Transcriber: Belisa Pires Reviewer: Walaa Mohammed
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERS)
What are you longing for in this moment?
Is it the father or mother you lost last year?
Or maybe one you never had?
Is it the child you wish to conceive?
Or maybe the one who just left for college?
Maybe it’s that beach on your bucket list.
Or a past lover who haunts your dreams.
We long for the divine, for home, for youth, for nourishment.
But what happens when longing itself becomes your lover?
You fall in love with the possibility and the withdrawal of that possibility.
Now longing can be our greatest muse.
It can soothe us in times of uncertainty
and give us a sense of control in our lives.
It can also become a debilitating crutch,
even an addictive neurochemical boost.
A naturally occurring antidepressant.
My friend with anorexia told me she fantasized about elaborate meals
but never ate them.
In a way I understood.
I was a 35-year-old virgin
when I realized I was addicted to longing.
By remaining starved, I could stay hungry,
which somehow felt more satisfying than feeling nothing at all.
About ten years ago, I started writing a letter to an ex-college boyfriend,
trying to untangle my actions, and desires, and questions I had.
That letter became an essay
The New York Times published titled “Does My Virginity Have a Shelf Life?”
When that essay went viral,
the Katie Couric Show flew me to New York for an interview.
I sat side by side with Katie as she asked me questions.
Mainly, “Why are you waiting for a loving and committed relationship to have sex?”
Which she should have been asking me is “why is it so hard to find such intimacy?”
The sexual revolution did a lot of women a disfavor by encouraging sexual freedom
without the need for emotional intimacy.
No matter how hard many of us try,
most women are not programmed to be Samantha from “Sex and the City”.
To have no-strings-attached sex
where mutual consent is the only requirement.
Now, at the commercial break, Katie turned to me and she said,
“You know, you just need to have sex.”
(LAUGHTER)
“Everyone here at the studio thinks you have Fairy-Tale Princess Syndrome,
that you’re just waiting for a knight in shining armor
to sweep you off your feet.”
Now, when I relay that story to most people,
they respond in anger.
But in that moment I felt shame,
as if somehow I’d been following the wrong script.
I had thought being an empowered, sex-positive woman in today’s society
meant choosing when and with whom to have sex.
And, for me, that meant being in a relationship
where I felt loved and respected, where sex was meaningful for both of us.
But I began to wonder if something was pathologically wrong with me.
I mean, what could be wrong with longing, though?
It’s inspired some of the greatest writers, musicians, artists.
On my college bulletin board,
I had this poem pinned, titled “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.
In it, the poet wrote
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
The 13th century Persian poet Rumi wrote
“Longing is the core of the mystery. Longing itself brings the cure.”
But does it really?
By the time I was a 40-year-old virgin,
I found myself living in this unique purgatory.
Longing for the ideal person at the ideal time and the ideal location
kept me distracted from my fear of making an imperfect decision.
It was a protective mechanism.
In a dating world
where intimacy looks like maybe somebody returning your text
after you’ve just met them in a drunken hookup.
And you know how easy it is to fantasize about a person or a place
when you have an incomplete picture.
That’s why so many of us return to that highly addictive place of “what if?”
I fell in love with emotionally and physically unavailable men.
That captain-of-the-Caribbean whose handlebar mustache tasted like rum?
(LAUGHTER)
And that charming journalist who told me while we were still lying in bed,
“I’m an asshole. Stay away from me.” (LAUGHTER)
And the depressed artist who could never love me
because he couldn’t love himself.
And even the unhappy married man.
I flew to Barcelona, Detroit, San Francisco.
All in hopes of rekindling a flame
I’d spent hours stalking on social media.
Friends, my longing consumed me.
It defined me.
I knew if I wanted to get into a healthy relationship,
I had to change my patterns.
And so, as most journalists do,
I sought out advice from a variety of experts.
From psychologists to neurologists, rabbis to porn stars,
sociologists to decision scientists.
And the fact that I entered the fifth decade of life a virgin
definitely puts me in the minority.
But idealizing the past
and seeking the thrill of anticipation is exceedingly common.
Longing is culturally and neurologically driven.
Our materialistic society monetizes longing.
Media and technology hook us at a young age.
Case in point: me with Cinderella at age eight.
Companies like Disney and TV shows like The Bachelor
have us believing in some fantasy.
And the words of the religious hymns that I grew up on
reinforced longing for a Superman.
Savior. Rescue. Faith. Surrender.
But I'm not blaming religion.
Like many of my peers, I was drawn to movies and music
where longing for a person or place distant is common.
I bet over half of you know the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
or “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2.
In a recent study at the University of Toronto,
psychologist quoted over 800 billboard number one hits
for their attachment themes.
They found that from 1946 to 2015,
lyrics have grown increasingly more avoidant and less secure.
Maybe you identify yourself up here somewhere?
This reflects social disconnection, which is a catalyst for longing.
And if longing is a mental muscle,
then the more we flex it, the stronger it gets.
I was gripped by what Decision Science calls Inaction Inertia.
Why say yes to one
when you weren’t willing to say yes to one equally right?
After all, how do you break a streak?
Most people with anorexia
know that the reward is not the distorted image staring back at you in the mirror,
but the addictive high from the habit of resisting over and over and over.
