The Persephone Complex

On Staying In Relationships That Hurt Us

“I hope I never fall in love, I hope I never fall in love, I hope I never fall in love.” - Sally Owens, character in the film Practical Magic, based on the novel by Alice Hoffman

“I can’t wait to fall in love.” - Gilly Owens, character in the film Practical Magic, based on the novel by Alice Hoffman

A long time ago, I dated a man that I secretly called, in the privacy of my mind, The Lord of the Underworld. Yes, I was very young, and it was very dramatic. He was ten years older than me and handsome, so handsome that when we went to dinners and parties together, people would not infrequently sidle up to me and whisper congratulations about my gorgeous boyfriend – which always felt both thrillingly flattering and a bit backhanded, because I always felt the implication of their surprise that someone like me had managed to get with someone like him.

Looking back, over a decade later, I have to wonder how much of that backhandedness was really there. It’s possible, I suppose, that those people were implying some judgement of my attractiveness, especially as I was a very newly transitioned, awkwardly intense transsexual in my early 20s.

What seems even more possible now is that I was the one with the most judgement about my awkwardly intense transsexual self. It seems very possible indeed that I was the one who didn’t believe that I deserved to be with someone as beautiful as that man. And it seems possible that this belief was perhaps the seed of the choices I made that I’m still trying to understand today.

***

The Lord of the Underworld was intense and brooding, moody and commanding in a very romance novel sort of way. He lived in a huge condominium apartment where he kept the shades drawn at all times, like a vampire. I still don’t fully know why.

This is the detail I remember best about that space: There were many clocks in his apartment – not obtrusively so; The Lord of the Underworld was not a collector. Yet the clock to room ratio was weirdly high, especially given that we dated at a time when cell phones had already made standing clocks largely obsolete. There were two small clocks on shelves in the living room, another on the dining table, a digital clock on the stove in the kitchen and another on microwave door, as well as a wall clock in the bathroom and an alarm clock by the bed. Like I said, it was subtle. Not being a great observer of my surroundings, I probably wouldn’t have noticed except for one crucial fact: All of the clocks were randomly set to different times, and all of the clocks were wrong.

I spent so many hours lying awake beside my gorgeous boyfriend in that dark, cavernous condominium outside time, wondering what I was doing there, wondering if this was my fairy tale ending, wondering if fairy tale endings were supposed to feel so frightening. Or so sad.

The Lord of the Underworld had a problematic relationship with drugs and alcohol. Though I am suspicious of the term addiction and its stigmatized, racialized, classed connotations, it is perhaps not wholly inaccurate to describe what was happening with my boyfriend. Despite his good looks and relative wealth, despite an apparently highly successful career and loving family of origin, he carried a deep and terrible emotional pain inside of him, the source of which I still do not know. (Nor is it, necessarily, my or anyone else’s business to know.) By the time I met him, The Lord of the Underworld relied on the heavy use of substances every day to manage his suffering.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this when we first started dating. I met The Lord of the Underworld at a party that I will self-indulgently describe as an anarcho-queer glam-punk after-hours bacchanal. I was on the cusp of transition, presenting as androgynous in cutoff short-shorts and a tank top that revealed almost my entire body, riding the wave of intensity that comes with suddenly revealing a part of one’s inner world to the outer world. For many newly transitioning trans femmes, this a powerfully vulnerable, sensual, and dangerous time – the emotional equivalent of a moth emerging from a chrysalis with its wings still wet.

The Lord of the Underworld came right up to me at that party and put his hand on my thigh. I don’t have any recollection of what he said or what I said, because the moment I met his eyes, I knew it didn’t matter. I didn’t know about the drugs or the alcohol, but here’s what I did know: There was something magnetic between us, something fierce and inexorable. I knew I was going to date this man, I knew I was going to fall in love with him, and on some level, I think I also knew from somewhere deep within my body that our love was going to hurt me very, very badly.

***

I almost wrote that last sentence using the words “he was going to hurt me” before changing it to “our love was going to hurt me,” a small but deeply significant shift in framing. It would be easy, narratively speaking, for me to make The Lord of the Underworld the villain and me his victim. It’s tempting. It is, perhaps, the more feminist way of telling the story:

Once upon time, I was a girl named Persephone, blossoming in the flower of her youth. Then the wicked Hades, King of the Dead, burst from the ground to steal me away to be his bride. He tricked me into eating six pomegranate seeds from a fruit grown in the Land of the Dead, so that I would be bound to the underworld, and to him, for all eternity…

Yet this has never been the way I experienced that relationship. It was more complex.

The Lord of the Underworld was unpredictable and intense; he could be extremely loving and lavish with his affections in one moment and then refuse to talk to me or get in touch with me for a week straight for no apparent reason. He could be controlling and carelessly cruel, for example, by telling me that I had gained too much weight (about three pounds) and asking if I’d ever look “like a real woman.”  When we had sex, he was demanding and rough, and he rarely seemed to care about my pleasure except when he wanted to prove the point that he could make me orgasm. When he was drunk or high, the level of consent in our intimacy could be shaky, though I never experienced outright violation from him.

