FROM AFAR: WHY UNREQUITED LOVE IS NOT SUCH A BAD THING

If you are an OKCupid user, you have probably come across this question:

“How would you describe hopeless, unrequited love? A.) Romantic B.) Foolish C.) Creepy”

There’s another option that OKCupid’s creators didn’t consider because it’s unlikely that they’ve ever thought of it: perfect. In our culture, we tend to think that unrequited love is pathetic, but this is not a universally-held belief. According to Reza Aslan’s book, No god but God, Sufi Muslims believe unrequited love is ideal:

“The Sufi conception of love…is a love that must remain unfulfilled…One cannot begin the Way expecting to complete it; only a handful of individuals will reach the final destination and achieve unity with God. For this reason, the Sufi is often compared to the bride who sits on her marriage bed, ‘roses strewn on the cushions,’ yearning for the arrival of the Bridegroom, though she knows he may never come. And yet, the bride waits; she will wait forever, ‘dying from love,’ aching for the beloved, crying out with every breath, ‘Come to me! Come to me!’ until she ceases to exist as a separate entity and becomes nothing more than a lover loving the Beloved in perfect union.”

Aslan also describes this love as “passionate, all-consuming, humiliating, self-denying love.” That sounds like an accurate characterization of unrequited love to me—especially the “humiliating” part.

Now, I’m no Sufi. I’m not even a dabbler, not in Sufism or any other form of mysticism. But the Sufi concept of love intrigues me, because I do consider myself a master of the art of unrequited love. I’ve had more than my fair share of brushes with unrequited love—more on that later. And, until I read Alsan’s book, I thought it meant there was something wrong with me. Until then, I had no idea that unrequited love was worth celebrating, but it is, and here’s why: The essence of the love experience is the love you feel for the other person, not in the love you receive. Pursuing the other person, or worrying whether or not he feels the same way about you can get in the way of that experience. But if, like the Sufi bride, you accept that he may never come, you let go of those worries and experience only the love.

The Legend of Majnun and Layla

I’ve had many experiences with unrequited love in my life, but there is one that still makes me tear up when I think about it, and I don’t let myself think about it very often.

When I was 21, I traveled through Europe. At a hotel in Paris, I met Hanine, an Algerian student who tended bar in the hotel. Hanine had shimmering dark eyes, wavy black hair, and a broken front tooth. We danced to “Dragostea din Tei”, which was popular in Europe that year. Being close to him made my heart race. And then when he kissed me…it was the first time someone I’d found really attractive was attracted to me too. I could hardly believe it. I wanted him more than I had ever wanted anyone. But there was one problem. I was a virgin.

I stayed in Paris for a week. On the second to last night, I told Hanine I was a virgin. With the help of a French-to-English dictionary, we discussed condoms and trust. We went upstairs and we had sex. And I fell hopelessly in love.

The next day, I left Paris. Hanine took me to the train station. He held me while I cried. I got on a train bound for Milan, and we said our goodbyes.

For the next week and a half, I traveled around Italy, alone and feeling incredibly sad. Probably because on some level, I knew what would come next.

One night, I boarded an overnight train in Naples. Confused by the numbers on my ticket, I asked a man in a uniform if I was in the right place. He said I was, and guided me to an empty compartment. He was a caterer, and had a little pushcart full of sodas. He sat in the compartment with me for a while and chatted. He seemed nice enough. He told me his name was Giovanni.  Then, he took his cart and went to peddle his drinks.

For a few hours, I was alone in the compartment. I lay down and tried to sleep. At 2 a.m., the caterer entered the compartment. He pulled his cart in with him, so that it blocked the door. He put his feet on the bench where I lay, and I felt his feet rubbing against my stomach. A bluish light streamed into the dark compartment and cut across his face as I looked up and caught him staring at me with a smile on his face.

Nervous, I sat up. He continued to talk. He groped my calves and licked the back of my hand. I wished he would leave. I held the souvenir pocket-watch I bought in Paris tightly in my hand until it left a tiny impression of the Eiffel tower my palm. Finally, it was time for him to serve coffee and he left me alone. After the train pulled into the station, I wandered around in a daze, scenes from the previous night flashing in my mind. I felt violated..

