In the thriller novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the protagonist Maxim’s “success”—his wealth, status as master of Manderley, and his position in county society—acts as both a cage and a curse.
He confesses he “put Manderley first, before anything else,” accepting Rebecca’s depravity to protect the estate’s reputation. This success alienates him emotionally, making him unable to trust or love openly.
When he marries the young narrator after Rebecca’s death, his success creates a vast power imbalance: she feels inferior, unworthy, like “a guest in Manderley… waiting for the return of the hostess.”
His success does not bring them closer; it widens the gulf, as she believes he married her for convenience, not love. Only when that success is threatened—by scandal, by the truth—does he finally become vulnerable enough to truly need her.
Though contrary to my story, I chose Rebecca just because the title reminds me of the woman I fell in love with and who carries the same name, which has been in my psyche for nearly two decades
1. A man’s success and mating probability
A man’s worth lies in his professional and vocational success. Success lies in ascending to the top of the social, economic, political, academic, or any other professional ladder—which, in turn, becomes visible in possessing a beautiful wife and a fitting abode.
A man’s wife is a visible measure of his success. A man’s wife can be judged by the level of his success because, as evolutionary psychology has long established, a more successful man possesses a higher probability of securing a more beautiful partner in the long run.
In the same vein, a successful man is worth more than gold. It is imperative that, as a man, he be successful—not a woman. She only needs to succeed in possessing all the traits of attractiveness sufficient to attract the man. It is the man alone who harbors a strong desire for beauty, while the woman possesses the hunger for a successful man.
To her, a successful man is always attractive. A man’s external attractiveness plays but a minor role in drawing her attention. It is far more vital for a man to be an able provider than merely an attractive one. A good man is good enough only to be appreciated, not to be pursued.
Subsequent large-scale replications and meta-analyses have reinforced the pattern. A 2020 study across 45 nations confirmed that men continue to value physical attractiveness more highly in long-term mates, while women value good financial prospects and status; the differences did not diminish in more gender-egalitarian societies.
Experimental work further quantifies the asymmetry: women’s ratings of male attractiveness are roughly 1,000 times more sensitive to salary and resource cues than men’s ratings of female attractiveness.
Niceness or moral goodness (“a good man”) elicits appreciation but rarely overrides these core preferences when resources or status are lacking—precisely because, in the ancestral environment, a kind but unsuccessful mate posed a greater survival risk to offspring than an unkind but capable one.
Individual kindness, intelligence, and emotional warmth are valued by both sexes and often tip the scales in real-world pairings once baseline thresholds of attractiveness and resources are met. Yet the data remain clear: a man’s success functions as a powerful multiplier of desirability in ways a woman’s equivalent “success” in beauty does not.
As Buss himself later summarised in The Evolution of Desire, “Women’s preferences for resources and men’s preferences for beauty are among the most robust and replicable findings in all of psychology.” The marketplace of mating, it seems, still rewards the able provider more than the merely virtuous one.
This is no mere cultural whim; it is an animal and chemical mechanism honed by natural selection to multiply offspring. David M. Buss demonstrates through cross-cultural data spanning 37 societies with 10,047 participants that women preferentially select mates with resources, status, and ambition precisely because these traits historically signalled greater reproductive success.
An attractive partner, in turn, carries a statistically higher chance of procreating more offspring—as Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa detail in Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (2008), where longitudinal evidence shows that physical attractiveness correlates with modestly elevated lifetime fertility even in modern industrialised societies.
2. Success and its mechanism
Now, then, I realise the potential of success and the fatality of failure (my failure, so to speak). Nature does not favour a failed man. It ignores his desire. Therefore, my desire for Rebecca and feeling love (romantic) toward her is, in a sense, unacceptable, prohibited and self-destructive.
A socioeconomically failed man may have only a scant chance to get a partner and procreate.
In the animal kingdom, as observed across dominance hierarchies in primates and other mammals, the overpowered male secures optimal access to the optimal number of females—dominance rank directly predicts mating and reproductive success, as documented in field studies of group-living species (Robert Wright in The Moral Animal).
Success, however, places the animal in the competing stage. It comes as a reward after a measure of competition among the peers. It comes through (as a consequence of) overpowering one’s peers, which demands brain and brawn, strategy, betrayal, lies, infidelity, a domineering attitude, an intimidating personality, opportunistic traits, flattery, and the occasional knife in the back.
Overall, success emerges from an intense struggle among peers, where the defeated counterpart can only expect the leftovers of the victors—not the expected or desired object, or partner, so to speak.
I happened to figure this out because I tried to practice what I preach: morality, altruism, humanism, and utilitarianism.
In doing so, I lacked the very character traits—“brain and brawn, strategy, betrayal, lies, infidelity, domineering attitude, intimidating personality, opportunistic trait, flattery, knifing in the back”—that the arena of success demands. Thus, a good man is good enough only to be appreciated, not to be pursued.
