between relationships that they wouldn't hold on to in the end, but didn't want one with me, something I'm grateful for looking back, and that's about as much as it's worth saying on those relationships of mine. If I were somehow to tie it to a few thousands of years of literary history on the subject, it'd be a different matter.
And yet. “Even after he knew I had met someone else, he continued to contact me periodically.” The man, clearly aware of her distress, continues to act in ways that prolong it.
I've been your friend , I've been your lover's wife. I agree with the rest of the comments, I understand you completly. Thank you for the article. It has helped me relax.
> Once, before our eighth meeting, I had gotten desperate enough to create a PowerPoint for him about our relationship. One of the slides said, “I cannot go on like this. Please help me.” We sat side by side at a sports bar, facing my laptop. I ordered tea; he ordered nothing. As I clicked through the slides, I noticed that he seemed to be creeping away from me.
… no, really?