I made a police report, and did the only thing that made sense: I went back to Paris to be with Hanine. With the language barrier, it was difficult to explain to him what happened. To this day I have no idea if he really understood. What is clear is that though I was in love with him, he never had any feelings for me at all. Between my leaving Paris and returning two it—in a span of less than two weeks—he had already found a new girlfriend.

“You love me,” he said, “and it is impossible.”

To say that I was heartbroken doesn’t really describe it. I was just broken. For months after that, I pretended he never said that he had no feelings for me. I gained eighty pounds.

I wish I would’ve been able to have that fling without getting attached. Or that I could have loved him without attachment—without needing him to love me back. Maybe if I had, those memories wouldn’t haunt me to this day. I could have romantic, pleasant-to-look-back-on memories that are not tinged with darkness.

In my most recent bout of unrequited love, I can honestly say that, though there were some agonizing moments, I was able to experience the feelings I had for this person, and enjoy them, without falling apart. And now that those feelings have faded (well, mostly) I can say that I got something out of that experience. I experienced love, even though I knew it would never be returned.

I don’t mean to idealize unrequited love. It can be painful (obviously). But that pain wouldn’t be there without the love. And I’m not saying it’s wrong to want to find someone who loves you back. That’s great, if you can find it. But not everyone finds intense, mutually-shared love with another person. You can say, “You’ll find someone when you’re not looking,” or “there’s someone out there for everyone,” but face it—the world is too big and chaotic to abide by such simple rules. Some people do spend their lives alone.

By deriding unrequited love, are we telling those people that they don’t get to experience love at all?

NO PROTECTORS

Six months after my grandfather died, my grandmother announced to my cousins and me that she planned to marry her boyfriend. We were sitting on a beach in San Diego, where the rolling of the waves filled in the silence, until someone asked why she needed to get remarried so soon.

“Grandpa was my protector,” she said. “Now I need a new protector.”

A few minutes later, with my grandmother out of earshot, my cousin said, “That’s bullshit. I love my husband with all my heart, but I don’t need a man to protect me.”

I was only twelve years old then, but even then I realized: no woman does.

The notion that women need men to protect them is a fantasy, an opiate, and both women and men are doped up on it. For many men, the ability to feel superior to women rests squarely on the belief that women are smaller, weaker and require shielding at all times.

Pundits often belabor this point when they argue that women shouldn’t serve in combat roles, but the real reason that they don’t want women serving in combat has nothing to do with men’s (nonexistent) inherent need to protect the women around them. The real reason? Men feel that combat is their territory, and feel that their strength is diminished if women are allowed to participate.

Even in World War II, when the nation pulled together to defeat evil, men resented women taking on roles—even secretarial roles that were miles away from any combat zone—in the military. I recently interviewed a 90-year-old woman who served in the WAVES from 1944 to 1946, and asked her about something I’d come across in a book# that said enrollment in the WAVES and WACS dropped due to rumors that GIs spread about servicewomen being “loose.”

“Yes,” she said, “the used to say ‘Join the Navy and ride the WAVES.’” When I asked her why, she said, “I think because they didn’t want women on their territory.”

Never mind that women had to take over those roles so that more men could be sent into combat.

These ideas are just as damaging to men as they are to women. In a recent post, blogger Amanda Marcotte wrote, “I’ve had a couple of occasions where men who have real disabilities rush to keep me from lifting something I’m perfectly capable of lifting. They were willing to injure their bodies rather than allow a woman to demonstrate a physical ability that they didn’t … have.”

Would men really prefer to risk injuring themselves—or losing a war—just to preserve the fantasy that they are stronger and superior to women?

It’s important to point out that this is not strictly a male fantasy. A few years ago, I met a man at a bar who said, “Women seem to expect us to protect them. And that’s a lot of pressure.”

Why do women expect a man to be able to provide protection, just because he is a man? Self-defense is a skill that requires study and practice. Defending someone else requires even more specialized skills. It’s not as if anyone with a penis gets to be in the Secret Service, right? But a lot of women seem to think that having a penis means having super powers of protection.

My grandmother’s choice of protectors included my grandpa, who didn’t serve in World War II because his bad eyesight made him a 4-F, and her second husband who was an overweight professional clown. They didn’t exactly possess the skills or physical fitness to stop knife-wielding attackers. But they were men.

