<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Dostoyevsky says somewhere that we attract to ourselves events that are like ourselves. If so, it must also be true that people who experience the same things are in some way like each other. After G. left and I found out about his other women, this thought disturbed me deeply. Because what if the kind of person your life says you most resemble is precisely the kind of person\u2014the kind of woman\u2014you most don&amp;#039;t want to be? &amp;quot;He told me he could be himself sexually with me as with no one else,&amp;quot; Judith said, in that offhand, take-it-or-leave-it way of hers, as if only stating the obvious. We were sitting in her little studio off Riverside Drive just a few days after G. had decamped, having it out. He&amp;#039;d told me a bit about this apartment\u2014how it was her second step down, how after her ex-husband stiffed her in the divorce she&amp;#039;d first moved to a two-bedroom and then, when she couldn&amp;#039;t afford that, came here, to a single room. Judith and G. were colleagues, and her travails had been the subject of endless conversation between him and me. Her life was rich in comic scandal\u2014like the time her husband&amp;#039;s girlfriend assumed her identity to use the family health insurance and Judith got the bills, and the time her big-shot academic boyfriend told her how lucky he felt to have women for all his needs: his wife for domestic comfort, his long-time mistress in Boston for &amp;quot;spiritual communion,&amp;quot; and Judith for sex. What made these stories funny was that none of Judith&amp;#039;s tormentors believed they were doing anything wrong. The girlfriend was uninsured, so what else was she supposed to do? But under the madcap routines, Judith&amp;#039;s life had the plot of a Zola novel: the long, slow slide from prosperity, from married mother of three to scrimping along in one room and feeling lucky because it had lots of light and a plaster rosette on the ceiling\u2014and at least she hadn&amp;#039;t had to move to Brooklyn yet. Judith told me she had been sleeping with G. virtually the entire time I&amp;#039;d been with him, that he always said he didn&amp;#039;t love her, that he was cruel to her but also her best friend, that she&amp;#039;d wept in the street when she glimpsed us through the window of a local diner having breakfast, and that she had no sexual inhibitions at all. Now that she mentioned it, I remembered that G. once called her the &amp;quot;sex goddess of the Upper West Side,&amp;quot; but I&amp;#039;d always taken that as a joke: She was older than me, and, while not unattractive, gave the impression of someone struggling gamely but unsuccessfully against bitterness and gloom. From time to time as we talked, she&amp;#039;d pull out a marbled composition book\u2014she&amp;#039;d kept a diary since girlhood, she explained\u2014and hunt for an entry to refresh her memory or prove that she was telling the truth. She wanted me to understand that it was she, not he, who&amp;#039;d ended their affair a few months before. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s see, where is that passage?&amp;quot; she muttered, flicking through pages of black, urgent handwriting. &amp;quot;Here: &amp;#039;June 9th. Broke it off with G. I feel sad, but it had to be done.&amp;#039; Voil\u00E0.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It sounds as if he didn&amp;#039;t love me, really,&amp;quot; I said as I stood to go, &amp;quot;that he just lived with me out of convenience.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Oh no, I&amp;#039;m sure he loved you,&amp;quot; Judith assured me. &amp;quot;Or at least if he didn&amp;#039;t, he repressed it.&amp;quot; Like everyone in this story, she had spent years in therapy and knew her Freud.  You&amp;#039;d think I&amp;#039;d hate her, but what was the point? Both of us, after all, had been rejected for someone else\u2014 another other woman. I had always enjoyed Judith&amp;#039;s scrappy, wisecracking manner; she had been to my house for Thanksgiving and had attended my book party. And now she and I had so much in common! For months, I would come home from running errands and rush to the computer still wearing my jacket: What\u2014he really said that to you? He did what? Again and again we enumerated men&amp;#039;s faults: the way they compartmentalized and played women off each other, the way they felt so entitled and were so cold and heartless. While she scorned sexual fidelity as bourgeois and naive, Judith prized her capacity for what she called &amp;quot;attachment.&amp;quot; She was even attached to me. &amp;quot;Sometimes I see the three of us ending up together,&amp;quot; she wrote brightly, &amp;quot;in wheelchairs in the same old-age home.