The most frightening part of our relationship was the many, many times when we were alone and he was drunk and buried deep within the subterranean layers of his emotional pain. In such moments, he would transform, seeming to lose his grip on reality. He would sob and scream and scream and scream, wordlessly, sometimes for hours, throwing and breaking objects in that condo apartment with all the mismatched clocks. Sometimes, in his sleep, he would scream and lash out, slamming his fists into the wall beside my head.

I never knew when such moments would arrive, or what triggered them, only that they happened multiple times a week. In those moments, a cold, eerie calm would descend over me, and I’d draw with icy desperation on every skill I’d learned as a community worker and therapist in training to try and soothe him. I still have it, that cold and eerie calm. Now, it is the first response that arises within me whenever I hear a person scream.

However, I never – ever – felt like I would be in danger of violence if I chose to end the relationship. He never threatened me, and the one time he touched me in anger, he immediately apologized and never repeated that behavior. He never said anything to try and bind me to him either, the way some other partners have – he never said he was relying on me, or that he would die without me, or even that he needed me. It was always clear that I could leave if I really wanted to.

What was so confusing, what confuses and scares me still, is that I didn’t want to leave. Even in the midst of my greatest confusion, my greatest fear, I wanted to stay there in that darkened condo where time was broken into a thousand pieces. I wanted him to need me. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to be the one who brought the springtime into his life, because that was what would make me worthy.

The truth that it’s taken me a decade to admit is that I was the one who believed I would die without him.

Here is another, potentially less feminist, way to tell the story of Persephone and the Lord of the Underworld:

Once upon a time, I was a wounded girl named Persephone who was suffering as she bloomed. Even as I unfurled, I worried that there was something rotting in my core. I was raised by extremely controlling parental figures who could not see me for the woman I was becoming. I desperately longed to belong, and I desperately longed for freedom. Every day, I wished upon a flower for someone to rescue me from my world of painful sunlight, and from myself.

So when the dark King of the Underworld burst up from beneath the ground and offered me his pomegranate seeds, I chose to say yes. I chose to eat the seeds, knowing they would bind me to him, because I wanted to be bound. I was confused. I thought that this was freedom, and even though now I know better, a part my body still doesn’t know the difference between bondage and freedom, love and suffering, saving someone else and saving myself. He was good to me and bad to me, my King of the Underworld. Or perhaps he wanted to be good but was bad for me. The seeds were so sweet. I can still taste them.

***

The Lord of the Underworld and I dated for two years, during which time I tried to end the relationship repeatedly. It would always end with me returning to him, unbidden, driven by that mysterious force from within me, much like the mythological Persephone’s annual cycle of leaving and returning to Hades. It finally did end when he left me, having decompensated so much in his mental health that he needed to seek an entirely different lifestyle in another country. In a development that may land as hopeful or ironic depending on your point of view, I have heard through the grapevine that he is now the director of a non-profit focused on supporting people recover from addiction.

In the time since I dated the Lord of the Underworld, I have come to understand, painfully, that what went wrong between us was in part my own doing: Not my fault in the sense of casting judgement or blame, but the result of compulsive and unconsciously driven survival behaviors borne out of childhood trauma that are still, silently and inexorably, trying to save my life by binding me to unstable men who need to be saved. In the last thirteen years, I often have moments in life where I think that I have at last exorcised the ghost of Persephone from my psyche, only for her to arise from the depths once again, her lips still stained red from the fruit she cannot stop eating.

Yet my Persephone complex is not the villain of the story either. As in so many ancient myths, villainy and victimhood are not really the point here. Like the Lord of the Underworld, Persephone is complex, and her reasons for making the choice she does in the conditions she has need not be assigned innocence or shame for me to try to understand them.

What is deeply compelling about Persephone – about the girl I used to be, the woman I still am, the woman I see reflected in so many other women and people of all genders who choose to stay in relationships that are hurting – is her longing for freedom and communion with something greater than the life she has known, and her courage to move towards it, over and over again.

I wish that I could end this essay with a pithy summation of insights gained and lessons learned, perhaps six clear steps to undo a Persephone Complex, but alas, I have nothing so simple. I only have the conviction that the Persephone – and the Lord of the Underworld – in all of us are a fundamental part of human beingness. And I have this small dream:

Once upon a time, there is a woman named Persephone who has for many, many centuries danced between the Earth and the Underworld. Many people have pitied her, others have idolized her, and all of them are mistaken. Persephone has been growing a secret tree, with its roots deep in the Underworld and its branches stretching far up into the skies of Earth. Persephone has watered this tree with her tears and her blood over and over again, and now its fruits – a kind of fruit never seen before – are finally ready. She holds the fruit in her hand, splits it open with her fingers, feeling the juicy flesh below the skin. The fruit is full of seeds. If she eats them, they will change her – but into what, she does not know.

This is a difficult choice, a risky choice, but Persephone is no stranger to risky choices. The juice of the fruit is full of her tears and her blood, and Persephone can only believe that to eat the fruit is to become more of herself, whomever that is.

She raises the fruit to her mouth and takes a bite.