I think it’s unfair to expect a man who is unskilled or unwilling to put his own physical safety on the line to protect you. If you have a male partner and your expectation that he’ll protect you puts “pressure” on him, that could put a great deal of strain on the relationship. But more importantly, if you rely on men to protect you, you’re not really doing yourself any favors, either.

Even if you have a man who is willing and capable of protecting you, it doesn’t mean that his presence will make you feel safer. In my last column, I related a story from my Krav Maga instructor about a woman who had a stalker:

“She was being stalked. She was so afraid she didn’t dare drive to school alone. She came to class with her boyfriend who was a Marine. She was gorgeous, couldn’t go anywhere without being hassled. She trained with us. A few months later I asked how she was doing.

She said, ‘I drove to school by myself the other day. I was aware, I was looking around, I was confident, I had my hands free and I was ready if I needed to be. And that was the first time I did that.’”

She had a strong, capable man to protect her, and yet she still didn’t feel safe. That’s because feeling safe isn’t something that comes from carrying a weapon or clinging the arm of a big beefy guy.

In “The Gift of Fear”, security expert Gavin de Becker writes, “[Y]ou will see that your personal solution to violence will not come from technology. It will come from an even greater resource that was there all the while, within you. That resource is intuition.”

“The Gift of Fear” teaches women to overcome the social conditioning that tells us to be polite and deferential to men, even when a voice inside ourselves is telling us that a particular man is dangerous. De Becker insists that everything we need to protect ourselves from assault, rape and other violence is inside of us already. We just have to learn to harness it.

The woman from the example above felt safer after she learned how to be aware of her surroundings, and after she learned techniques she could use to defend herself if she needed them. Even if her Marine boyfriend had been able to be by her side everywhere she went, he never could’ve made her feel as safe as she did when she learned how take responsibility for her own safety.

Now that the ban on women in combat has been lifted, it’s time to put this fantasy to rest once and for all. Sure, it’s romantic to imagine being rescued, or to imagine rescuing someone, and it’s okay to fantasize about it. But the only time you can realistically count on someone rescuing you is when the building is on fire. And unfortunately (fortunately?), no firefighter is going to rescue you and then immediately make love to you next to a pile of smoldering embers.

SELF DEFENSE: AN INTERVIEW WITH GAIL BOXRUD

You might expect a woman who teaches people how to defend themselves against attackers armed with baseball bats and knives to be angry or butch, but Gail Boxrud is neither of these things. As the owner and lead instructor at Krav Maga Minneapolis, Gail smiles almost constantly, greets her students with hugs, and instantly becomes the big sister you never had. Her experiences as a crime reporter for the Anchorage Times in Alaska led her to Krav Maga, which is an Israeli system of self-defense. 

Krav Maga traces its roots to 1930s Bratislava, where a man named Imi Litchenfeld developed a style of street fighting to protect the Jewish community from growing fascist hostilities. Gail is the Minnesota State Director of the International Krav Maga Federation, and the first woman to become a certified Krav Maga instructor for the IKMF in the United States. 

I train with Gail four times per week. Recently, I sat down with Gail to talk about what Krav Maga means to her, her students, and why it is so difficult to convince women to train.

After a Tuesday night sparring class, Gail and I head over to The Bad Waitress, where drinks are 2-for-1 and Christmas lights glow softly in the windows. As we shed our coats, we notice a familiar face. Derwin, who was one of Gail’s first students and is now an instructor, walks over to us and greets us with a smile.

I ask her how her experiences as a crime reporter led her to Krav Maga. She begins by describing the scenes she often witnessed:

Often I was running on adrenaline and I would go into a scene. There was a lot of racial tension. Police were heavy handed. They would do a drug raid and piss everyone off. I would go in and talk to them. I was always anxious but I was careful of my approach. There were times I was really nervous…There was one situation in Anchorage where there was a fight in a trailer park. A woman had shot and killed another family’s dog. All hell broke loose. They were armed heavily. I had to interview the woman who shot the dog and the family who owned the dog. That was the most scared I had ever been. They were afraid to open the door and I was trying to get in and get the story.

You see a lot of people victimized as a crime reporter. That was hard for me. Especially women who are beaten up and killed by husbands or boyfriends. That left a mark on me.