&amp;quot; Yet Judith&amp;#039;s talent for bonding was something man after man had failed to appreciate. I&amp;#039;d had this conversation before, of course\u2014in a way, I&amp;#039;d been having it all my life: Why don&amp;#039;t they love us the way we love them? How could they ignore, forget, dismiss, neglect, not pay attention, not care, say this, and then do that? But I&amp;#039;d never had it before with a woman who was complaining about a man who was, after all, living with me.  It was bound to end poorly. One night I woke up suddenly in bed: I saw Judith and G. giggling and bustling around the stove a few months before he left; they were making paella for our Marxist study group. She&amp;#039;d brought her own special pan and her own special recipe. The whole evening came sicken-ingly back to me: I&amp;#039;d drunk wine in the living room with the rest of the group while the two of them crashed about gaily among the cabinets, laughing and calling each other &amp;quot;Professor.&amp;quot;  I wrote to Judith breaking off communications, and she promptly e-mailed back that she&amp;#039;d been about to do the same. Her friends and therapist all thought she was crazy to have anything to do with me. They had a point: I could have forwarded her e-mails around the globe. But information was all I&amp;#039;d wanted from her: The underside of the carpet I thought I had been standing on. I hadn&amp;#039;t exactly pretended friendship to get her to talk, as she charged, but I had indeed been interviewing her, quietly and methodically, like a journalist gathering facts for a story headlined &amp;quot;How I Could Have Been So Stupid.&amp;quot; Once I&amp;#039;d extracted from her everything she was willing to tell me\u2014and more\u2014I either (self-exculpating version) allowed myself to feel the true scope of my wrath or (self-critical version) treated her the way Janet Malcolm says reporters always treat their sources: I betrayed her.  Judith wasn&amp;#039;t the only other woman I got in touch with. Erica, a sweet, rather fey art historian, talked to me on the phone for hours. Her relationship with G. had mostly been by telephone too, back when he was living with the woman before me. It was one of those intense flirtations that has all the ups and downs and close calls of a love affair. Instead of sex, it revolved around contact lenses; he used to send her a special kind available only in New York. One night he had called her from a phone booth on the street. After a few minutes of romantic banter, she heard a gruff man&amp;#039;s voice say, &amp;quot;Hey, buddy, you gonna be much longer? You been on that phone for an hour and a half!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He must have been going down a list,&amp;quot; Erica said, &amp;quot;and finally got to me.&amp;quot; She blew up at him, and it was years before he called again.  And then there was Judith&amp;#039;s friend Liz, who taught linguistics in the Midwest and actually stopped coming to New York to see him when he moved in with me. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think there was anything wrong with us for falling for him,&amp;quot; she wrote. &amp;quot;I just happened to meet him at a susceptible moment. It was like catching a cold because you&amp;#039;re tired and run-down.&amp;quot; Some cold. Fifteen years later, she was still alone. In our e-mails, we contrasted our resolve and self-respect with Judith&amp;#039;s weakness and abjection. Imagine, she&amp;#039;s still obsessing over their every encounter in the hallway at the wretched university where they both teach, turning over his every word in search of that tiny gold spangle of hope. Not. Like. Us.  There were other women, too; I&amp;#039;d met them around town. A famous philosopher, a beautiful Polish dissident, a pair of anthropologists, a trio of painters. At one dinner party, I realized three of the five women there had been his girlfriends back in the early 1980s. We eyed one another slyly over the roast lamb, as if to say, &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s talk.&amp;#039; After I published the essay &amp;quot;Learning to Drive,&amp;quot; I got letters: &amp;quot;I think I knew the man you are writing about in graduate school.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I dated him in the sixties.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He said I was too consumerist and didn&amp;#039;t care about the working class.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Would it be possible to send a recent photo?&amp;quot; I rummaged in my drawer and found two; I mailed her the one that made him look like a chipmunk.  G. was a kind of Don Giovanni, I&amp;#039;d thought, but I began to see that this wasn&amp;#039;t quite right. The Don had been indiscriminate; all he cared about was adding names to his list. But G. had a type. The women he went for were not especially beautiful and not especially young. But they were all artists, writers, academics: smart, serious, romantic. There was an essential solitude about them, as if inside they were still 12 years old reading Wuthering Heights under the blankets with a flashlight. Like some shy, neglected princess pacing in her tower, a part of them was still waiting for life to begin. I had been a bit like that when I met him, and maybe the new one was as well, a late bloomer, hot for intensity, passion, It.  