What comes through in the writer's exasperated tone is a sense of waste—of seeing individual identities distorted, and individual possibilities circumscribed, by an intensely felt pressure to seek security in one other person. It is a universal pattern, expressed in a variety of personal styles. My reaction eventually was to consider just how closely this pattern fit the addiction model. As an illustration, I have put together a composite case which conveys the essence of relationships like the three that have been described. Since this is meant to be a straightforwardly schematic example of addiction, I have deliberately kept it free of distracting detail and complicated motivations. In it there is none of Mike and Betty's chaotic loving conflict and comical domesticity, none of the coercion worked by Herman's wife, none of Janet and Arnold's bizarre regimentation. Bruce and Vicky's relationship is smooth and harmonious, its terms mutually agreeable.

An Egoisme a Deux

Vicky and Bruce are individual human beings in body only; they are constantly struggling to overcome the separation of skin that is the one barrier to their total union. Their backgrounds explain some of the story. Both of them grew up, comfortable and protected, in a suburb of Los Angeles. From an early age they thought in terms of professional careers and a domestic existence. Bruce, who graduated from high school a year ahead of Vicky, turned down a scholarship to an Ivy League university he had always dreamed of attending. Instead, unwilling to leave Vicky, he went to a university in the Los Angeles area. Vicky followed him there a year later. She hadn't wanted to go too far from her parents, and in fact she lived at home rather than on campus, just as Bruce had done the year before so that he could be near her. The couple made the hour-long trip to and from school every day together, and they continued to see each other in the comfortable settings of their old neighborhood and their parents' homes. It was as if they were biding time, waiting simply to reach an age when they could marry without arousing comment. Their lack of experience with other people at college naturally did not give them a chance to gain a very accurate impression of themselves as others saw them. The result was that they didn't develop adult qualities that might have made them attractive to people who didn't already know and love them.

And there you have it. Two people reluctant to leave the security of their high school relationship, probably as much from a fear of disappointing each other, and of never finding anything better for themselves, as from inherent desire, had joined themselves together "'til death do us part." In the meantime, they had missed the opportunity to live away from home, an experience their upper-middle-class parents would willingly have subsidized. The price they extracted from each other for the sacrifices involved in maintaining the relationship was the constant reassurance of each other's company. Having spent so much of themselves simply to stay together, they both felt the relationship owed them a great deal. And, to justify this commitment, they steadily inflated each other's worth to the point where nothing else seemed of any consequence to them.

They soon gave up whatever independent interests they had. Vicky discarded the idea of joining the college drama club because it would have taken too much of her time from Bruce. They did not see much of their old friends, most of whom had gone away to college. Nor did they make new friends at the university, except a few classroom friends. They talked about courses and teachers with these people, and together went to occasional parties with them, but because so little of their free time was spent on campus, these outside relationships didn't amount to anything. The couple grew more and more clinging, turned to each other for more and more of what they wanted, and gradually severed all connections with the rest of the world except for school and their parents.

Vicky and Bruce got married upon Bruce's graduation. Together, they decided to move to San Francisco for their graduate training. Bruce was to go to law school, while Vicky planned to take her Ph.D. in history after completing her senior year at a college in the area. Not that she had any intention of being a historian. She found her history courses boring and, worse, tremendously stressful. Constrained but not inspired by the curriculum during her undergraduate years, she had made her way through with the help of stimulants and tranquilizers. One may wonder why she didn't rise up against this agony and get off the academic treadmill, but it is not surprising that a person so little disposed to question the security of her family home and her marriage would not seek something more purposeful than continued, meaningless academic activity. In fact, she saw no alternative for herself while her husband was in law school.

Vicky and Bruce were concerned about moving so far away from their families. However, they enjoyed regular weekend visits from their parents. They frequently returned these visits, carefully dividing their time between the two families, as well as bringing them together for joint gatherings. And they had hardly arrived in San Francisco before they began making detailed plans for their eventual return to Los Angeles, where they would buy a house near both families once Bruce was earning a lawyer's income and their San Francisco "bohemian" period had come to an end.

At this point they settled into the kind of married life described in the account at the beginning of this chapter. Marriage gave their relationship, blessed with parental indulgence from the beginning, the added comforts of a home life. Occasionally they roused themselves to attend an evening lecture or other university cultural event. However, their penetration into San Francisco never went much deeper than that. With few friends, their social life was as limited and superficial as it had been in college, and although they espoused topical viewpoints, they were certainly not part of the new West Coast scene.

Thus two underdeveloped egos merged into what D. H. Lawrence called an égoisme à deux: two people banded together, not because of love or an increasing understanding of each other, but rather because of their over-entanglement and mutual self-deprivation. With each step in their growing interdependence, Bruce and Vicky broke a few more of the ties they had had with other people, things, and activities. And as these disappeared, they hung on to each other that much more frantically to bolster themselves against an increasingly alien environment.

We can partially trace the genesis of these addictive personalities in Vicky's and Bruce's upbringing. Neither of them had broken from a childhood dependence on their parents. They approached all experience outside the family as somehow external to themselves. Although they were both successful students, and both accepted the yoke of school's demands, their schoolwork had little meaning for them, and they spoke of it cynically. Nor were they capable of forming relationships outside the family, but for one—with each other. It was as though this isolated excursion drained them of all the energy they might have applied toward knowing other people.