Verena's Case, Part II

This is the second half of the case fiction I wrote about last Friday.

Listening with more than his usual attentiveness, Horace was alert to the idea of an inability to love. Surely, it was one of the great shibboleths of modern psychotherapy. Taking it to be a panacea had boxed Verena in. 

Horace knew that love was not a redemptive salve that would magically solve all of Verena’s problems. From the time of Freud therapists had rationalized their obsessive focus on libido and desire by declaring that the goal of treatment, the meaning of life, and the incontestable sign of mental health was the ability to love. Of course, they meant erotic and romantic love; they did not mean Christian agape.

Therapists often declared their patient cured when said individuals fell in love. There was a fairy tale quality to the story, not entirely inappropriate if the technique wanted to turn life into a comedy. Yet, Freud’s vision was relentlessly tragic. He was not about happy endings. 

Horace decided to broach the central issue: “You believe in love; you are looking for a man who will love you despite your past. And you expect that this true love will cleanse your sins.” Didn’t true love mean accepting one’s beloved, warts and all?

Verena was listening quietly and made no move to respond. So Horace continued. “I suspect that you have had feelings of love, somehow, sometime, somewhere. Convincing yourself that you are incapable of love diminishes you as a human being. You seem to see yourself as a sexual acrobat, a fetishist who can only deploy libido when no affection or fellow-feeling is involved. In most circumstances that describes male more than female behavior.”

Verena ignored it all. She kept to her beliefs: “I have never fallen in love and I believe that the reason is, I did not have a father. I want to understand how this abnormal circumstance affected me.”

Horace changed tactics. “Doubtless there is truth in your observation, but focusing on your absent father is a counsel of despair. It still seems unlikely to me that you have never felt love for anyone. And I think it highly unlikely that no one has ever loved you. This does not mean that you noticed or cared, but I suspect that love has not been as absent as you think.

“I suspect that the issue involves reciprocity. You might have felt love for some people; some people might have felt love for you. Yet, the feelings did not harmonize. You did not love someone who loved you, and vice versa. For all I know, you feared falling in love with someone who also loved you.”

To which Verena replied: “Why would anyone be afraid of falling in love?”

Horace ended the session by suggesting that if she were in love she might no longer recognize herself. And she might feel a yearning for domesticity, thus betraying her mother. Worse yet, it would make her feel more like a woman. 

To that remark Verena took some serious offense. When she engaged in sexual activity she felt perfectly like a woman. She had no doubts about her sexual identity. She was starting to believe that Horace was missing the point. Not that she was surprised.

For his part Horace persevered. He suggested that they draw a difference between what she felt when she was alone with a man, indulging all manner of sexual release, and when she was out in public with a man who would be identified as her beau or even husband.

A wave of anxiety threatened to drown Verena. She turned a different color and asked for a glass of water. For his part Horace was thinking that he had discovered something important.

Once she regained her composure Verena declared that she had a vision of being attached to a man, within a defined relationship, and introducing him to her mother. Worse yet, having dinner with said mother.

It was not merely that the situation was unfamiliar and thus threatening. She knew that she would not only be hurting her mother, but she would be putting said man in a position where her mother might very well treat him with contempt.

Obviously, Verena had never been on a dinner date. She had never accepted an invitation to the theatre. She had never needed to organize her life as a function of someone else, and she was certain that she would fail at the task. 

Even if she succeeded, she would feel strange being associated with a man within a relationship. It’s one thing to pick up a man in a bar, take him home, have carnal relations with him, and discard him like so much used trash. It is quite another to organize your life as a function of another human being, to assume the new role, whether of girlfriend, or heaven forfend, even of wife. 

And then there was the problem of including or not including him in different activities. Besides, if she presented him as her beau, she would be defining herself in a decidedly feminine position.

If she did so and the relationship failed, she would be facing the unenviable task of explaining to friends and family what went wrong. For a woman who had succeeded at everything she had undertaken, the idea of failing at love was almost too much to bear.

Worse yet, Verena had never been on a proper date. She had never made an appointment to spend an evening with a man, to meet him somewhere, to enjoy dinner and/or a play and then to go home. She did not merely have no relationship skills. She had no dating skills either.

