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Unrequited love

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Part of a series on Love
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Unrequited love is love that is not reciprocated, even though reciprocation is usually deeply desired. This can lead to feelings such as depression, anxiety, and mood swings such as swift changes between depression and euphoria. The expression is usually used in a negative sense, but even today there are many people who unknowingly live in or even purposely strive for a frame of mind perhaps best described by that of minnesingers and troubadours in general.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Falling in love produces a very different hormonal and psychological state than that of an established, mature love, even when such an older love is very happy and fulfilling. Many people crave this feeling so badly that they repeatedly look for new objects of infatuation and even break off old relations when this causes them great emotional trauma (often repressed). Many accidentally discover the much less traumatic ways of attaining the "high" they crave by flirting or by looking for an unattainable object of love. Especially poets and other artists often do this deliberately — in fact, many are not able to be productive otherwise — and they often know that this way of loving and living was much more common in past centuries.

For probably most people, however, being in unrequited love is a tortuous experience. For them too, however, it can simultaneously be a source of great joy, sometimes providing the lover a sense of fulfillment for having somebody to love, even though that love is not returned. The lover may feel this satisfaction is worth the emotional distress they must suffer. They may prefer to stay in love rather than move on. However, for the majority it can be a very frustrating and upsetting situation to be in, and it happens more in the teenager when the person becomes extremely infatuated with someone who doesn't like them back or they are stuck and don't know what to do about it.

[edit] Outcomes

When you tell your partner about your unrequited love, one (or more) of the following are likely to happen:<ref>"Dave answers your questions", MSN Dating & Personals</ref>

  • You become closer
  • The status quo remains the same
  • There will be awkwardness in the beginning but things return to normal
  • The friendship ends
  • Things become extremely awkward
  • Love turns to hate, and hate turns to depression

Unrequited love may last a very long time, as long as a few decades. <ref>"Can unrequited love be real?", Shaadibliss.com</ref>(dubious; discuss) But the lover's feelings usually reach a breaking point and the love ends. The following are reasons why unrequited love may end.

  • The lover receives reciprocation from the loved
  • The feelings subside
  • The lover acknowledges that their feelings will never be returned
  • The lover channels their devotion towards another person
  • Suicide of lover

Unrequited love can result in obsessive behavior such as stalking and even transform into hostility toward the object of desire if the love is rejected, though this behaviour really is more of an exceptionality than the norm, and is usually rooted in much deeper problems than a broken heart. <ref>"Crazed stalker almost broke me", Michael Sheather (Woman's Day, 3 May 1999)</ref> These sorts of behavior can lead the afflicted person to be seen as "perverted" or to a lesser extent, simply "creepy". Conversely, unrequited love has also been the inspiration for and topic of many great works of art. Such works have brought hope and inspiration to the lovelorn and romantically inclined for centuries. Whether a particular case of unrequited love is interpreted by an observer (or by the love's object) as being sweet or creepy is a complex and subjective issue.

There is a movement towards making people aware of this as being an illness which leads to many people committing suicide.<ref>"Unrequited love can be a killer", BBC News (Feb 6, 2005)</ref>

[edit] In literature

Perhaps the most famous example in Western culture of unrequited love is that of Dante Alighieri for Beatrice Portinari, with whom he apparently spoke only twice in his life, the first time when he was nine years old and she was eight. Although both went on to marry other people, Dante nevertheless regarded Beatrice as the great love of his life and his "muse" and made her the guide to Heaven in his work The Divine Comedy. Additionally, all of the examples in Dante's manual for poets, La Vita Nuova, are about his love for Beatrice. The prose which surrounds the examples further tells the story of his lifelong devotion to her.

The creator of the Italian or Petrarchian sonnet, Petrarch, too, is famous for his love for the lady Laura. He is best remembered for the sonnets he wrote her, despite her marriage to another man.

Still earlier is the Roman elegiac poets, in which unrequited love is a common theme. Catullus is most famous for his love affair with Lesbia, in which around 50 epigrams display the full circle of emotion in an ultimately one-sided relationship. Throughout, Catullus realises he must break free, but lacks the will to do so.

