If it’s happened to you, keep reading. If it hasn’t, keep reading anyway. It happens a lot.
It begins with the standard set-up. You feel trapped. Hate your life. Nerves shot. Self-esteem shredded. You know the drill: biglaw.
That’s when the dæmon lover appears. It doesn’t end well.
There’s biglaw hanky-panky and biglaw sexual harassment. There’s also biglaw romantic infatuation. It’s the one you talk about least because you least feel like talking about it. Once you reemerge on the other side and wish it never happened, you never feel like talking about it again.
It’s no coincidence life-crushing, soul-annihilating infatuations collide on a regular basis with the lives of young associates – any more than cars colliding with deer on an expressway is a coincidence if you locate the expressway in the path of the herd’s migration. Life-crushing, soul-annihilating infatuation is the logical outcome of life-crushing, soul-annihilating law firm existence.
The firm swallows your life, denies you sleep and vacation, works you into the ground, and subjects you to an endless stream of criticism. You got there in the first place because you’re a pleaser – the kid who earned “A’s” to please teacher. Now you can’t please anyone.
Enter the dæmon lover. He gets you when you don’t love yourself – when you hate yourself. That’s infatuation – not falling in love, but hating yourself so much you try to escape your own identity by merging into someone else.
For some reason, he’s British. I’m not saying he has to be British, but three of my clients – by some stroke of fate – ended up obsessed with British guys at their firms. Oh, and I did, too. So we’ll make him British.
If you’re American, there’s something about a British guy that says…here’s someone smarter, more tasteful than me. The accent conveys it. You pick this message up watching tv and movies. In a romantic comedy, when the guy meets a dream girl, she’s always tall, thin and white (this is Hollywood)…with a British accent. If he’s a dream guy, he’s Hugh Grant, with the British accent telegraphing effortless, jovial confidence. Oh, I’m sorry – I didn’t mention I’m Prime Minister/a billionaire/a genius CEO entrepreneur? How curious – I feel a perfect fool! Did you know, by the way, that you have the most beautiful eyes? Oops! I’ve spilled my canapé down your cleavage! Let me fetch something to tidy that up…
Superior. Cool under pressure. Charming. Confident. Everything you aren’t six months into your saison en enfer. And he’s so…approachable. A tiny life raft, an unflustered, un-freaked out, un-panicked bit of flotsam on which to cling once the ship’s prow sinks beneath the waves. Think back. Remember unflustered? Un-freaked out? Un-panicked? Recall a time when you slept through the night? When you went out with friends in the evening? Enjoyed “weekends”? Remember back when people used to be nice to you? Your little Hugh Grant impersonator represents a lost world – the antidote for your now.
Okay, deep breath. Before I continue to limn the romantic nemesis destined to toss your heart into the workbowl of a Cuisinart (equipped with the slicing blade) and press “pulse” – let’s talk about how embarrassing this is. Especially in retrospect. You might call it the final humiliation. You’re adjusting to having your ass handed to you by a sociopathic partner each and every day, and grasping that you’re in debt up to your eyelashes and cannot escape the worst job you’ve ever experienced. Then – one evening – you go home, settle in bed…and you’re smiling a little at the thought of that cute English guy you keep eyeing in the firm gym.
It turns out his office is down the hall from yours. He’s short-ish, with a snubby nose and hair that flops in his eyes. He smiled at you at the CLE training. Today you had lunch together and he winked while you tried to concentrate on blathering about law firm gossip. He’s so…terrific. He seems to like you.
Maybe life will go back to being worth living.
I wonder what it would be like to kiss him.
Yeah – it’s embarrassing. Recounting this stuff makes you feel a little more useless, stupid and pitiful – more nauseous, retarded and pile-of-vomit-like – than before.
Fast forward to emails and texts exchanged at all hours, mostly about nothing. You grow accustomed to two-finger typing silly messages at 1 am, giggling in your office like a fifteen-year-old. There’s one almost sort-of kiss.
Then somehow you awaken from the anesthesia and realize he’s got a girlfriend – or a boyfriend, in my case – so he’s not yours. In fact, you’ve made a fool of yourself – or was he leading you on, or torturing you, or what? Something happened – you’re sure of it. But now he’s acting all innocent, like he never realized you felt that way about him. He’s pulling away. Then he isn’t. Then he is again.
You hate him. You love him. He’s an asshole, a psycho. But you need to talk to him. You’re not going to text him. Then you do. He doesn’t reply. Then he does. Then he doesn’t. You think about him – a lot. You’re always thinking about him. You miss him. You need him.