After all, if the purpose of any meeting is a hookup, you do not need any dating skills. You do not even need to know the other person’s name. Nor do you need to divulge your own.

It was as though Verena had missed out on adolescence. And yet, if she started dating now, she would probably be so awkward that she would seem to be fake.

If she were not pretending to be fake, she would still need to repress her effulgent personality. She could not overpower a date with her wonderfulness and expect to be asked on another date.

In addition, no one really went on dates any more. As Verena continued to think about the task at hand, she was becoming increasingly anxious.

As for her feeling awkward about playing a more feminine role, the truth is, Horace shared, that men do not mind-- awkward. They are effectively suspicious when a woman is too experienced. If such is the case, they start thinking: “Where did she learn that?” and cross her off the marriageable list.

And yet, for someone who has developed the habits of taking charge, the challenge not to take charge would be a challenge. It would require some serious repression, and Verena was not very confident she could do it.

Worse yet, Horace suggested that she could transition into dating by forswearing sex for a time. This was hardly an original idea. A British writer, by name of Hephzibah Anderson had done as much and had chronicled her experience in a book called: Chastened. 

Surely, this did not preclude flirting, but it would impose strict boundaries on sexual activity. Horace was explaining that removing quick hookups from the equation would cause Verena to modify her behavior. It would also signal to her male admirers that she was looking for a permanent relationship, not just a one-night-stand. 

Verena thought that this advice was very bad indeed. She was unwilling to picture herself waiting at home for a man to call and to ask her out. Wasn’t she perfectly capable of taking an initiative?

And that was before she would need to learn different behaviors. How should she behave in restaurants when her date wanted to pay the bill? What about those theatre tickets, the ones he might lavish on her?

If she allows a man to take an initiative and to take control of a dating situation he would certainly feel that she owed him something in return. 

Verena listened politely to Horace’s idea. She was certainly not happy to hear it. She could not imagine herself functioning the way he was describing. She could not imagine herself introducing a boyfriend, no less a husband, to her mother. She thought that Horace was a relic from a distant past, one that young people like Verena had outgrown some time ago.

She was thinking that if she had to choose between living a loveless life and dealing with people like Horace, the former was suddenly seeming to be more appealing. She started thinking that consulting with an older male coach was a decidedly bad idea.

She did not come this far in life to become a tool of the patriarchy. So, she expressed herself openly to Horace, who was prepared.

“Consider this,” he suggested, “in the old days women refused to engage in carnal relations until they had exchanged marriage vows. An appalling practice, but sufficiently commonplace. It meant that women required that a man make a public commitment to them before they had conjugal relations. Were these women-- tools of the patriarchy?”

“Of course, they were,” Verena interjected. She explained her heartfelt belief that the marriage ceremony was akin to being sold into chattel slavery. In the old days a married woman would become a wife, and that meant that she was her husband’s property. He could do whatever he wanted to her. She had no right to object or refuse. She might even be induced to give up her name, and to take her husband’s name.

Horace had heard this before. Despite the feminist attack on marriage, women still wanted to be married. If they had obligations to their husbands, their husbands also had obligations to them.

So Horace, being slightly too glib for anyone’s own good, replied: Yes, modern women keep their fathers’ names, and they consider it a blow against patriarchy. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Dare we say, none of this made Verena very happy. Horace was challenging her most deeply held beliefs, to the point where she felt that the best course would be to fire him.

Before she had the chance to tell him what she really thought, he proposed something new. He was not going to spend time with her discussing theoretical abstractions. It would lead them nowhere.

Instead, he offered an experiment. What if Verena tried changing the way she was conducting her dating life? What if she refrained from asking any man out on a date and also refrained from hooking up with a man she had just met? What if she started developing the habit of accepting invitations to go out on dates. 

Admittedly, the only way to learn how to be pursued is to be pursued. And what if she simply refrained from sexual relations, until she had established a true connection with a man. Would she need to be committed, or would she retreat to the local feminist coven, to hear about why men were dastardly oppressive creatures.

Anyway, Verena said that she would think it over. In time she decided that she would try out Horace’s experiment. She did not think it was a very good idea, but it was something new. And, if it did not work, she could blame him,

The work is now in progress. I will report further when there is more to report.

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