In love with what you don’t get

Some people almost never fall in love. I don’t belong there. I have been in love many times and several times with men who, in retrospect, I didn’t even like. Blunt, clumsy boys, but also damaged, sadistic men; unable to show love due to a complex of insecure anxiety. My crush didn’t go away as soon as the harsh tendencies surfaced. No, my desire remained. In fact, it was fueled by the dynamics of rejection.

There was the man who I found too pushy. The night we met, he pulled a hand full of flowers from a flower box in front of a window and gave them to me because he liked me so much. Creepy, but also funny. I only really started to like him when he went away for a few weeks, didn’t answer his phone or reply to my messages. In his absence I fell more and more in love. When he returned and he mocked and insulted me with vicious humor, I remained in love. This wasn’t the first nor the last time I talked myself into loving someone who denigrated me.

Now not every crush has been accompanied by hurtful rejection, I have had wonderful relationships, balanced mutual affirmation. But when I look back on my countless crushes, it is striking that precisely in the situations where there was rejection and manipulation, the crush flared up uncontrollably and destructively.

Although love is depicted by pink clouds, hearts, angels and rose petals, everyone knows that it can also be a source of struggle, fear and pain. I consider myself a strong, independent woman, but I have become completely dependent on the affirmation of that one person, who in some cases was an annoying, sickly man. What I find difficult to understand is that I could always see clearly that the lover in question was not good for me, but this did not end my pining. On the contrary, the more I felt manipulated and rejected, the more the hunger for love burned within me. I would like to understand why rejection, insecurity and fear fuel that craving.

Rejection and the resulting obsessions are often recurring topics in literature. Marcel Proust devoted large parts to it in his À la recherche du temps perdu. And Carry van Bruggen described the power of rejection in the affairs of her protagonist Ina A coquette woman. As soon as Ina’s lover shows some reserve and becomes aloof, she immediately feels that this will intensify her crush, that she would like to “notice the other person with all their might, and could not remain cautious.”

It is recognizable to many: the loved one who is not completely available exerts a stronger attraction than the loved one who is always there for you. It’s the dynamics of attraction, but it’s also a power play. The one who desires more has less power. I was in a relationship with a musician for a while. He was bothered by the way I used my voice: when I spoke, I didn’t breathe properly. My jaw was also too tense. And I didn’t distribute my body weight properly over my feet. His criticism evoked a tense self-consciousness in me, made me insecure and unhappy. Instead of showing him the door, I longed to be loved by him. I wanted him to love me just the way I was, including the way I breathed, spoke, walked. My desire for his love gave him a position of power in our relationship.

Rejection can of course mean that the loved one is tired of you, but rejection can also stem from insecurity. That’s what I suspected about the musician; that he was actually the one who feared being abandoned. That he humiliated me for that reason. In The Quiet American Graham Greene tells the story of a man who has had many love affairs. Among all those women, there was one whom he had truly loved. And she loved him too. Yet he left her. Fearing that he would not be able to handle the pain if she ended the relationship: ‘I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her change – I don’t know if I really did, but I couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran to the finish like a coward runs to his enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to be beyond death.’

Instead of showing him the door, I longed to be loved by him

I know this about myself too. On the one hand, my interest is aroused as soon as the other person starts to reject me. On the other hand, I also feign nonchalance and disinterest as soon as I sense that the other person might be less interested. You long for the other person, but you don’t want the other person to know how much you long for him. It is an insidious power play, born of vulnerability, resulting in harshness.

Just a slight fear of rejection can lead to feigned disinterest and cruelty. In Diary of a thief Jean Genet describes how he scolds his lover when he sees him dirty and unshaven after an arrest. Genet fears that his lover will disgust him. When he realizes that their infatuation can pass, he immediately decides that he will ‘do without this love’. Genet begins to despise the man he desires in order not to feel rejected himself.

