on one-sidedness

giving without getting

by Jenny Holzer

Q: What do Don’t Be A Stranger by Susan Minot, All Fours by Miranda July, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, The Ravishing of Lol V Stein by Marguerite Duras, Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, Willful Disregard and Acts of Infidelity by Lena Andersson, and the Jean Rhys quartet have in common?

A: They’re books by women about women who are abjectly in love with men who don’t love them back. Maybe the guys in question like them back, or even love them a little bit, but the guy in these books are mostly indifferent and uncaring. Emotionally unavailable, as the vernacular would put it.

Q: What’s wrong with being abjectly in love with a man who doesn’t reciprocate your love?

A: According to our culture, it makes you pathetic. Katie Roiphe puts it well in her book on the subject, The Power Notebooks: I recognized in myself an unseemly will to power, a possibly unnatural fascination with it, an aspiration toward it. But I also saw myself, at times, failing to hang on to a decent amount of it. I saw myself sometimes wanting to give it up or get it rid of it or hide it in surprising ways.

Q: Men write books about this too, right?

A: Of course, all the classics are about this. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary. Men love to write books about women who commit suicide because they can’t keep their heads. But I’m rather more interested in the female narrative.

Q: Do you relate to this?

A: Well. This entire post is inspired by this review by Adele Waldman of Susan Minot’s latest book. It’s called Against Self-Actualization, which is kind of funny because I would say I’ve spent my whole life striving for self-actualization. I’m a control freak, and I’ve always felt that the scariest thing in the world is being out of control. In hindsight, I would probably describe it thus: I believed that in order to get what I wanted, to be loved, I had to be virtuous, and I equated virtue with equanimity and self-possession. In other words, I was afraid of being pathetic, of wanting more than I got.

I mean, in dating there’s a pretty simple prescribed equilibrium right? You sort of monitor the energy the other person is putting out, and you match it. If they withdraw, or they’re not putting in much effort, they’re probably just not that into you. So you withdraw and then you move on. And when you’re unable to do that—when you continue to be wildly in love with someone even when you’re not reciprocating—there’s something wrong with you that needs to be fixed.

Q: Limerence.

A: Sure, well, I’ve stopped believing in limerence. I mean, I obviously believe it exists as a phenomenon. And I even sympathize with the understanding of it as an affliction. But I think it is not an affliction the way getting struck down by the flu is. Like, it does have a metaphysical meaning, it usually is pointing to something you need to do. I saw this tweet once that described intense infatuation as a vehicle designed to move you specifically out of relationship you don’t want to be in anymore. Miranda July describes it as a crowbar.

Q: But what if it’s not clear what it’s pointing you towards? Can’t it simply be a bad and sort of embarrassing phenomenon that you get nothing out of?