By any standard, I am a failed man, a man who sees no success, bereft of any monetary capability to attract a desired partner.
Because, as Niccolò Machiavelli laid bare in The Prince (1532), morality and raw success cannot comfortably reside together; the effective ruler—or, by extension, the effective man in the mating and status markets—must sometimes act as a fox or a lion, not a saint. Scarcity and desire, or love, likewise cannot coexist.
For, to desire someone romantically of one’s predilection, and romantic love itself is a luxury that a scarcity-ridden man cannot afford. It’s a successful man’s business, a desire or demand valid solely to him. As Lord Petyr Baelish echoes in Game of Thrones, “All desires are valid to a man with a full purse.”
Having said that, in the world of affordability, money overpowers all traditional character traits or concepts—concepts like “unrequited love” and “unequal yoke.”
Here, my expectation to fall in love with someone more socioeconomically advanced and to desire her is considered going beyond my accepted/allowed moral limits. Hence, I must choose carefully with whom I should fall in love.
Should I, then, consider it an “unrequited love” for falling in love with Rebecca, just because she is a decade younger than me and socially privileged, while the feeling is/was once reciprocal? You may call it that I will not; society may deplore it; the community may excommunicate me; authority may stigmatise me, criminalise me, and deprive me of voice.
When it comes to romantic love, the human mind faces a dual struggle to counterbalance its social and personal esteem with shamelessness and unreasonableness involved in courting and falling in love.
To quote Mirza Ghalib,
“You fall in love, and you also want respect,
You fall in love, and you also want dignity.
You are very naive…..(you have taken poison, you still want to live).
The fact is, I consciously chose to like her, to love her, disregarding my moral boundaries and economic deficiencies. Yes, it is my audacity and audacious love for the woman I decided to love. I forever take the liberty, at least, to love her—if not to possess her—because of my financial incapacity.
I will love her. I will love her unregretfully, consciously and to eternity; my love for her will certainly find its way to my grave to reside with me because she is the reason for my spiritual, moral and physical awakening.
As Leo Tolstoy said, “We are asleep until we fall in love.” Rebecca awakens me from my spiritual slumber, calling me back to my truest self. It is as though love has lifted a veil from my eyes, revealing not merely another person, but the deeper meaning of my own existence.
Thus, loving her becomes a kind of revelation.
It awakens the soul from the dull sleep of self-absorption and calls it into responsibility, humility, and devotion. In loving her, I rediscover not only another soul but also the moral compass within my own. And in that awakening lies the beginning of a journey—one that leads beyond mere feeling into the quiet, demanding work of becoming a better man.
The sin I commit is not in saying that, regardless of my deficiency, I dream of her, think of her, sustain her in my mind for every single day from the moment our paths crossed—not less than sixteen years ago.
3. Love and eventuality
My heart stopped there at that auspicious moment when my path crossed that of Rebecca, sixteen years ago. I kept on going through a psychological struggle from then on. I drowned in despair, anxiety, and shamelessness, and self-disgust for uncountable nights. I remained hopeful even when I realised the feeling was merely unrequited or single-sided, or confusingly mutual.
I swung between certainty and uncertainty. It tortured my heart; it emotionally broke me.
After all, a day finally came when Rebecca had to vanish to an exotic nation for good. More than an era slipped by into oblivion after that.
The fact that I decided to remain single for life partly germinated from her departure, only for her to return occasionally.
However, as unprecedented as it sounds, our paths crossed once again in the year 2026.
I was done for and unsettled as my glance met hers. The silent volcano inside me erupted most dangerously—like Taal Volcano in the Philippines or Mount Vesuvius, whose cataclysmic outbursts have forever scarred the earth. The deluge of emotion permeated the entirety of me with a shivering spell.
Her presence at the other table obstructed my food canal, created a neurological fog, and reduced every word I uttered to linguistic blabbering. Shaking her hand triggered an electric undercurrent so strong—a ripple effect vast and powerful—that it consumed my whole being immediately.
The erupted lava from Vesuvius was engulfing the adjacent territory.
Thereafter, my eyes surrendered to the pleasure of seeing her hypnotic beauty and gorgeousness; my heart craved more of a constant rush of blood with adrenaline. Rebecca became the object of a daredevilish adventure that heightened my greed for an unceasing and consistent thrill.
I remained captivated, hunted, cripppled by her presence, beauty for an ultimo.
She stole all my attention, kept me intoxicated, and beguiled me with her eyes. She threw her spell at me, bound me, and I degenerated myself into a mere vermin, incapable of freeing from her glances—which were so deep, so intense, so appealing, so full of life, and yet so full of hope—that it felt as if I let myself slip into that depth to be killed before I rise with my salvation.
