When science journalist Eli Chen begins to have doubts in her relationship, she tries to control her feelings using neuroscience.
Eli Chen is the science and environment reporter at St. Louis Public Radio, as well as the producer of The Story Collider's shows in St. Louis in partnership with the public radio station. Her work has aired on NPR, Marketplace, WHYY’s The Pulse and won Edward R. Murrow and National Federation of Press Women awards. Her favorite stories to cover often involve animals or robots. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where she concentrated in science and radio reporting. She is @StoriesByEli and echen@stlpublicradio.org.
This story originally aired on Oct. 6, 2017 in an episode titled “Perception.”
Story Transcript
It was about a year and a half ago and I was sitting on a balcony in a small beach town in Delaware, and I was looking up at the moon. I was looking up at it because, that night, people around the planet would be able to see a rare lunar eclipse.
Lunar eclipses, they happen often enough when the earth comes in between the sun and the moon, but not often do they happen at the same time as when the moon comes closest to the earth. When the moon is in this position it looks larger to us and that’s why we call them super moons.
Total lunar eclipses are just amazing to watch anyway because light from the sun bends around the edges of the earth in a way that refracts red light onto the moon, and that’s why we call them blood moons.
The last time there's this super moon-blood moon combination was in 1982 and I didn’t exist then. The next one will take place in 2033 and by then I'll be in my forties, which I can’t imagine right now.
I wasn’t observing this eclipse alone. Sitting next to me was my boyfriend whose balcony I was sitting on. And for the sake of this story, I’m going to call him Adam.
Adam and I had been dating for about a year and we had this sort of dynamic where I'd babble on about Mars and bacteria and all of the beautiful things you can learn from bat carcasses, just things that a public radio science reporter does stories about. I mean, I do what I do because I don’t know how to quite turn off that switch of talking about weird things all the time. That’s just who I am.
I remember he told me once that he knew he liked me from the day we met not just because he found me attractive but also because I did a lot of talking, and there aren’t many girls in Southern Delaware who look or talk the way I do.
I liked Adam because he chose his words carefully and I tend to like guys who are a little reserved because, frankly, they're a lot less annoying. And, for the most part, he let me be my weird self, which was important.
But I was also strangely drawn to his nervousness around me. Usually, I’m the one who’s feeling awkward and nervous around other people. I have crippling social anxiety and it was new for me to be on the other side of that.
So we’re sitting in the balcony, we’re watching the moon turn red, and this is something that doesn’t take place in fifteen minutes. It took hours. I think we were sitting out there for at least a couple of hours. Nonetheless, Adam stayed up with me. He took charge of adjusting the controls on the telescope, which he was very good at doing.
Rarely in my life has there been anyone who’s been willing to spend that much time with me. You know, growing up, I always felt like I was a burden to other people. But as the moon turned red that night and as we watched the eclipse through the telescope lens, I remember thinking I’m not going to find anyone better than this.
A little time passed and I got offered a job in St. Louis to continue being a public radio science reporter. Adam and I were dying to get out of Delaware so we eagerly packed up all of our things and we left the state and we moved in together.
About eight months after we moved here, I interviewed a cognitive psychologist who studies romantic love from the brain. So she had invited me to watch some experiments where she was recording the brainwaves of people who had recently fallen in love. I sat down with her a couple of times to ask her why she studies what she studies. The way she saw it, love is a way to understand how the brain works. Love is a very powerful motivator. It can sometimes make us do really irrational things.
This researcher was really interested in learning how our thoughts influence how much we love other people. She had published some research that said that thinking positive thoughts about say your partner, your spouse, would help you feel more in love with them, and thinking negative thoughts about, say, someone who had broken your heart would help you feel less in love with them. To me, and I don’t think I’m alone here, that seemed fairly obvious.
But then she threw out this example. She said, “Say you're in a committed relationship and you find that you’ve fallen in love with someone else. You could attempt to try and control love by thinking positive thoughts about the person that you think you should be with and negative thoughts about the person you shouldn’t be with.” Immediately I thought that would really suck to be in that situation.
But I was also skeptical because relationships are complicated, people are complicated, so I asked her if this would actually work in a real-life situation. She said her research showed that it could work in the short term and that, over the long term, you'd have to keep exercising those thoughts regularly to work.
I left her office thinking who’s got time for that, but I also thought it would never happen to me because I thought things between me and Adam were good. I had also become really close with his friends and family and there's a lot of talk about getting married down the road.
But there are also things that were kind of simmering underneath the surface, things that I thought were issues that naturally came up when you're with someone for an extended period of time and especially when that person moves halfway across the country to be with you.
Basically, I've been harboring a lot of guilt that I was here pursuing this glorious science public radio career while he was attending community college with kids half his age and waiting tables at a really dysfunctional restaurant.
I had come home from work a lot and immediately just start complaining about things that happened that day and that happened over and over again to the point where he said that he had enough of it and that he didn’t want to hear about it anymore and I should be grateful to have the job that I have. It’s a valid point, but it made me feel terrible and it also made me feel alone.
So bad feelings like that were building up in the weeks and months, actually, before I interviewed this psychologist. A few short weeks after, I realized that I had fallen in love with one of my friends. This was a friend who I felt like I could talk to and share things that were happening in my life without feeling bad about it. I didn’t have to prod him to be receptive to the things I was talking about. So there were times where we’d get into these long conversations about feeling a little lost in life. When I spent time with him, the loneliness I was feeling would recede only a little, but just enough to matter.
When I realized what was happening, I thought about what the psychologist said and I tried to redirect my thoughts. I thought, “This is stupid. Adam does so much for me. He moved here for me, he loves me unconditionally. I should be lucky to have him. And crushes will come and go and my friend will always just be a friend.”
I even forced myself to think about what our apartment would look like without all of Adam’s books and posters and Lego spaceships and I tried to focus on how devastating that would feel. But I really underestimated how much stress I was under in my professional and personal life and how much that was making it impossible to control the feelings I was having about these people.
Eventually, Adam and I got into a huge fight and that led quickly to the end of our relationship. I finally admitted that I didn’t think I was in love with him anymore and a large reason why I was with him was because I didn’t think anyone else would have me. That was a feeling I couldn’t change. He said it was the cruelest thing that anyone ever said to him. In less than a week, he packed up all these things and he left St. Louis.
Since then, I've tried and am still trying to figure out what love means to me. I never expected to have feelings for anyone else and I never expected to hurt Adam the way I did. I also never expected to feel so relieved, actually, when he up and vanished from my life.
There was a while where I was wondering if I was just some horrible, messed-up, awful, selfish person, but my friends, who were so supportive during this time, they kept telling me that I shouldn’t be ashamed of the way I feel, that everything I’m going through just means that I’m human.
I started to think that maybe I shouldn’t try to control love. Maybe I should just accept my feelings as they are.
Recently, I remembered this one time that Adam and I were walking along the beach in Delaware and the moon looked unusually large that night near the horizon. I tried to take a photo of it with my phone, but the moon ended up looking small and I was disappointed that my phone couldn’t convey the size of the moon I had seen. Adam said something about how it’s really our minds that make the moon look big to us and that our perception is actually based on an illusion.
At first, I was annoyed that my brain was responsible for tricking me in this small way, but then I saw it as a chance to learn something new about myself and that there's something to appreciate about the curious ways that our minds and our bodies are wired to give us the experiences that we never expected to have.