Burning desire

Indeed, a basket of books and films pays tribute to obsessive love of a broader if often no less damaging character. Several films put a character's obsessive love to fiendish purpose. In Hitchcock's Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart is dazzled by Kim Novak. Once she appears to plunge to her death and he later encounters a lookalike on the street, his compulsion to make her over to better resemble his lost love seems unhealthily manic. In truth, he has been unwittingly duped as an accomplice to murder. A bored housewife in The Postman Always Rings Twice deploys a drifter's gnawing desire for her to dispose of her husband. In Double Indemnity, a calculating siren gets a life-insurance salesman in thrall to her to murder her husband so she can collect on the policy. The archetypal representation of obsessive love is, of course, Fatal Attraction, in which Glenn Close grows ever more unhinged in her determination to wrest Michael Douglas from his wife. (A pattern is emerging: besotted men are generally portrayed as erstwhile normal chaps fallen victim to scheming vixens; besotted women are plumb crazy.)

For the sake of definition, I'd submit that love could be labelled "obsessive" when meeting the following criteria: 1) It can't take no for an answer; 2) It grows only more intense in response to frustration, when disappointment should rationally be a discouragement; 3) It entails an element of self-destruction.

As for that last criterion, my fixation on Roger Cook may not quite qualify. I was a kid; I got over it. Yet the uncanny duration of my first great passion did signal a propensity for seizing upon a romantic object like a terrier that would have regrettable consequences as I grew older. I wish there were not so many examples to choose from, but one fruitless, misspent obsession stands head and shoulders above the rest.

At 27 I attended a fundraising dinner, where fate seated me next to an Irishman whom I will not cite by name. Let us call him Arsehole. The ensuing relationship was not strictly unrequited. Arsehole liked me. He certainly fancied me. For brief periods, he may even have imagined that he loved me — albeit very brief, and generally on the fourth bottle of wine. Nevertheless, from early on the relationship did evidence the emotional asymmetry that seems to be a prerequisite for the obsession that took hold on my end.

Arsehole was (and is, since our hero is still out there, although for me he is mercifully past tense) 15 years my senior. The age difference probably heightened my terrier inclinations, for I'd long experienced a similar frustration with my emotionally distant father. If perhaps not to every woman's taste, Arsehole was an attractive man with a long, gaunt face and the kind of tall, spare figure that looks good in suits. Like most Americans, I was a sucker for his Irish accent.

I was still an unpublished novelist; he was an established nonfiction writer and academic. For an aspirant scribbler fresh out of grad school, he was intimidating as could be.

I have two mental portraits of Arsehole (who did not go by "Arsehole" in my head in those days): the before-and-after pictures. From the dispassionate vantage point of age — 48 — "after" comes more readily to mind. I now perceive him as arrogant, patronising and manipulative. Afflicted with delusions of grandeur and arguably incapable of real, reciprocal love, he may have qualified for a clinical diagnosis like narcissistic personality disorder. (At one dinner, he predicted to me that he would win not one but three Pulitzer prizes for books he'd yet to write.) His on-again, off-again drinking — emphasis on the on — led to repeated embarrassments in restaurants. Yet my "before" picture is charming. Arsehole-in-Waiting was articulate, astute and droll. If he drank too much, he at least knew how to have a good time. Self-styled as larger-than-life, he was the sort of charismatic character who catches you up in his own mystique, and we all need these people to maintain the faith that life can be conducted on a grand scale. I wasn't the only woman who fell under his spell. Since he collected quite a harem, with which I had to compete, I can only conclude that there was something objectively compelling about the man that was not my own invention. If nothing else, he was a bloody good kisser.

I slew a good eight or nine years on the altar of Arsehole. Mind, these years were from the centre-cut of my adulthood, the prime rib, when I was, as a woman, at my most attractive, and as a prospective mother at my most fertile. All that time, I should have been shopping for a credible lifelong partner, which (there is a God) Arsehole never became. Failing to prove out romantically was probably the nicest thing he ever did for me.

