We are sold this in every Disney movie: a man who simply cannot get enough of you. He cannot leave you alone. He shows up, he calls again, he cannot sleep, and we are taught to read the fact that he cannot leave you alone as the measure of how much we are loved. It took me most of my life to learn that it measures something else entirely.
I write this with the bravery of taking yet another step into owning my authenticity, whether or not it disappoints people, whether or not it ends with me a single dog-lady forever. Either way, it must be written.
Let me put my part on the table first, so no one mistakes this for a piece about villains.
In a world of almost-maybes, of situationships and soft launches and men who want you on Tuesday and go quiet by Friday, certainty from someone has always felt like safety to me. As a neurodivergent woman I will say it more precisely: certainty felt like a routine. Routines are how I stay regulated. When I know what happens next, my body can stop scanning for it. The man who texts every morning, who plans the weekend before you ask, who says with his whole chest that he has never felt this way about anyone, hands your nervous system a schedule. And a schedule, when you have spent years improvising, is almost impossible to tell apart from love.
It is not love. That is the whole essay. But let me earn it…
It is, I fear, a state in him.
The problem, I am learning, is that when someone is “obsessed” with you, it is not about you. It is not about who you are at all. It is a state in them.
Psychology has had a word for this since 1979, when Dorothy Tennov named the involuntary, intrusive, all-consuming fixation on another person “limerence.” Pay attention to what she called the person it lands on: the limerent object. Not the beloved. The object. The phrase is clinical rather than cruel, but it tells the truth the Disney movie hides. Limerence runs on uncertainty. It feeds on the gap between what he has of you and what he wants. Which means the state does not want you so much as it wants the wanting, and it cannot survive being satisfied.
So the obsessed man is usually a highly anxious one. He needs you at the center of his attention to manage something in himself: an anxiety, an emptiness, a self he would rather not sit alone with. You have been handed a job, and the job is to fill a void that was there before you arrived and will be there after you leave, because it was never shaped like you. His devotion lasts exactly as long as you keep receiving it without complaint and need nothing that costs him your attention, or costs him the work of facing himself.
The philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote that love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. I have come to believe that obsession is the precise failure of that realization. He has not discovered that you are real. He has discovered that you are useful, and he has mistaken the relief for devotion.
And intensity, which we are taught to read as proof, is only the volume at which that state is playing. It tells you how loud he is. It tells you ~nothing~ about whether he can see you.
You are not a manic pixie dream girl!
The term was coined in 2007 by the film critic Nathan Rabin to describe a certain kind of female character: the bubbly, quirky girl who exists in the story only to teach a brooding young man to embrace life. She has no arc of her own. She has no bad days that are not, somehow, about him. She appears, she transforms him, and the camera never once asks what she wanted.
Rabin publicly apologized for the phrase in 2014; it had become a cliché, he said, flattened onto nearly any quirky woman on screen. The apology did not kill it. I think the term survived because women kept recognizing it, not on screen but in their own lives: the experience of being cast in a role you never auditioned for, inside a story you did not write, by a man who called the casting love.
It is an old story. Ovid tells it in the Metamorphoses. Pygmalion, disgusted by the real women around him, carves an ivory woman so perfect that he falls in love with her. He dresses the statue, brings her gifts, lays her on a couch, kisses her. He prays, the goddess obliges, and the ivory warms under his hands. We are meant to read this as a love story. I now read it as a confession. He loved her because she was not a woman. She could not disagree, could not have a headache, could not want something he had not wanted first. And notice where the myth ends: at the exact moment she comes alive. It does not tell us about the first morning she had an opinion.
And I have been told I am this, for over a decade. That’s right. I was essentially a child, already placed into this role.
I just needed a picture of my adorable dog, Love, for comedic relief.
What makes this insidious is how it begins. It begins with him doing anything for you. And then, so gradually that you never see the handoff, it becomes you doing anything to keep him regulated.
You comfort him for your own unhappiness, because he cannot grasp how you could possibly be unhappy when he is this obsessed with you. Your sadness becomes an accusation he needs you to withdraw.
Your boundaries and needs frustrate him, because he’s already burned himself out trying to do what he thinks you want.
You apologize for having boundaries. You apologize for the night you needed alone, for the call you missed, for the opinion that did not match his, because a dream girl does not have those, and you can feel the role tightening around you each time you step outside it.
You end up with a man whose feelings, whose entire energy, are moved by your slightest motion. So you stop moving. You make yourself still. You hold your breath.
I want to stay on that image, because it is not only a metaphor. Breathing is the most basic act of self-regulation a body has, and a woman in this kind of relationship learns to suspend it. She goes quiet and small so that the room stays steady for him. She hands over her own regulation to keep his intact, and she calls it being easy to love.
Virginia Woolf observed that women have served for centuries as looking-glasses that reflect men back at twice their natural size. The pedestal is the mirror’s newest shape. It looks like elevation. It is a place you cannot move on without the whole thing wobbling.
Usually, these things end one of two ways.
In the first, you try to hold a line, or you question the consuming mind-fuck you are living inside, and he escalates. He escalates until you win, or until he gets what he wants: the love, the closeness, the certainty that you need him. And then the strangest thing happens. It does not hold. It was never going to hold, because what fed him was the uncertainty, and you just took it away. The novelty drops. He needs yet more. He cannot see your gratitude at all anymore, because somewhere in the effort of winning you over, the hunger curdled into contempt. You have become the thing that was supposed to fill him and did not. You get devoured, and he is still hungry.
In the second, you are thrown straight off the pedestal and discarded, fast, the moment he realizes you are not, in fact, a houseplant or a Pokémon, but a dynamic, hyper-intellectual woman. A houseplant is the perfect object of obsession: alive enough to feel like a relationship, still enough never to disappoint. A Pokémon is something you catch and put away. And a pedestal, it turns out, is built for a statue. The first time the statue moves, there is nowhere for a person to stand.
Both endings are the same ending. In both, he was never in a relationship with you. He was in a relationship with a state in himself, and you were the place he kept it.
If you have been loved this way, and then dropped, and then loved this way again by someone new who swore he was different, I want to say the thing nobody said to me: the speed of the discard is not a verdict on you. It is the measure of how little of you was ever in the room. You cannot be dropped from a height you were never actually standing at. You were held up. That is different.
What is the answer? After over thirty years on this earth I do not know 100%. But I own my part.
I have mistaken intensity and obsession for security, when they are far from it. I mistook being needed for being seen, and being watched for being known. I will keep learning in therapy why my body reaches for certainty like a railing, and why a man’s inability to leave me alone read, for so long, as safety instead of as a warning.
Because I, too, want a partner with a strong sense of self. One who chooses me calmly, every day, from a place that does not need me to be smaller in order to stay standing. One where I do not walk on eggshells if I miss a call. One who does not discard me the moment I fail to meet the impossible standards of a girl who was never real in the first place. One where I can cry and have a hard night and not shatter their entire illusion of a storybook they had in their head.
I would like to be known. Loved. Slowly. Carefully.
Beautifully articulate, as per usual 🔥
I felt this with every piece of me. Beautifully tragic truth.