And the seemingly infinite number of choices on dating apps
had me believing I would eventually find the perfect partner.
Psychologists call this Choice Overload Theory.
We keep looking and longing for a cheaper flight,
a job with better benefits, a home in a better location.
And some keep looking for a better lover.
“Ashley Madison” is the leading dating site for married individuals.
Its tagline “Life is short. Have an affair.”...
(LAUGHTER)
reflects its members beliefs that affairs help maintain their marriages.
Members say that affairs are great distraction
and give them something to look forward to.
Longing. Anticipation.
In one California real estate survey,
1000 participants said they would rather browse Zillow for their dream home
than have sex.
Longing. Anticipation.
(LAUGHTER) We seek it out in different parts of our lives.
These anticipation-inducing habits produce drug-like dopamine highs.
Neuroscience says that our brain is actually wired
to crave what we don’t have.
The happy hormone dopamine is released not when we get what we want,
but when we anticipate getting it.
That’s why studies show that our brains release more dopamine
when we’re planning a vacation rather than actually taking it.
CU’s own neuroscientist Zoe Donaldson’s research suggests
that we are actually hardwired to long for past lovers.
When these monogamous prairie voles are separate from their partners
and running to reunite with them,
that's when a unique cluster of cells in the nucleus accumbens lights up.
Now, this is the same reward center in the brain
that also lights up when cocaine and nicotine addicts are craving the drug.
The same place that lights up
when Netflix binge watchers are anticipating their show.
The same place that lights up
when heartbroken people look at a picture of their former romantic partner.
And even the same place active
when you are anticipating somebody liking your dating profile or Facebook status.
Now, these habits are all based on three elements:
a trigger, a behavior, and a reward.
For me, the trigger was anxiety about my future.
The behavior was longing.
It distracted me from that uncomfortable feeling of anxiety.
And the reward was the dopamine that was released.
The excitement that I felt from that.
Ancient Buddhist psychologists call this neurological loop Samsara
or “endless wandering”.
We began to mistake feelings of anticipation for joy.
I dated over 100 men.
I got off on the high of anticipating the sex I knew I wasn’t going to have,
and the loss that eventually followed the feelings of that loss.
Research on prolonged grief shows
that people who never get over loss,
who never let go,
may be activating neurons in the reward centers of their brain
when they repeatedly recall memories
of their lost loved ones, dead or alive.
I had the same high recalling the grief of the day my grandfather died.
As recalling the grief that I felt
the day the E.R. doctor stood me up at a concert in Detroit.
And the same grief I felt the day that I received a letter
from a college boyfriend breaking up with me from the other side of the world.
And this recalling the day that the soldier was deployed to Iraq.
So what happens when you find
that you would rather feel pain than nothing at all?
You allow your heart to hurt bad enough to make a change.
When I was 40, I began writing this sort of prayer in my journal:
“I am ready for and worthy of a deeply intimate and loving relationship.”
I wrote it every night.
At the age of 41, I broke up with longing
when I gave a healthy relationship a chance with a man who loved me.
Now, it was a slow burn.
At times, it actually felt too easy.
Where was the fear that he would leave me?
Where is the anxiety that I associated with love?
Eventually, my attraction to his transparency and availability
and kindness grew.
I trusted him before I loved him.
A few months into dating,
Dave said to me, “You’re worth waiting for.”
And I'd heard that from guys before, and they soon lost interest.
And then about five months into dating,
Dave took my hand
and said the most intimate thing any man had ever said to me,
“You are worthy of love.”
I cringed. I did not believe him. I wanted to run away from that situation.
But instead, I sat in this very unfamiliar and uncomfortable place,
learning to receive love and return love
with the man who stood in front of me with his arms wide open.
Scariest thing I've ever done.
About eight months into dating, my 100-year-old grandma Velda called me
And she said, “Do you think he’s the one?”
“I don’t know”, I told her.
She said, “Well, how would you feel if he left you?”
Her husband had died when they were 55 years old.
“Maybe he should. And then I would know.“, I told her.
You see, we are programmed to long
until there is a threat of losing something we love.
About a year into dating, we married at her hospital bedside
three days before she left us.
The law of scarcity trumps longing.
You buy those tickets to Paris when there are only two seats left.
When there’s an urgent sense of a clock ticking, you engage.
“So, what about the sex?“, you ask me.
(LAUGHTER)
It was never about the sex. Just as anorexia isn’t about food.
And when my two-year-old daughter asks me
in her teen years about my intimacy journey,
I will tell her it wasn’t wrong
to have waited to have sex in a committed and loving relationship.
It was chasing the unavailable men
and the impossible plot that was self-destructive.
By obsessively looking to the past and the future,
I almost longed the chance for a healthy relationship and child out of my life.
You see, when we idolize a person or a place we’ve never seen,
we make a bigger hole than any one or any place could ever fill.
We give it too much power.
I will tell my daughter,
“You cannot be attracted to a healthy and loving relationship
until you stop longing for the perfect one.”
And how do you do that?
How do you have a relationship with longing
that is rooted in nourishment and not suffering?
You accept that no person, place or thing will make you whole.
You trust Providence.
And realize you’re not in control.
You believe you are worthy of love. I mean, really believe it.
And you learn to receive love. And stop longing for it.
Thank you.
(APPLAUSE) (CHEERS)