I have been training with Gail off and on since 2009, and one thing remains the same: there are very few women in class. Many women try a class or two, but very few stick with it, even though women need self-defense skills more than men. I ask Gail why it is so hard to keep women in the class.

I have thought about that a lot. I wish I had a good answer. Most women would have a hard time in the coed class, which is why they developed the women’s class. This was eye opening: when our instructor Avi came here from Israel for the first time, I organized a women’s seminar, which he taught. He had insights into the way women tend to behave. It was a real eye opener to see Avi work with women like this. I was astounded. I said, “I want to do this”. He said, “Gail, you are not a typical female”. It was meant for me to realize that most women won’t train like I do. I have to understand their perspective, and approach their training from that angle.

We have women who are unwilling to fight when their life is in danger. Opening that door and giving them the tools -- that is the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my life. You hope they never need it, but if it prevents one rape, if it prevents one incidence of domestic violence, if it prevents one homicide, if it saves one person from something bad it is the best job in the world.

She describes a moment that inspired her: 

Once, I went to a fight that Duke was sponsoring in Milwaukee. A quinceañera was happening in the same building, and an 11-year-old Mexican-American girl walked by. She looked in and saw two women in the ring and said, “I didn’t know women did this stuff.” She stood there and stared and her eyes were huge. She said, “I wanna do this.” I was so moved by that. An 11-year-old girl had discovered that at that age it is okay to be beautiful and be strong. We talked to her family and helped her find a place where she could train. She could be in a ring right now. I don’t even know her name.

Though most of the men in our class do not identify as feminist, they espouse the values of feminism and treat the (few) women in class with respect. Men who are aggressive, macho and looking to prove something tend not to stick around. Why is that? 

I’m not sure but I’m delighted. We attract people who are nurturing. Once in awhile we get people who are problematic but they leave.

It helps that I teach the advanced classes. It makes the men respect women. The biggest problem is getting the male students to attack women -- it’s hard for them to be aggressive and be bad guys. Sometimes it takes me talking to them and saying, “You are not doing us any favors by going light on us. We need you to attack us aggressively so that we can defend ourselves on the street.”

Most of the men recognize that women need it more than they do, and they go out of their way to be helpful.

Once in awhile someone will say, “You kick like a girl,” and I’ll say, “Hey, that is a compliment in this place.”

I remember a time, not long after I first met Gail, when she told me that she would “bring the fighter out of me.” I ask her what this means to her, and how she achieves that.

Each student is going to be different. Sometimes you have to push them to the edge but you don’t want to push them over. Women are different than men in that respect. It can be very intimidating and overwhelming. And you want to go there and you don’t want to push them so far that they don’t come back. It’s a dance with each person. With Krav Maga, it’s not about winning; it’s about surviving. When you dig in and think: “this is it, if anyone is left standing, it is going to me.” You have to have the mindset that I’m already dead -- what have I got to lose? 

Sparring requires a high level of trust. I trust the people I spar with more than anyone else I know. What is your view on this?

You trust them with your body. You let them touch you and be close to you and sweat on you. It’s a level of intimacy, but as a woman and a man you’ve got to not go there while training, because that would be uncomfortable for everyone.

Before we leave, Gail tells me this story about a woman who was one of her first students:

She was being stalked. She was so afraid she didn’t dare drive to school alone. She came to class with her boyfriend who was a marine. She was gorgeous, couldn’t go anywhere without being hassled. She trained with us. A few months later I asked how she was doing.

She said, “I drove to school by myself the other day. I was aware, I was looking around, I was confident, I had my hands free and I was ready if I needed to be. And that was the first time I did that.”

She started tear up and she said “You guys did that for me.” We gave her her life back. 

Gail and I both blink back tears. She says:

That is the coolest thing in the world.

FRIEND ZONED

My grandmother never could make sense of the fact that my best friend was a boy.

“So, Erik is your boyfriend?” she’d ask.

“No, he has a girlfriend,” I’d reply.

“So, what’s he doing with you?” she’d ask, her face twisting into a hardened question mark.