Somewhere in this mess you realize if you can’t have him, you need to be away from him, so you can remember who you are – or were. It’s hard to remember life on the other side of the looking-glass.
His office is down the hall from yours.
Incidentally, he succeeds effortlessly at the firm – or appears to. You’re sinking like a lead balloon.
It doesn’t end well.
You leave the firm at some point. Or he does. Probably you. And you never see him again, or you do, but it’s a glimpse as he’s crossing 34th Street at Seventh Ave and you only think it was him. In any case, he was with a girl. Whatever.
I’ll skirt over the hours passed lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wanting to die. The wondering if you can tell your friends – the friends that remain, post-the-law-firm-killing-off-of-your-social-life. You know what they’ll say. They will only put up with this crap for so long.
So you go see a therapist, and find out how infatuation works, and why life at that god-awful firm stressed you and regressed you and left you vulnerable to seduction by a rejecting love object – someone a bit like your father – in fact, a bit like the firm.
Years later, maybe, you’re doing something satisfying and interesting for a living – something that speaks to who you are. Your life partner actually loves you – digs you, vibes on you, “gets” you and adores you. You return the feeling.
Then the thought sails out of nowhere and slams you like a body check: How could you have hated yourself enough – forgotten who you were sufficiently – to cling to someone who only used you to stroke his ego? And suddenly it’s perfectly clear. You didn’t want to be with him – you wanted to be of him, to appropriate him – to step into his skin and his life and his self-confidence and escape to a place where you didn’t hate every day, fear everything and fear everyone.
On the spot, you make a solemn vow: Whatever happened years ago with the dæmon lover – it won’t happen again. You’re a different person now.
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This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
If you enjoy these columns, please check out The People’s Therapist’s new book, Way Worse Than Being a Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning
I can also heartily recommend my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”.
(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.)
The People's Therapist 
You need help man.
I think this is a sign that he’s running low on new material.
I’m just warming up, Schnookums.
Crazy how true this is for so many big law peers I know, as well as myself. I think we try desperately to find someone, anyone, remotely happy with their life, which coincdentally is our own life, in an attempt to justify or make sense of an existence we loathe. We cling to the mirage like a life raft until we realize that the life raft really is but another anchor pulling us further down instead of keeping us afloat. Hopefully most of us learn a ton from this experience, and come out on the other side recognizing its root cause and walking away towards a healthier, if battlescarred, version of ourself.
[…] reason I’m going off on this is that I read The People’s Therapist’s latest post and I finally understood fandom in its extreme form. It’s infatuation. It’s wanting to […]
I would note that, as a British man who fell wholly for a female American associate in six weeks of rather wonderful infatuation in almost the exact circumstance as described above, I will say that I will look back on the period as a time of joy, hope and the exquisite pleasure of finding someone perfect, if only for a little while. She may now think me some kind of philandering, manipulative monster as you describe above, but I think the above post is far too one-dimensional to reflect all the realities.
I have not read any of the other posts on this blog – perhaps you are the finest shrink to walk the earth, I have no idea – but the above reads like some terrible rom-com parody. It’s a reductio ad absurdam of people’s emotions rather than a proper analysis of them. Perhaps this was written for comic effect, in which case my British sense of humour has clearly missed the point. Apologies.
Guy likes girl [subtext: he must be an absolute arsehole who is just using her to “rub his ego”].
Girl likes guy: [subtext: she must have a terrible lack of self-worth and therefore easily malleable]
Guy and girl fall in love [subtext: she’s vulnerable, he’s lying and taking advantage].
And I would note there is nothing wrong with forgetting who you are for a little while given the difficulties of the profession – and nothing wrong with dreaming, hoping for something more, something different. And, if that thing is delivered in the form of a British stereotype who wants you and who you want, why not?
I am the finest shrink to walk the earth.
The fact that you used the word “arsehole” proves the entire column in my mind.
“Shrink” is a slang term for a psychiatrist, which is an MD, or a psychologist, which is the minimum of a master’s degree and quite often a doctorate (Psy D.) A shrink is not a social worker. Don’t know if it’s different in England.
In the USA, the term “shrink”, technically speaking, refers to someone who shrinks heads, most commonly a witch doctor or primitive animist herbalist.