Precisely because I recognize this game, although I have never been a hard player myself, I think I have a keen eye for it in others. For the musician, who was ultimately devastated when I broke off the relationship, a similar protective mechanism definitely kicked in. He humiliated me, criticized my entire being, even my breath; After all, a woman who cannot breathe and speak properly is not worth being sad about. If he could reduce me to nothing, he would have nothing to grieve about. Seeing how his harsh behavior was part of an attempt to protect himself from heartbreak made me forgive him for his cruelty. After all, I saw that his unreasonable harshness stemmed from insecurity. I hoped against my better judgment that my generous forgiveness would ease his fear of abandonment and soften his spirits.

There are several forces at play in these types of unhealthy relationships. First, a militancy that makes me, against my better judgement, pursue the attention of my beloved: I will be seen by him, loved and loved! I will place myself above the power play; through my understanding and forgiveness we will still draw near.

A psychologist once told me that unreasonable criticism from loved ones puts me in a battle that I could never win with my parents as a child. That I long to be seen as I was not seen by my parents; that that struggle awakens in me every time it seems that I will not receive that attentive love. It is precisely then that an urge to prove myself awakens in me with which I will show myself and the world that I can handle this. That I can make whole what seems broken. That I will win that dedicated attention this time.

While all of this could play a role, I also see the hold of my imagination: my belief in a story I have made up for myself. A story in which the conscious loved one plays a decisive role. In my story we overcome all misunderstandings and struggles. It is precisely because of the effort it has cost us that we will penetrate deeply into each other. It is this story that I do not want to let go. I have believed in that specific interpretation of my life and I cannot simply tear myself away from it. Is that what falling in love is? Combativeness and a compulsive desire to be absorbed in one’s own imagination?

In retrospect, it’s shocking how much I fooled myself in my crushes. They say that rose-colored glasses only make you see the beautiful sides of your loved one. But the glasses I put on myself are not just pink, they are glasses that make me see things that are not there. It may sound a bit strange, but several times I have fallen in love with what I did not get. Like the man who ripped a handful of flowers out of the flower box. I fell in love with his absence. He didn’t speak anymore and I started to crave him. An immense urge to fable was set in motion in me, a fiction was spun in which this absent man ideally suited me.

In itself, desire always extends to what is (still) missing, in that sense it is logical that you long for what is not there. Moreover, if the promise that you will eventually get it is nourished, this strengthens desire. It is a dynamic that Annie Ernaux also describes in several of her autobiographical novels. The waiting, the restless lust, the preparation for the lover to arrive, the obsessive thinking and yearning. Her heartfelt revelations take my breath away. I want to shout at her to break free from the toxic relationship, to stop debasing herself. With others, I see all too well how such an uneven relationship makes you suffer.

Although Ernaux admits that she is ashamed of her behavior, she has no regrets. At the end of Only passion she writes: ‘I have discovered what a person can be capable of, that is, everything. High and base desires, the loss of dignity, superstition and behavior that I considered idiotic in others as long as I did not exhibit it myself.’

Looking back on the relationships in which I have felt humiliated and unhappy, I sometimes think that I seek it out too. That I unconsciously pursue the intensity of feeling, which Ernaux also mentions here. I experience the intensity of the longing for love even more intensely when there is some form of rejection involved. And it is precisely that intensity that lifts you from your daily life, that gives you momentum, that makes you escape from everyday life.

In the cultural portrayal of love, in films and pop songs, it seems as if we all long for a state of mutuality and fulfillment, but often it is the touch of heartache that keeps the love alive. Sometimes this pain resembles the restlessness that drives writing, a pursuit of perfection and completion of what seems fragmented and elusive.

When others turn their backs on a loved one as soon as they are treated like dirt, a longing awakens in me. A deep longing for what is not there. Although I generally consider myself quite down-to-earth, I am a romantic fantasist in this regard. Instead of acting on reality, I continue to get caught up in a story that only exists in my imagination. And yet not just in my own imagination. There is also a culturally shared story of love, in which I, perhaps stubbornly, still believe: the magic of falling in love that can bridge everything and break through all differences. The inexplicable thing that brings two souls together, the bond between two individuals that cannot be captured in a mold. Cannot be understood by others. Unique and essential and incomprehensible. Just when everything indicates that two people are not suitable for each other, falling in love can prove the opposite. Uncertainty and the associated pain can actually strengthen my belief in exactly that magic that will conquer everything.