Naturally, they, she\u2014we\u2014were all feminists. The last sort of woman who&amp;#039;d expect herself to fall for a philanderer in a Panama hat. A Panama hat! &amp;quot;The first time I met him,&amp;quot; Liz wrote, &amp;quot;I thought he was affected, sexist, and bizarre. That old-fashioned suit, the way he bowed over my hand as if he was going to kiss it. Then I met him again, and boom.&amp;quot; I hadn&amp;#039;t even needed a second time. All he&amp;#039;d had to do was introduce himself, and half an hour later I was making my way home through the damp gray streets, on fire: I was like a flame in fog. My friends didn&amp;#039;t like him; my therapist was suspicious. &amp;quot;He sounds like a charming bounder,&amp;quot; said Dr. Bone, but all I took away from that astute observation was the delicious Victorian turn of phrase, so unusual for cautious Dr. B. I didn&amp;#039;t care what he thought; when I wasn&amp;#039;t mooning over G., I was patiently explaining to Dr. Bone, at the cost of $3 per minute plus taxi fare, that psychiatry was a male plot to keep women docile and domestic. &amp;quot;Some feminists would say,&amp;quot; he countered mildly, &amp;quot;that romantic love is a male plot too. The velvet glove on the iron fist.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Oh well,&amp;quot; G. laughed when I repeated that. &amp;quot;An iron fist in a velvet glove is better than an iron fist.&amp;quot;  Feminism was supposed to be about what women had in common, and I&amp;#039;d always thought of myself as a person who liked women. When someone\u2014usually a woman; in fact, always a woman\u2014told me I &amp;quot;thought like a man,&amp;quot; I was insulted both for women and myself. It was as if I was being expelled from the tribe. I love, for example, the instant intimacy women can have with each other, how within minutes you find yourself sharing life stories, like characters in Russian novels but certainly not like American men. Like Judith&amp;#039;s misadventures, the tales women tell each other about themselves revolve around improbable, vaguely malevolent (but always entertaining) twists of fate, with the speaker shaking her head in wonder as if she were the audience at the movie of her life. And every story has the same shrug of a punch line: What can you do?  Now I confronted what we women really shared: the longing for male approval, the bartering of self-respect for relationship, the obstinate refusal to know what you know. All my adult life I&amp;#039;d tried to rescue women but at the same time felt superior to them\u2014and annoyed when they didn&amp;#039;t take my excellent advice: Don&amp;#039;t waste your fertile years on that married man, find a sitter, finish your degree, get a lawyer, get a better lawyer. Look, see, face facts. But what about the facts\u2014the encyclopedias of facts\u2014that I had brushed aside because, like Judith, Erica, Liz, I wanted what I wanted? I had not taken my own advice either. The truth was, I was just another woman. I was just like them.  &amp;quot;Maybe I&amp;#039;m not cut out for monogamy,&amp;quot; G. said to me early on. &amp;quot;Maybe I should just live in a room by myself and have girlfriends.&amp;quot; Another woman might have said, &amp;quot;Now, where did I put my coat?&amp;quot; Being a madly infatuated rationalist who&amp;#039;d read her Simone de Beauvoir, I took a deep breath and calmly explained that I understood fidelity wasn&amp;#039;t for everyone but that I wanted to give my whole self in love, and I couldn&amp;#039;t do that if I were being compared with other women on a daily basis (which I was) or if our relationship were only provisional (which it was). &amp;quot;Sweetie!&amp;quot; he said when I finished. &amp;quot;I love it that you can say how you feel without getting angry at me.&amp;quot; That other woman would have slammed the door behind her before he&amp;#039;d finished speaking.  They say philanderers are irresistible to women because of the thrill of the chase\u2014you want to be the one to capture and tame that wild quarry. But what if a deeper truth is that women fall for such men because they want to be them? Autonomous, in charge, making the rules. Imagine that room G. spoke of, in which the women would come and go\u2014is there not something secretly appealing about it? Rain tapping softly on the tin ceiling, a desk, a lamp, a bed. A woman dashes up the narrow stairs, her raincoat flaring, her wet face lifted up like a flower. And then, the next day\u2014maybe even the same day\u2014different footsteps, another expectant face. It was an exciting scenario. You wouldn&amp;#039;t want to be the women trooping up and down the stairs, but you might want to be the man who lived in the room.  