Obsession, Love and Sex

Perhaps you, like me, fell in love when you were young, really, deeply, passionately and adoringly in love. The object of my affection was my teen boyfriend, Mike. I thought he was perfect. He was Bronte's Heathcliff Wuthering Heights, Dr. Zhivago, every brooding romantic male in the French movies played by Jean Paul Belmondo, and even the fireman in 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, Oskar Werner. But, as it turned out, he was mostly Heathcliff, with unregulated rage, petty temper tantrums, intemperate negative emotions the full range of the menu. His competent, take-charge side became domineering and belittling in order to keep me thinking I was incompetent and dependent. The worse his moods became, the worse his behavior, the more controlling he became because he feared I might leave him, and it is important to say, he loved me passionatey too and as much as he drove me away, he wanted to hold on to me.

P AS he was the classic male romantic lead of the period (including Terence Stamp in The Collector), I was the classic female romantic lead of our period, Julie Christie from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (an excellent film - a masterpiece). I was very pretty, very intelligent, well-read, a budding intellectual and artist. And I was enthralled, so I followed him like a loyal dog, until I jumped the fence and unloosed the leash.

But literature teaches us a lot, and not many write about that aspect of a literary education. The film from a novel by Truffaut, The Story of Adele H, taught me where obsessive love leads, to a beautiful and intelligent woman with her life ahead of her turned into a ragged beggar, roaming from military camp to military camp after a man who had discarded her.

Women, however, are not the only ones subject to the downfall in obsessive love. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, Cherie, by Collette, Nana by Emile Zola, are all novels of men brought to desperation, despair and ruin by obsessive love.

Contemplating these novels and films may seem irrelevent and yet today our headlines are filled with large print on the scandal of the world leaders caught with their pants down in a depraved network of exploitation of under-age girls run by Jeffrey Epstein.

Throughout my entrance ito the literary world, I have pondered the seemingly undeserved adoration of college professors and writers for Vladimir Nobokov's novel, Lolita. I have even read it more than once when some author has brought up some aspect with his admiration that I thought I might have missed.

To me it was not only NOT a great novel, but it wasn't beautiful or inspiring or enlightening either. it was the sordid tale of an old man obsessed with a teenaged girl. Did I miss something here? Some moral insight? Maybe.

The thing is, my object of adoration was a young man my own age who adored me, and he was beautiful, the same as I was, and we entered into our sexual experience together, discovering together and learning together, equals in every way.

These modern expose's of old men buying sexual service from economically deprived girls just barely emerging from childhood, are disgusting because of the inequality and the theft by these old men of the beauty of the experience of romantic love that belongs to young women by right. There is nothing mutual, only usage. And the way society has punished and shamed women who serve the sexual needs of men for money, intensifies the trauma and the destruction this exchange inflicts on these young girls.

Can you remember what a child you were at 15 or 16? I can. I was full of hope and a sense of adventure and the allure of the wide world and my own future. I was fortunate to find real love and experience the Romeo and Juliet of it, not the theft and impoverishment of it.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The Story of Adele H. (Francois Truffaut) Mp/> Nana (Emile Zola)

Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)

Cheri (Collette)

and a more subtle but also a view of imbalance in love - Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com