Hard to Get. Leslie Bell
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involvement with his wife or stepchildren. And that may be the case—it may be that Katie merely followed the models available to her. Or it would seem that Katie found only men who acted in ways that confirmed her mother’s fears about men. While her mother did remarry, Katie grew up regularly hearing her mother’s warnings about men’s fundamental unreliability and sexually aggressive nature. In cheating with her, Katie’s partners proved themselves to be worthy of wariness. In effect, they showed her that her mom was right. Or Katie may have been unconsciously acting like the men her mother had warned her about by doing her own cheating, thus seizing some power in a situation in which she felt powerless. But I had the sense that there was more to Katie’s choice.
It seemed to me that Katie not only didn’t want the closeness and interdependence that accompany a serious relationship, but actually feared them. She admitted that early in her relationship history, “I didn’t really want to be in a relationship, and so it was kind of just like, ‘Well, we have this play relationship, and it’s never gonna go anywhere, it’s not that serious, and it’s kind of like having my independence but [also] having someone to kiss.’ ” She came to recognize that she got something out of not being someone’s girlfriend—she kept her independence. And she deeply feared that this independence would be compromised by a relationship. She desperately feared becoming a Relational Woman, lacking sexual desire and, more important in her eyes, independence.
We can understand some of Katie’s determination to maintain her independence when we look at her mother. Katie was so resolute in her efforts not to be like her mother that perhaps she avoided committed relationships with men altogether. Although Katie felt close to her mom, she wanted a life very different from hers.
In creating who I am, I definitely try to avoid the things that I feel like [might predispose me] to be who my [mom is] . . . losing sight of your own goals in life, and just things that you find interesting, when you have children. And if I have children, I’ll definitely . . . make [an] extra effort to keep my own personal life going on as well, with hobbies or career or whatever. Which my mom didn’t do at all, and now she’s kind of, her career was us. And now we’re gone, basically, and she’s left with “What do I do now?” And she can’t think of anything.
Katie’s mother had not maintained a career or even independent interests while raising her children, and for Katie this served as an object lesson about how to live, or not to live, her own life.
Katie’s fierce attachment to her independence gave me some important insight into her struggles. Half of the women I spoke with shared her strong concerns about compromising their independence when they were in a relationship. Of course, independence and autonomy matter to all of us—we need to be able to think for ourselves, make decisions for ourselves, and take care of ourselves. But many of the women I spoke with were subject to an ideal of radical independence that holds that invulnerability, safety, and control are important to maintain at all times. This ideal, however, is based upon a fear of closeness, vulnerability, and interdependence.8 So it is not surprising that Katie didn’t like to admit her desire for a relationship, feeling that such a desire made her weak and dependent. This seemed to be one key to her being with unavailable men: as long as she was never someone’s girlfriend, she could continue to be radically independent.
Katie felt ashamed of her desire for a man in her life on whom she could rely: “Women feel like they want to reach for their goals, and yet they can’t admit that they want to be in a relationship. And women who want to be in a relationship more than reach for their goals are seen as weak and spineless. . . . I think for years I’ve never wanted to admit that I wanted a relationship.” In Katie’s social context of young and aspiring women and men, she felt as though it were disappointing to prioritize a relationship with a man. This is a new cultural message that goes against the grain of centuries of female socialization. Historically, women have been encouraged to value relationships, often at the expense of their own aspirations. Much of feminist scholarship has focused on understanding and sometimes trying to change this apparently distinctive aspect of female psychology.9 Katie is part of a new generation of highly educated women who are, of course, still socialized differently than are men, but who feel they ought to focus on their career goals, potentially at the expense of developing a relationship, at least in their twenties. All the women I interviewed felt this encouragement, and many, like Katie, expressed shame at their desire to prioritize a relationship.
This shame seemed to be at the core of Katie’s continued involvement with unavailable men. Her choice allowed her to have emotional and sexual relationships with men but keep them at a distance. She did not, and in fact could not, put them at the center of her life—they remained at the periphery. This ideal of radical independence was so powerful because it matched up with Katie’s fears: men leave and men are unreliable, so she’d best avoid closeness, vulnerability, and interdependence with them.
INTERNAL CONFLICT AND SPLITTING
Katie’s dilemma—being with men who were taken yet desiring relationships—signaled her internal conflict about being in a relationship at all. Her desire was tempered by her fears of losing her focus on career and herself.
But instead of just being conflicted and acknowledging her mixed feelings about both relationship and career, Katie split the two desires. She set them up as mutually exclusive in her mind, and therefore made their coexistence seem impossible. This kind of splitting is the basis of much helpful categorization of the world—past and present, you and I, here and there. These are the building blocks of the mind’s organization and distinguish people with a healthy orientation to reality from those with a disturbed orientation to reality. But many otherwise healthy people also use splitting as a defense against complexity and uncertainty. When someone such as Katie splits rather than acknowledges her internal conflict, she neither recognizes her complex desires nor opens herself to the uncertainty and vulnerability inherent in desiring seemingly paradoxical things. By splitting, Katie solved the problem of uncertainty and vulnerability, but she also didn’t get the relationship or sex that she tentatively wanted.
Katie followed a path trod by many women in her generation—she doggedly pursued her career goals and achieved success by being aggressive and competitive. She was smart and accomplished in her work but had trouble finding as much success in her love life. She approached the latter mainly by keeping it at bay. To prioritize relationships felt embarrassing and slightly humiliating, and could also have threatened her identity. But the identity that Katie was so fiercely defending was based in part on splitting.
We all have internal conflicts—over whether we want to be in a relationship, over whether we want a career. It’s when we turn these conflicts into splits that we run into trouble. When we make our conflicts categorically true, we’re likely to have difficulty achieving our desires. For example, we might assert: “I can’t have a relationship and a career at the same time.” Splitting deprives us of the opportunity to know our complicated feelings about our desires.10
Katie was able to talk about and identify these conflicts, which was hopeful, as she tried to sort out how to fulfill her desires. But the conflicts were more solid than fluid, more external realities in Katie’s mind than complex internal experiences. Katie imagined commitment to career and commitment to relationship to be mutually exclusive and felt guilty for wanting a relationship. This split goes a long way toward explaining why Katie tended to be with unavailable men.
Katie split for a variety of reasons, both personal and social. For Katie, and for many women, the vulnerability that characterizes relationships was difficult to tolerate. Katie’s solution to managing her vulnerability and internal conflict was to split and to develop a version of radical independence. At the same time that she wouldn’t depend upon a man financially, she wouldn’t need a man emotionally, either. In this way, she maintained her invulnerability.
Personally, Katie worried that wanting a relationship made her too much like her mother, a woman who gave all her energy to her family and children. Katie worried that desire for a relationship made her “weak and spineless,” unintelligent, and dependent. She was concerned that if she prioritized her career, she would be unable to have a relationship with a man because that is not something