The New York Times Magazine has an intensely romantic story by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the famous memoir Eat, Pray, Love.
Her memoir involved how she unraveled after her divorce.
This…is so much more than that.
As a journalist friend explained, “Normal American dudes like to dream about cost-free, hassle-free instant hookups. Women who read The New York Times like to dream about…this.”
Well, that may be true. But I read the New York Times and so do some of my female friends and I don’t think we dream about busting up relationships all over town.
There are addictions for everything these days — Glibert confides that she is a “seduction addict.” And she sounds downright frightening.
If the man was already involved in a committed relationship, I knew that I didn’t need to be prettier or better than his existing girlfriend; I just needed to be different. …The trick was to study the other woman and to become her opposite, thereby positioning myself to this man as a sparkling alternative to his regular life.
Soon enough, and sure enough, I might begin to see that man’s gaze toward me change from indifference, to friendship, to open desire. That’s what I was after: the telekinesis-like sensation of steadily dragging somebody’s fullest attention toward me and only me. My guilt about the other woman was no match for the intoxicating knowledge that — somewhere on the other side of town — somebody couldn’t sleep that night because he was thinking about me. If he needed to sneak out of his house after midnight in order to call, better still. That was power, but it was also affirmation. I was someone’s irresistible treasure. I loved that sensation, and I needed it, not sometimes, not even often, but always.
Thankfully Gilbert clues in that something is disastrously wrong when she’s not quite out of her marriage but is in marriage counseling with her new man or prey.
She spends the next six months finding herself and concludes the story in a park with a man who asks her to come home with him to his apartment. Newly recovering, she declines, but agrees to join him for Italian ice.
Like any good fairytale the story wraps up quite beautifully.