Lives, deaths and self-annihilations in that love never seemed enough, as if every death brought me one step closer to my salvation.
It felt as though Rebecca was the redeemer of my whole being, much as Sonya Marmeladova was for the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866).
In that towering work of Russian literature, Sonya’s pure, sacrificial love and unyielding faith become the sole force capable of lifting Raskolnikov from moral annihilation toward the possibility of redemption—embodying Dostoevsky’s conviction that “beauty will save the world,” a truth he voices elsewhere in The Idiot yet enacts here through Sonya’s quiet endurance.
The course of true love never did run smooth, as Shakespeare warned in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; yet the risk itself, as Lord Byron captured so perfectly in “She Walks in Beauty,” makes the heart race: “She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”
Yet, the impossibility, the sheer improbability of our ever getting together, haunted me from all sides.
For no benevolent and concerned parents who had invested their whole lives in a child like Rebecca would entrust her future with a man such as I. The thought of that improbability, and the unreasonable longing for her love, channelled everything into ambivalence at a time.
For sure, I would have been a different person in a world without her existence. Her existence redefined my perspective on life as a whole. Things have never been the same since.
She began dominating my heart and soul invisibly, controlling my very being as though a puppeteer controls his puppet with strings.
My entire self effortlessly gets lost in thoughts about her, from time to time.
Many a time I resolved to rid myself of the very idea of loving her, of liking her, but my willpower was crushed the moment I realised her eyes were scanning me, investigating my movements keenly from afar. My willpower loses its willingness to pursue its objective goal; it instead tends to rise above all legal, moral, and psychological constraints, to break free of self-limiting dogmas, and to compel me to tell her, “I love you.”
But the possible eventuality of rejection and humiliation held me back, bringing me to my senses. Maybe she, too, wants to express herself; or, perhaps she waits for me, as the man, to make the first move.
However, neither of us was able to announce our feelings.
Above all, for me, everything about her seemed aloof in comparison—distant, unreal (too good to be true in relation to me), dreamy, lofty in standard—so that winning her soul would still seem euphoric and imaginary. Because she is too valuable a prize to avail to an ordinary fellow like me.
However, I resolved to convince myself that I had married her a thousand times in my heart, a mental solace to march forward.
My heart bleeds as my journey to her land comes to an end, without either of us revealing our love.
Upon my return, I miss her presence so strongly—so strong was my desperation to see her—that surfing her images was not enough. My health deteriorates, and somehow I needed to express that feeling of missing her, and did it by dairying in the following manner:
My dearest Rebecca,
There you are again — after sixteen long years — standing in the same light that once fell on a girl in her early teens and changed the entire course of my plain life.
The first time I saw you, I was completely undone. Love just happened in a lovely manner. The simplistic and angelic aura just spellbound me right that moment. The fountain of love and lovely feelings originated. I simply started counting you as a part of my rib. Even when you vanished ….., the feeling stayed behind like a faithful shadow, refusing to leave. The fire remains unextinguished.
As Mirza Ghalib puts it, “Love is not within one’s control …. it is a fire that cannot be lit, nor extinguished.”
This year, when I saw you once more, the restraint I placed on myself felt almost unbearable.
I wanted to cross the distance between us in a single step and say everything at once. But I could not. An invisible force halts me. Some invisible constraint held my tongue, and I chose silence instead.
Maybe love should not always be expressed to a beloved. Maybe unexpressed love is the safest, fairest and most intimate. I know — with a certainty that needs no proof — that you have carried the same hidden current all these years. Otherwise, you would have had someone to hold hands, a shoulder to rest on by now.
In fact, that would have been more relieving for me than to see you cherishing a moment. That would have given even more reasons to remain unmarried. Do not let the sun of your youth set before your very eyes. The dazzling beauty of yours must find its purpose.
As for me, I have decided to wait. Wait as long as it takes.
I wait for certainly, the right moment, not out of fear, but out of reverence.
I will wait as long as it takes, exactly the way Florentino Ariza waited for Fermina Daza through decades of cholera and ordinary life in Love in the Time of Cholera — patient, unchanged, writing letters in his heart that he never sent until the moment was finally, perfectly right.
And I will wait the way the memory of Rebecca lingers in Daphne du Maurier’s novel: not as a ghost that haunts, but as the quiet, constant presence that defines every other love that follows.
You have been my Rebecca all this time — the one no one else could ever replace, the one whose name alone still rearranges the air around me.
So I remain here, silent but not absent.
When the hour comes — whether tomorrow or years from now — I will speak every word I have kept safe for sixteen years. Until that day, know this: my love has not dimmed; it has only grown deeper, steadier, and more certain with every passing season.
Yours, always and already,
N.B. Any relevance is purely coincidental. I have just expressed the fatality of men in a fictional manner. True, that I lost myself to a ….
