Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession

by Lisa A. Phillips

Unrequited love is love that is not yet returned. It is a caterpillar in a chrysalis, destined to transform into a butterfly and take flight.

The lyrics focus on her longing. Our heroine, like so many people consumed by a crush, never gets an answer to the question “Do you love me?” But the video my daughter and I watch on YouTube advances the story in keeping with the myth of perseverance.

Geeky Swift doesn’t just win her man—she makes him happier than he realized he could be.

And she overturns the faulty social order of high school, which dictates that the handsome jock will date the popular cheerleader, no matter what their true selves need.

The unrequited lover is the one who knows best, both for herself and for her unwitting beloved.

She held on to the fact that, earlier in their relationship, they had been so in love that he spoke of marrying her.

“I can’t sit there and act like it’s okay to not be in a relationship with someone I still love.”

“The seeker has a confirmation bias, looking for positive signs and discounting the negative ones,” Baumeister said. “If there’s ambivalence, it’s going to prolong the hope, because there are enough positives to seize on and overinterpret. The negatives you can brush aside.” Janey’s bond with her ex sporadically rewarded her desire for love, increasing his allure and spurring her to look for more. Behavioral psychologists call this “intermittent positive reinforcement.”

But in gambling and in love, this isn’t a satisfying way to live.

Whatever the case, the rejecter’s advantage seems unjust. He is getting what he wants.

And what a rejecter has felt—a lack of love—is precisely his crime.

We can insist, for instance, that Janey’s ex is wrong for leading her on with all his attention—a romantic sin. You are not supposed to lead people on and then push them away.

We have a very hard time shaking off the sense that a certain kind of attention must lead to romance. We take an early expression of interest as an inviolable truth. Nothing our beloved says later, including “I don’t love you,” can have the same power.

We don’t know whether we have grounds to be dissatisfied, because we have to consider what relationship expectations are acceptable.

Are daily phone calls a right you can claim after you’ve slept together? Or only after you’ve agreed to be exclusive?

The rejecter may not want you at all—or he may not want you back as much or in the same way.

Knowing what he had been through erased Sonya’s anger and amplified her feelings for him. “I felt like I wanted to take care of him,” she said.

Then he left and didn’t call.

She waited. Waiting for the phone call (or the text, or the email) is a mortifying cliché of unrequited love. So many of us have been there.

Sonya and Ryan were in a “reconnaissance dance”—the exploratory stage in the formation of a relationship. In this stage, potential couples or friends sample each other’s company in an effort to decide whether they want to be together.

The decision is based in part on an unstated cost-benefit calculation: what the relationship will give versus what it will take away.

She also bestowed value on him. In loving him, she made him valuable beyond his objective appraised qualities.

bestowing value isn’t evidence-based. It’s more closely linked to the need for attachment, which isn’t always rationally expressed.

For most people, falling in love is something the...

Chances are that Ryan and his ilk—The Ones Who Do Not Call—are having a very different experience of the reconnaissance dance. They are conductin...

As he got to know her better, he realized that she wasn’t the beautiful heroine he’d imagined. He saw her ongoing vulnerability and was frightened by what he perceived as her neediness. He told me he realized that he could not be her “knight in shining armor.” The cost-benefit analysis he conducted no longer tipped in her favor.

He began to show up late for dates, or not at all, until she called him out on his rudeness and ended the relationship. Later, she tried frantically to get him back, distraught that a man she’d let herself trust had been so callous with her.

He said that actually confessing how he really felt would have been “too emotional, too time-consuming,” and he couldn’t handle it.

Lorne’s story is unsettling, not just because of how cowardly he was but also because there seems to be no way he could avoid being cowardly. The woman he was involved with deserved the love of a supportive man, but Lorne didn’t have it in him to be that man.

The answer to “Why didn’t you call me?” was belated but clear: He didn’t want to continue what they’d started.

He made a confession quite similar to the one Janey’s ex had made, admitting to his own preoccupation with The One Who Slipped Away: Just before his accident, he’d started to have strong feelings for a girl from his hometown.

He was getting over her, and that was why he couldn’t have a relationship with Sonya.

The rejecter doesn’t have to be a villain, or a broken soul who needs fixing, for the unwanted woman to face her real challenge: coping with the fact that she’s not getting what she wants.

In the simplest terms, she has a clear goal, and she’s doing what people working toward important goals do. They ponder and strategize. They face obstacles and try to remain patient. They take encouragement from signs of progress. They problem-solve. These qualities of perseverance are valued in most other areas of life. If we believe a goal is possible to achieve and we want it badly enough, we’ll put in the effort over time to make it happen.

“It’s a paradox in that we’re being motivated toward something that’s not likely to be successful,” Arthur Aron said. “You maintain a desire for something you don’t expect to get. It’s painful, and the more you try, the more painful it is.”

The goal-linking theory helps explain why the script of unrequited love holds so much sway over the unwanted woman, even when it’s getting her nowhere. Giving up on the beloved can feel like giving up on her most fundamental desires and dreams.

“Rejection can be useful if a person can reflect on it,” said Jacqueline Wright, an Atlanta-based Jungian analyst. “For example, what expectations did we have about the relationship? What unrealistic beliefs did we have about ourselves and the other person?

Even if we can’t stop our longing, we can consider using the urge to persevere in another way: to better understand ourselves. What does the beloved mean to us? What ideas, needs, or dreams have we cast upon him? Then we might begin to understand what it is we’re chasing.

She grew up in a traditional Catholic household. Her mother always told her to wait for a man to choose her. “Let them come to you,” she used to say.

She shrugged off any doubts she may have had. Johnny had chosen her. She was ready to be chosen, and that was that.

Sex—which he seemed to want all the time—lost its appeal. She often endured it by fantasizing about other men.

For six months, they saw each other regularly. She usually initiated their outings. “I thought I had to be doubly aggressive because this guy was so passive and shy,” she said.

“I called him up. I thought, ‘This is great.’ It was a new experience for me to ask someone out. I was having the time of my life.”

“I thought, I never pursued a guy before in my life! And maybe that’s why I never got the guy I wanted.”

She gradually realized he was letting her know that he didn’t want to be intimate with her again.

She didn’t contact him for four months. She cried so much she thought she was going crazy. “I thought, ‘I have to see Scott, because I have a feeling that will make me feel better.’”

After spending so many years with a husband she was not compatible with, she wanted to be with someone who shared her values. She wanted a man she didn’t feel she had to chastise all the time. These aims got linked in her mind to Scott.

Her life had been marked irrevocably by the mandate that she wait for a man to “come to her” first. The man who did wasn’t the right man for her. She had long berated herself for letting that happen.

It took her a long time to realize he wasn’t choosing her in return. The pride of having spent time with a man she really wanted is mingled with the pain of facing his rejection. “I did everything I could, assuming he’d fall in love with me,” she said. “I gave him too much. I didn’t leave him any room.”

Maria has come to understand that having choices in love doesn’t mean she has to pursue them so single-mindedly. She also doesn’t need to abandon the goal of real choice in relationships. She doesn’t need to go back to feeling like the young woman she was forty years ago, ready to hand her destiny to the next man who chooses her.