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the more vulnerable when someone walks into our lives and triggers all that unsatisfied need.
The pull of unrequited love can stem from a longing for transcendence, a need to experience great, impractical feeling. So for some of us, moving beyond obsession may entail finding something or someone with a similar ineffable power.
They soon discovered that they were born on the same day, three hours apart, which Lina took as a sign that “there was something bigger at work”—they were meant to be together. She nursed that feeling for two years, despite the fact that Bartolo disappointed her again and again. When she and her daughter visited him in Italy, he became jealous of the four-year-old girl and kicked them out of his home. On a trip to Romania, he abandoned her after a disagreement and sent a text to let her know where he’d moved her luggage.
When Clara was a kindergartener, she loved Peanuts, a comic strip that is all about unrequited love. Charlie Brown once famously bemoaned, “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”
The strip links its characters in chains of unreturned adoration. Peppermint Patty loves Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown loves the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sally loves Linus, who loves his teacher, Miss Othmar. Lucy loves Schroeder, who wants nothing more than to play Beethoven on his toy piano.
But Lucy doesn’t leave. She kicks the piano, believing the instrument to be her rival, the only thing standing in the way of Schroeder’s love.