It is illegal to practice psychotherapy in the USA with a master’s degree in psychology. The vast majority of people in the USA who practice psychotherapy – and who are often referred to fondly as “shrinks” – hold master’s degrees in clinical social work, which is my professional degree. In the USA very few psychiatrists, and exceedingly few psychologists practice psychotherapy. Freud, for his part, insisted that a medical degree was entirely unnecessary and in fact undesirable for a psychoanalyst. He wrote a book on the subject – “The Question of Lay Analysis” – and he strongly urged his disciples, including Theodor Reik, not to bother with a medical degree. Freud hated the US psychoanalytic community because it was dominated by MD’s.
Interestingly, both in England and the USA, neither a doctorate nor a master’s degree is a required to be a douchebag.
I’m unsure as to what your “douchebag” remark was meant to imply, but there are many psychiatrists and clinical psychologists practicing psychotherapy in the US. LCSW’s practice as well, but an MD or nurse practitioner are the only ones licensed to prescribe medications.I was merely attempting to clarify a term to someone who appeared to be unfamiliar with it. I would assume you would not want to be perceived as possessing credentials which you do not in fact possess.
Why would the slang nickname “shrink” be limited to people prescribing medication? And what’s the significance of any of this?
I get attacked regularly by a group of people – whom I shall call “douchebags” – because I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist. I work closely with psychiatrists and psychologists as colleagues (we attend a monthly peer supervision group) – my father was a psychiatrist, and I sometimes refer clients for psychopharm evaluation. But the implication is always the same – that somehow I’m not “real” – that without a PhD – or the ability to hand you some Zoloft – I’m just a “social worker” and therefore an object of contempt. It’s annoying.
I agree that it makes no sense whatsoever that a degree in social work – which is a bit of an absurdity, let’s face it – should be the professional degree commonly associated with the practice of psychotherapy in the USA. But that’s the degree most psychotherapists have. Psychiatry is an entirely different field, centered around medication and the treatment of psychotics. Psychology, at this point – since the psychologists made it impossible for MA’s to practice as therapists – is a field dominated by academics doing grant-funded research or working in the corporate field as consultants, or doing testing – mostly of children for “ADHD” (that’s another whole scandal.) There is the new-fangled PsyD degree in “clinical psychology” – which I opted not to pursue because I would have had to go to Rutgers for it, spend many years and well over $100k on it (remember, I was already a lawyer with school loans) – and most of what I would have been studying would have been pointless – such as a lot of advanced statistics intended for research purposes.
I wanted to be a therapist – so I did the stupid MSW and learned everything I needed from my own work with several senior therapists (who held degrees in everything from Drama to Education), from courses at psychoanalytic institutes and from reading, doing group therapy and training in a hospital setting. That’s how you learn to be a therapist – just as Freud intended when he invented the field.
And when have I ever – EVER – implied that I have any “credentials which I do not in fact possess”? I would push hard in the opposite direction, and point out that “credentials” aren’t the key to finding a talented psychotherapist. I would urge clients looking for a therapist to ignore credentials, and go with their gut. This work isn’t about locating an intellectual with a fancy degree – it’s about finding someone you can talk to, who will make you feel understood.
I have great respect for social workers, and their dedication to helping people. You are obviously a well educated and intelligent man, but reading your columns leaves me with the impression that a lot of this is almost a game to you. Also in my opinion Freud is no longer the be all and end all of mental health.
I have so-so respect for social workers, frankly.
Freud is important to the field of psychotherapy to the same degree Darwin is important to the field of evolutionary biology – he was the founder. Freud also died over 70 years ago, so yes, of course things have moved on a great deal since Freud’s time. But his ideas remain the basis for my work.
As for it being a game – it is a bit of game writing these columns. I love writing, and there is demand for a column about law, so that’s what I’ve been focusing on, but I try to keep it interesting for myself (and presumably my readers) by lightening things up and aiming to be provocative. If I didn’t make it a bit of a game I couldn’t imagine myself spitting out – what is it now? – something like 80,000 words about law, a field I only practiced for a couple years and found rather dull.
There’s also a strong element of frustration in my writing – I witness a fair amount of human suffering that results from the current state of the legal profession and that gets me fired up to grab the world’s attention and try to change things – which is why I published my last book – to try to bring about some change. There is a serious side to all this.
That’s it??? A kiss? What about the trainwreck sex and cringe-worthy affair, after which you realize he wasn’t even that attractive and it was all the “work goggles”?
I bet the lover’s only british because you wanted an excuse to spell demon with an A.
The thought of becoming infatuated with anyone in my law firm makes me throw up in my mouth.
Agreed.
brilliant.