“He’s my friend,” I’d say and she’d stare at me blankly. Though gin was partly responsible for that glazed look, I could see that the idea of men and women being friends—purely platonic friends—was so far-fetched in her world it was completely off the map. It wasn’t entirely her fault. In her generation, men and women didn’t share platonic friendships. 

In the 1940s, you could be friends with a man through your husband, maybe, but you didn’t spend time with your husband’s friend without your husband around. And if you were single, it was a waste of time to hang around with a guy who wasn’t going to marry you because marriage was necessary for survival. Therefore, any man you spent time with was a potential husband. And therefore, any time you went anywhere with a man, it was a date. 

The progress that we’ve made over the decades is evident in generational differences. My mother understands my friendships with men, but only in theory. When I told her that I went barhopping with my friend Erik and another female friend she said, “It’s so strange to me that you girls can hang out with Erik without his girlfriend.”

It’s strange to her because she’s never experienced it. But at least she’s capable of understanding it. Her generation had the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the feminist movement of the 1970s. They were the first women to taste economic freedom. Their strides in the workplace laid the groundwork for women of today. But that generation has not moved past the notion that interactions between men and women are inherently and invariably sexual. (I happen to believe that is one of the great lies humans tell. Everyone does not want to have sex with everyone.)

That brings us to Generation X, the generation that coined the term “the Friend Zone.” The “Friend Zone” is a place you get stuck in when somebody rejects your romantic advances by declaring that he or she—usually it’s a she, more on that below—just wants to be friends.. Typically, it’s men who complain about getting trapped in “the Friend Zone”, and a recent Nerve article argued that the term was sexist and ought to be retired:

“[T]he term most frequently refers to something that is done to men, by women. That's the problem. ‘Friend Zone’ implies a sort of capricious, unfair act, perpetrated by the vagina-ed set.”

The term itself wouldn’t be sexist if we lived in a world where the genders were equal. If a girl asked a guy out and he told her he just wanted to be friends, she could say that she was put in the zone. If both sexes used the term, it wouldn’t be sexist. But even after decades of progress, women are still hesitant to—and are discouraged from—asking men out.

As Amanda Marcotte of Slate puts it: “Given the choice between two stereotypes—the passive princess whose charm and beauty brings a man to one knee or an insecure needball who nagged a reluctant man into marriage—women will pick the former every time. In order to change that, we'd have to dramatically restructure our cultural understanding of gender and romance, away from stereotypes of promiscuous men who love only reluctantly and overeager women who just want to put a ring on it.”

Those of us who are on the outlying edge of the Millenial Generation still have these attitudes ingrained in us, which is why we still use terms like “Friend Zone.” Maybe the generation after us will be the one who stops using it. But here’s the thing: even though the term is sexist, it’s also a stepping stone to progress. Three generations ago, there was no zone for friendships. Feminism and the push for equality have brought men and women together as friends, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland, recently wrote this in a piece for CNN.com entitled “The Mythical War On Men”:

“[T]he empirical evidence suggests that men are quietly adapting to a very new landscape. [They] assume, without resentment, that their wives will be as fully committed to their careers as they are. Why? Because they'll need the income. And they assume, with no resentment, that they will be involved fathers, spending far more time with their families than their parents or grandparents ever did. Why? Because they actually want to be involved dads. They all have friends of the opposite sex ("When Harry Met Sally's" dictum to the contrary), which bodes well for their ability to be more equal coworkers and colleagues with women they consider their peers.” (Emphasis mine.)

A generation or two from now, there will be no zones, just friendships. Sure, you’ll still have the awkward situations where one person falls for someone who doesn’t reciprocate. And you’ll still feel hurt and embarrassed. But these gendered resentments will fade. We just have to keep pushing.

Maybe that’s optimistic. Misogyny is alive and well. All you have to do is read through comments on Shit Reddit Says or follow @YepYoureSexist on Twitter to see that. Or, you know, listen to what comes out of the mouths of rape-apologist politicians and pundits like Rep. Akin and Rush Limbaugh. But they are clinging to a pasttime paradise that is teetering on the brink of destruction. And as far as misogynistic terms go, “Friend Zone” is a pretty tame one if you ask me. But just as we’ve gotten away from the idea that every person of the opposite sex is a potential spouse, we’ll get away from the idea that every person of the opposite sex is a potential sex partner.