Years ago, I found a pair of Japanese prints in an antiques shop in Maine. The first showed a knight on horseback with a pair of attendants on foot; one holds his furled standard, the other his sword. They are wading across a shallow river in a lovely celadon-green landscape and give off an air of dignity and confidence. In the second, a beautiful woman is wandering through a similar landscape, only it&amp;#039;s raining and the wind is blowing her kimono about; she has no horse, no weapon, no flag; an elderly maidservant struggles to keep a paper umbrella over her mistress&amp;#039;s head. This is what happens when a woman goes out into the world alone, those pictures say; his adventure is her misfortune. The hell with that, I thought. I bought the man&amp;#039;s picture and left the forlorn beauty behind to fend for herself, even though I felt sorry for her and as if I was betraying my sex. But I didn&amp;#039;t want her over my desk, wringing her hands and weeping. I wanted to be that bold, well-girded knight. Or at least to look at him.  G. had a term for women who had slept with the same man. &amp;quot;Think of them as your sperm sisters,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;d say cheerfully when I looked glum at the mention of previous girlfriends. I&amp;#039;d try to see myself bobbing playfully in the dark blue sea, sleek and happy, one in a herd of seals or a pod of whales, buoyant with female solidarity and many layers of fat. I&amp;#039;d forgotten that I&amp;#039;d ever met Erica or Liz in the nonvirtual world, but eventually an old memory swam up: Judith, Erica, Liz, Sally, G., and me in a garden in Santa Barbara. G. had brought me along to a conference; I&amp;#039;d been sad and tense. I felt disregarded without being able to explain why\u2014was it just that I always had to be the center of attention? The next day Erica and I found ourselves browsing in a jewelry supply store, a long, dark room where beads flashed in hundreds of drawers, like the treasure in those miniature pirate chests people put in aquariums. &amp;quot;You look so much alike,&amp;quot; the proprietress exclaimed, although I saw nothing of myself in Erica&amp;#039;s gentle dreaminess, her ripply blond mermaid hair. &amp;quot;Are you sisters?&amp;quot;  To be the pasha with his harem\u2014it&amp;#039;s the oldest male fantasy in the book. And you&amp;#039;d be surprised\u2014I was\u2014by how many feminists buy into a kind of women&amp;#039;s mirror-image version: Polygamy as female cooperation, a kind of wifely labor union that keeps the man in line. Tough luck, boss, it&amp;#039;s mac and cheese for supper again and young Fatima&amp;#039;s got exams tomorrow, so you&amp;#039;ll have to make do with me.  &amp;quot;The only thing I didn&amp;#039;t like in your story was the way you went after that other woman,&amp;quot; one feminist historian said to me after &amp;quot;Learning to Drive&amp;quot; came out. It would be easy to say that as a single woman she had a vested interest in the claims of &amp;quot;friends.&amp;quot; But I could see what she meant. It wasn&amp;#039;t that I had no right to be angry at Judith, but she wasn&amp;#039;t the one who&amp;#039;d said to me: love, adore, deep, stay, always. He&amp;#039;d said those words. And although he hadn&amp;#039;t said those exact words to her, maybe he&amp;#039;d said the ones next door\u2014need, pleasure, here, yes, now\u2014the ones that can make you think that those other words are just around the corner, and if you&amp;#039;re not careful you can look up and realize it&amp;#039;s been, what, 15 years.  Liz published an academic article describing G. as a genius and his new book as a major contribution to its field. Erica sank out of sight. The Polish exile took up with a married man; the anthropologists continued to puzzle over their clans. One painter became more famous, the others more obscure. I met the famous philosopher at a party, and she said that she and G. had never had the intensely sexual affair he told me it had taken him years to get over. Mostly they&amp;#039;d just talked.  I glimpse Judith every now and then around the neighborhood, darting into the subway or browsing among the tables of cut-rate underwear and African knickknacks at a street fair. Maybe she has a new man in her life, someone honorable and kind. Or maybe that&amp;#039;s all over for her now, and she goes home and sits by the window in the room that was once some lively nineteenth-century family&amp;#039;s parlor, writing in her diary and remembering how long ago she had looked out a different window and thought, Everything is about to change. Everything!  She looks older, younger, exactly the same. Like me.  From Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt. Published by arrangement with Random House. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a8988/power-play-19056/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>