Another classic example of unrequited love in literature is the romance between Don Quixote and Dulcinea in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Don Quixote, who believes he is a knight, imagines that he serves a noblewoman named Dulcinea. Unfortunately, the object of his desire is actually an uncomely peasant in his hometown, and his love for her is not returned. Her name has come to be a metaphor for unrequited love, in the sense, "That woman is my Dulcinea."

Several years later, the poet Abraham Cowley wrote of the emotion[citation needed]:

"A mighty pain to love it is,
And 'tis a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain."

At around the same time as Don Quixote, Shakespeare touched on the topic, in his plays A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night. A more threatening unrequited lover, Roderigo, is shown in Othello. The classic French play "Cyrano de Bergerac", by Edmond Rostand, is about a brilliant swordsman and poet who is in unrequited love with his cousin for decades. Also, French literary author Victor Hugo's two most famous works' Notre-Dame-de-Paris and Les Misérables feature characters (namely those of, from Notre-Dame-de-Paris; Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Frollo and Gringoire) and the character of Eponine, the street-waif who later sacrifices her life to save the man she loves, from Les Misérables.[citation needed]

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the beginnings of romanticism. Unrequited love combines two main themes in romanticism: Weltschmerz and love.

Gaston Leroux's character Erik from The Phantom of the Opera, who was born hideously deformed (said to have looked like a 'Living Corpse') and yet whom falls for the young soprano Christine Daaé who, it turns out, also loves another man—the Viscount Raoul de Chagny. Stendhal writes in a more clinical manner in On Love.

Unrequited love is the most potent theme in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, manifested mostly in the character of Pip. Additionally, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, contains an unrequited love subplot: the efforts of Mr. Hargrave to win Helen Graham. Charlotte Brontë's Villette describes isolation and unrequited love.

The Slovene poet France Prešeren wrote a devastatingly beautiful sonnet cycle dedicated to his unhappy love for Julija Primic.

In Russian literature, among innumerable examples, one could mention First Love, by Turgenev.

T.S. Eliot writes of the unrequited love of Prufrock in a number of his poems preceding The Waste Land, in an ultimately very depressive and negative style.[citation needed]F. Scott Fitzgerald offers his ideas on unrequited love in The Great Gatsby, wherein the main character Jay Gatsby builds wealth through alcohol smuggling during prohibition to try and lure back his one time lover Daisy Buchanan. However, her shallowness, while allowing physical consummation does not provide the emotional security that Gatsby is seeking.

Carl Sandburg treats the theme of unrequited love with minimalist elegance in poems from his 1963 book, Honey and Salt. In the poem, "Little Word, Little White Bird", the narrator asks, "Love, can it hit one without hitting two and leave the one lost and groping?" And in the poem, Offering and Rebuff, the rebuffer says to the one professing his love, "Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely...Love is a fool star."[citation needed]

And then, of course, there is Charles Schulz; his Peanuts character Charlie Brown suffers from unrequited love for the Little Red-Haired Girl, as does Lucy van Pelt for Schroeder, Sally Brown for Linus van Pelt, and Linus for his teacher Ms. Othmar. Charlie Brown famously notes in one strip[citation needed]:

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."

[edit] In music

Unrequited love has been a topic used repeatedly by musicians for decades. Blues artists incorporated it heavily; it is the topic of B.B. King's "Lucille" and "The Thrill is Gone," Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" and many early and later blues songs, including Axella Johannesson's more recent "The Unrequited Blues". Eric Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos even devoted a whole album to the topic, Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, which included such famous songs as "Layla" and "Bell Bottom Blues".[citation needed] Many Rock n' Roll musicians also based songs on unrequited love; from The Eagles all the way to Led Zeppelin, almost every classic rock band has at least one song on the topic. The exact term may be found in the lyrics of Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow 1995 song "Insatiable", among others. It is also heard in many of the songs by The Wolfe Tones, most noticeably Boston Rose.

The Doobie Brothers hit it on the head with "What a Fool Believes" which posits that for some, a fantasy, even an unrequited one, is perferrable to lonelyness.

