...

Imagine his surprise to discover that the happiest, most confident woman he'd ever met was actually---when you got her alone---a murky hole of bottomless grief. Once again, I could not stop crying. This is when he started to retreat, and that's when I saw the other side of my passionate romantic hero---the man who was solitary as a castaway, cool to the touch, in need of more personal space than a herd of American bison.

His sudden emotional back-stepping probably would've been a catastrophe for me even under the best of circumstances, given that I am the planet's most affectionate life form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle), but this was my very worst of circumstances. I was despondent and dependent, needing more care than an armful of premature infant triplets. His withdrawal only made me more needy, and my neediness only advance his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating under fire of my weeping pleas of, "where are you going? what happened to us?"

(Dating tip-Men LOVE this.)

The fact is, I had become addicted to him (in my defense, he had fostered this, being something of a "man-fatale"), and now that his attention was wavering, I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every of every infatuation based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit that you wanted--an emotional speed ball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie.

When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore---despite the fact that you KNOW he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because HE USED TO GIVE IT TO YOU FOR FREE).

Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in the corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob you neighbors just to have THAT THING one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you are someone he has never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.

So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination---the complete and merciless devaluation of self.

The fact that I can even write calmly about this today is mighty evidence of time's healing powers.

We continued to have our bouts of fun and compatibility during the days, but at night, in his bed, I become the only survivor of a nuclear winter as he VISIBLY retreated from me, more every day, as though I were infectious....Most mornings, he would wake to find me sleeping fitfully on the floor beside his bed, huddled on a pile of bathroom towels, like a dog.

"What happened now?" he would ask---another man thoroughly exhausted by me.

...But then there emerged a pattern: I would separate from him, get my strength and confidence back, and then ( attracted as always by my strenth and confidence) his passion for me would rekindle...It HAD to work, didn't it? Reunited with fresh hopes, we'd share a few deliriously happy days together...but eventually he would retreat from me once more and I would cling to him (or I would cling to him and he would retreat---you never could figure out how it got triggered) and I'd end up destroyed all over again. And he'd end up gone.

He was catnip and kryptonite to me.

~elizabeth gilbert~
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