Early on, I had evidence for the condescension that emerged in my "after" picture. Although lavish in his praise of my fiction (which he considered an intellectually feeble undertaking), Arsehole dropped his admiration like a hot brick whenever I dared a toe into his own territory of political commentary. I'll never forget the night I told him in a restaurant that I had just had my first opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal. "You?" he cried. "You?" he whooped, even more loudly. "You?" By now he was shrieking, and our fellow diners were cutting nervous, uncomfortable glances at our table. "Write for The Wall Street Journal?" Yes, me. Sad, incompetent, dim-witted me, who has written hundreds of pieces for the Journal since, and for many other fine papers too. But what strikes me most about that evening now is a returning incredulity. Did I put my fork down? Did I fold my napkin with dignity, stand, announce that I have never been so insulted and walk out? No. I took another bite of my nicely underdone scallops. I mumbled, "That's right," and changed the subject back to the next Pulitzer-prize-winning book he had yet to write.

Even in the most casual asides, Arsehole betrayed an impulse to undermine and a poisonous contempt. At yet one more restaurant, I made a remark to our waiter that made the man laugh. Arsehole was immediately jealous. "You know what he's thinking," said Arsehole. "Typical drunk American, thinks she's funny. Better laugh at her lame jokes to get a bigger tip." I was only on my second glass of wine. Did I throw it in his face? Hardly. I wilted. I cowered, and didn't banter with the waiter again.

()

In retrospect, however, I earned his contempt, because in retrospect I earned my own. Despite being rubbished, two-timed — nay, three-timed! — and left to float in a miasmic romantic limbo, I gratefully rocked up in his family's home town for several Christmases running. They were flummoxed as to what role I played in his life, and I couldn't help them out because I hadn't a clue myself. While Arsehole stayed with his mother, I was exiled to a B&B, from which he would summon me for the odd occasion. Otherwise I was on my own. I cried a lot. But I made sure to dry my eyes before my few audiences with the great man — and to wear a pretty dress.

I did have other boyfriends during this period, more's the pity, since taking up with anyone else while hopelessly indentured to another man amounts to abuse. They always had to live with my hopping up to retreat behind a closed door whenever Arsehole rang, and with my telltale flush of exhilaration when I emerged. With the way I'd drop everything when he rolled into town. With the fact that Arsehole was the inspiration for the protagonist in my third novel, and contributed to the protagonist in my fourth, while my real-life boyfriends never seemed to make an appearance in text at all.

There is a happy ending. At 36, I finally fell in love with a wonderful man who also fell in love with me, issuing in an era of mature, reciprocal relationships that did not drive my friends round the twist. (One of the downsides of terrier love is that your friends get sick to death of submitting to the latest instalment of a story whose dark conclusion they anticipate from day one.) I present myself, then, as a recovered obsessive, and as evidence that there is hope for sick puppies everywhere. That said, newspaper readers would dismiss my obsession as mild in the scheme of things. From a grab bag of recent stories, take the tale of poor Gemma Newman, a 21-year-old woman just graduated from university. When she said she wanted to cool their relationship, her boyfriend enticed her from her parents' home in Warwickshire, stabbed her repeatedly, doused her car with petrol, and died with her in the conflagration. Take the odder tale of John Williamson in Newcastle, so stuck on his wife he convinced the court to release the woman — convicted of stabbing her previous husband — after she attacked him with a kitchen knife. Mr Williamson told the court he could not live without her, but would not live with her, either. Four years later, she went for him again with a kitchen knife, which snapped off in his chest and killed him instantly. Take the downright stupid tale of Tina Marie Stebbins from San Bernardino, California, whose boyfriend shot her and held her hostage for six days. He's now doing 20 years for attempted murder, and she still wants to marry him. "Obsessive love" is not the problem of a deranged few. It lurks in fevered hearts on every street corner.

Even when the relationship is moderately two-way, obsession not only thrives on frustration, but may even require it. Why, what finally put the kibosh on my teenage infatuation with Roger Cook was getting my mitts on the kid. When I was 17, we finally grappled on a sofa. His basement was dark, the coupling furtive, even unpleasant. I went home. I felt nothing. It was over. The slightest brush against a more-than-imaginary relationship with Roger Cook sent me careering in the opposite direction. Had Arsehole ever proposed that we make a life together, I'd have run a mile.

That's because obsessive love is an exercise in myth-making. Its object as real person is an inconvenience: that flawed, flesh-and-blood human being who chews with his mouth open and has smelly feet. We may all idealise those we love to a degree, but in obsession this normal distortion gives way to total displacement. "Love object" is apt, for you fashion the beloved like a doll, dressing it up in little outfits. Moreover, the passion itself is fetishistic. It is the love that you love. The adored often just gets in the way.

