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But as the months passed and he didn’t come around, something inside me shifted. My unrequited love became obsessive.
Though unrequited love can get out of hand, it doesn’t have to.
And if we can gain enough distance from the pull of obsession to be able to understand it, unrequited love can be a highly meaningful state of mind, offering us insights into what we really want in life and love. Almost inevitably, it’s not the person we’ve been fixated on.
Unrequited love isn’t sensible, obedient, or practical. It doesn’t follow the rules.
We’re far more comfortable, and, historically, more familiar with the idea of women as the objects of desire and pursuit.
Self-help books advise women to yield to the fundamental male need to chase if they wish to find a committed mate. To win at love, women are supposed to make men feel as if t...
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cousin by marriage, rejected his affection. When men become aggressive and invasive in their pursuit of unrequited love, we don’t mock them. We fear them, and we take action.
at some point, were too consumed by unrequited love to just “get over it.” Some kept their feelings quiet, while some openly courted and pleaded. Some had a big crush that energized and inspired them. Others became deflated.
Most eventually came to understand themselves better. Several felt their obsession led them to make major changes in their lives.
the importance of listening to unrequited love and seeking out its many possible meanings.
What are we protesting? In other words, what is it that we’re really yearning for?
Pop superstar Lady Gaga once told Rolling Stone magazine that her yearning for a heavy-metal drummer who rejected her was key to her rise to success. Losing him, she said, “made me into a fighter.”
How could rejection in love transform us so radically?
Unrequited explores the consequences and possible meanings of our feelings and actions. And it offers new possibilities for our tortured hearts. 1 Do You Love Me?
I chose B. to love next, and I chose him specifically because he was not available. I was wounded, I told myself, and not at all ready to date again. The best remedy might be to spend time with a man who was not free to love me back.
In ancient Egypt, the hieroglyphic sign for love meant “a long desire.” The state of not having, though on its surface an anathema in our rapacious consumer culture, is truly the essence of narrative.
When it hurts so bad / Why’s it feel so good?
They spend an evening together, both knowing that the night will conclude with lovemaking.
But Madame de T. persists in delaying the act. She makes small talk, she becomes angry. She walks with him through her courtyards and gardens, discussing her philosophy of love, sex, and fidelity.
The conversation creates tension and suspense, all in the service of, as Kundera puts it, “protecting love” and turning desire int...
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His unrequited love wasn’t really about a flesh-and-blood person. It was about devotion to an ideal, a way to glimpse the transcendent.
It is much more about the lover than it is about the beloved.
It may feel submissive, but it is also egocentric—all about what extreme feeling for another can do to transform the self.
absence fueled his longing and imagination.
“Everything is new, everything is alive, everything breathes the most passionate interest.” Love, he believed, allows you to connect more deeply with all that is beautiful in the arts, nature, and human emotion.
The girl who ‘crystallizes over her embroidery’ is a target for pity. The man who crystallizes on the back of his arching horse is an object of admiration. The girl is a fool; the man a tragic hero.”
Modesty was the “mother of love” and the source of what he perceived as a woman’s ultimate power: to inspire a torrent of male feeling.
A woman’s yearning may be as strong as a man’s, but Stendhal did not believe she should reveal it to anyone other than her closest confidantes.
I want, no matter what I actually do (or don’t do) to get what I want. That selfishness is exactly what permits those torrents of feeling, the brilliance of perception Stendhal described. It makes possible the privilege of unrequited love: the assertion of the self through the idea of the beloved.
In the first swell of attraction, we are all unrequited lovers, uncertain whether our feelings will be returned. In this uncertainty, we give tremendous power to the beloved. Our feeling for him unifies our lives, defines us, infuses our view of the world.
Social psychologist Sharon Brehm calls passionate love a force that gives us the capacity to imagine a “future state of perfect happiness.” When we dream of uniting with our beloved, we dream of an emotional utopia. We dream that love will complete us.
Thus did life’s quest become a reunion with the missing other half—a dream of oneness through love that emerges in some form across world cultures and religions.
Unsatisfied desire allows us to imagine we have found the one who will make us whole, because we haven’t yet tested the fit. The not yet relationship becomes strangely comfortable, at least compared to the risk of finding out your beloved’s half-self won’t conform to your own.
After the months of waiting, he was barely giving her enough time for a decent date, much less the long romantic evening she’d been hoping for.
They parted ways before his meeting without making any plans for later that night or the next day. She went home in tears.
Who was this man who wanted to relate to her only from afar, through his laptop screen?
“She always says, don’t sleep with a man for a few dates. Spend time getting to know him, so you won’t get hurt if it doesn’t work out. That’s what we had. I never slept with him, but the effect was the same. I still got hurt.”
Theresa had felt the verbal and written exchanges—all the sharing and confiding they’d done—constituted real intimacy, leading up to a deeper connection in person. Now she had to “change her definition of intimacy.” For real intimacy to begin, she decided, a man had to do things for you. He had to deliver his presence.
Theresa was becoming everyone’s poster child for the Single Girl Who Needed Guidance. She was pushing forty and still committing our era’s worst sin: wasting time on yearning.
Chemistry.com, an online dating site that uses a personality test (designed by biological anthropologist Helen Fisher) to connect people by personality type and neurochemical compatibility.
What Theresa told me was that the emails she received from Russell spurred her imagination, just as reading always had. “I lived in books when I was a kid,” she said. “I have an excessive capacity to take fantasy over reality, to like the world of images and books and ideas more than the real world.”
When we’re caught up in unsatisfied desire, we can write the story of our love and, for a time, control it. This is fundamentally a creative act, often full of pleasure at first. We can be self-centered in a way that’s impossible in mutual love. The situation is emotionally risky, because it’s all about yearning to be together—yet being together means facing reality, which will probably fall short of the self-centered fantasy. But does that mean the fantasy has no meaning or purpose?
The image brought to mind a clandestine meeting with a paramour. However, she was alone, and it was only her thoughts that were taboo.
The friendship doesn’t end, but the air around it changes. The boundaries become clear and painful, thwarting the earlier exuberance. She tends to choose people who won’t reciprocate.
When I asked her why, with a husband she loves, she keeps opening herself up to these cycles of love and hurt and unsatisfied desire, she said it might be because of her father, whose love she never felt secure in.
There was another possible reason, a more existential one. “It’s about the reality of our aloneness,” she told me. “Ultimately, we all die alone. And at heart I’m a lonely person in the sense that even though I surround myself with lots of people and friends, I recognize that I’m alone, and that sense of isolation is hard for me.”
there’s a part of me that craves nothing but the unity, nothing but the whole. Nothing separate. Nothing off limits, nothing spoken but the truth.”
As for many unrequited lovers, her fixation on her beloveds is about a need inside her—a need to stay in touch with the dream of perfect unity with another.
This view is understandable and common. But it ignores the value of the emotional honesty of allowing yourself to feel love, even when it can’t be returned.
I admired Katherine for not pretending the pain of aloneness didn’t exist—an angst most of us try to keep buried. Katherine wasn’t shut down, huddled into her marriage as if it were the be-all and end-all of intimacy and addressed all of her emotional needs.