Modern Rock musicians such as Weezer, Coldplay (notably the song "Shiver") and The Killers are some of the many who still continue this trend today. U2's tome on unrequited love, "All I Want is You," was accompanied by a dramatic music video recounting the tale of a circus troupe where a dwarf is in love with a trapeze artist, and perhaps even dies trying to impress her.

Although most rap and hip hop artists rarely dabble with such a subject, many R&B artists such as Usher and R. Kelly have written songs about it. The English singer Aqualung has also written a song, entitled, "Strange and Beautiful", which was featured in the sound-track to the 2004 film Wicker Park, in which the singer spends much of their life secretly in love with an unspecified person, eventually resolving to quietly prove his or her affections in the hopes of reciprocation.[citation needed]

In the musical Les Miserables, based on the novel of the same name, one of the most well-known songs is "On My Own", a vivid account of the crushing loneliness felt by unrequited lovers. In this song Eponine describes the division of her world between her fantasies of life with Marius and the reality of his disinterest. Such fantasies are a common, if not integral component of an unrequited love affair. She is painfully aware that she is marginal in Marius' life, singing[citation needed],

"Without him
The world around me changes
The trees are bare and everywhere
The streets are full of strangers"

And, later, contrasting this with,

"Without me
His world would go on turning
A world that's full of happiness
That I have never known"

Despite most rappers portraying themselves as being able to attract women easily, rapper Slug from Atmosphere recounts suffering from unrequited love, not only from one individual, but from an entire ilk. He states in Like Today,[citation needed]

"from Anne Landers, to Ani DiFranco to Orphan Annie
I love all women, but most of them just can't stand me."

One of the most famous songs dealing with unrequited love is the 1980 George Jones smash hit "He Stopped Loving Her Today". The song was about a man who had an unrequited love for a woman for many years until his death. The moment he died is the moment he stopped loving her.

The song "Auf Achse" by Franz Ferdinand expresses many of the feelings held by sufferers of unrequited love, especially in the opening four lines[citation needed]:

"You see her, you can't touch her.
You hear her, you can't hold her.
You want her, you can't have her.
You want to, but she won't let you."

A most recent venture into the unrequited love movement is the Irish singer/songwriter Damien Rice. Many of his songs are about the daughter of his clarinet teacher. I Remember, The Blower's Daughter, The Blower's Daughter Part 2, and Accidental Babies are all about the girl in question. Lyrics consist of "The pillow in your pillowcase is easier to touch", "Do you cum? Together ever with him? Is he dark enough, enough to see your light?" and "This has got to die, this has got to stop, this has got to lie down, there's someone else on top. You can keep me pinned, it's easier to tease, but you can't paint an elephant, quite as good as she."[citation needed]Symphonie Fantastique (1830) by Romantic composer Hector Berlioz is one example of a classical work about unrequited love.

Other songs about unrequited love include[citation needed]:

[edit] On the web

The website eCRUSH, as well as other similar services, offers to help the love-shy initiate romantic relationships without fear of unrequited love.[citation needed] It does this by adding a layer of anonymity to the process of finding out whether the object of the user's crush is also interested in him or her. In practice, however, the process operates somewhat like a chain letter with the purpose of driving large numbers of visitors to the website. The veracity of "matches" found by the site is dependent on all users entering the addresses of people they are interested in, rather than trying to guess who is interested in them.

[edit] Books

  • Loves me, loves me not: the ethics of unrequited love / Laura Smit., 2005
  • The handbook of sexuality in close relationships / John H Harvey., 2004
  • The Genesis of sex: sexual relationships in the first book of the Bible / O Palmer Robertson., 2002
  • Interpersonal rejection / Mark R Leary, 2001
  • The dark side of close relationships / Brian H Spitzberg., 1998
  • Breaking hearts: the two sides of unrequited love / Baumeister, Roy., 1992

[edit] See also

[edit] External Links

[edit] References

<references/>

fr:Amour non partagé

ru:Неразделённая любовь tr:Karşılıksız aşk zh:暗戀

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