But what's so addictive about not getting what you want, especially if you wouldn't want it if you got it? What is so compelling about all that suffering? Suffering is compelling, frankly. When I look back on the Arsehole Years, I concede that on some level I was having a good time. That man endowed my life with a potent driving force. The fact that I was smitten with Arsehole helped to define me to myself, if only by certifying my capacity for enduring passion.

Artistically, I benefited from the rollercoaster of he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not, and I used this material for my novels. Perhaps it was emotion that I craved; I wasn't that particular about what kind. I may have derived equal sustenance from the night he stood me up as from others on which he deigned to keep his dates. When I lived alone, a doomed infatuation still beat arid, torturously self-possessed evenings of reading and a spot of TV after brushing my teeth. I preferred to cry than to feel nothing. Strong emotion of any stripe is vitalising. It confirms we exist.

Be that as it may, in the aftermath of Arsehole I feel ashamed. Surely what underpins this proclivity to seize on a beloved to the point of self-degradation is lack of self-respect. That poor bastard John Williamson was so head-over-heels with his wife that he lost his life. Gemma Newman's boyfriend, whether or not he deliberately threw himself on the pyre of her car, was at least willing to destroy his life with a murder conviction. I look back on my own romantic fixations as humiliating. Oh, I can forgive myself for falling for Roger Cook. But as for Arsehole, I'd like to sock myself in the jaw.

Once you've sobered up, a romantic bender is no less embarrassing than those evenings when Arsehole would start to abuse the waiter after our third bottle. Cured of my now-baffling subjugation, I conjure the man and experience flashes of outright dislike. But the person I really dislike is me. Foolish, undignified, self-abasing me. For I have occasionally been the object of such obsession, which is a bit like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. What is grand, magnified theatre for the adorer is pesky aggravation to the adored. Yet another letter in the same week elicits a rolled eye. With one correspondent I ceased to read them altogether, though he must have laboured over every word. The phone rings and you let the answering machine pick up, because you know who it's going to be: the same guy who cannot get the message himself. The milder obsessions are tedious, the extreme ones frightening, as anyone subject to a stalker would attest.

But obsessive love only looks "obsessive" when you're over it. At the time, it feels like love. Indeed, Webster's dictionary defines obsession
as "a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an unreasonable idea or feeling". Doesn't that sound like love, full stop? In her recent book on the subject, Helen Fisher notes that romantic love — marked by a sense of exhilaration and intrusive thoughts about the beloved — chemically resembles the manic phase of manic depression, and behaviourally resembles obsessive-compulsive disorder. The healthiest romantic love is effectively a mental illness.

Ultimately, all love is obsessive: "persistent", "unreasonable", "disturbing" and medically pathological. I could credibly say that my husband and I are "obsessively in love" with each other. We just don't call it that when you're both nuts.

Lionel Shriver is the author of We Need to Talk about Kevin, published by Serpent's Tail

THE CONTROL FREAK

Elizabeth, 45, married Andrew, 52, in her twenties. She has always called the shots, getting her own way using emotional blackmail or hysteria. Their teenage children are loved, and there is a bond between their parents. But Andrew feels emasculated and is thinking of leaving.

Dr Glenn Wilson says: If Andrew wants to stay, maybe he needs assertiveness training to stop Elizabeth behaving like a spoilt child. He doesn't have to send her to the naughty room, but needs to let her know he won't tolerate her tantrums, saying something like: "You can scream all you like, but it won't get you anywhere."

(Dr Glenn Wilson is a reader in personality at King's College, London, adjunct professor at the University of Nevada and author of over 30 books on love, sex and compatibility.)

'I'm someone who went out with a male model for two years, so for me love has always had an enormous sexual agenda. Love is not a nice, warm feeling: it's your stomach churning when he walks in the room, and then that overwhelming pleasure when he smiles at you. Marriage isn't about love: it's a sensible arrangement. Love must be based on a fabulous chemistry. Love is a very bright and attractive man with that look in his eye — for you. As I grow older I think I couldn't do it any more; I also think I'd like to fall in love just one more time before I die'

MARCELLE D'ARGY SMITH,
writer

'Love can be a happy and peaceful experience — or it can be agony. Great love is probably mostly agony. Catullus said, "I hate and I love... and it is excruciating." I've experienced great love which is agonising and obsessive, but for me now, love is a happy experience of pleasant tears and pleasant laughter'

JOHN MORTIMER,
writer