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Unrequited love

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Unrequited love is love that is not reciprocated, even though reciprocation is deeply desired. This can lead to feelings such as depression, anxiety, and mood swings such as swift changes between depression and euphoria.

Contents

Overview

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. 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.

Being in unrequited love is torturous, but 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.

Although unrequited love can last a very long time—many years, or even decades—the lover's feelings usually reach a breaking point as they continue to deepen. The love typically ends either when the lover receives reciprocation from the loved, the feelings subside, the lover acknowledges that their feelings will never be returned, or the lover channels their devotion towards another, more reciprocative object.

In literature

Perhaps the most famous example 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.

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:

"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 touches on the topic, in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream. 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.

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 the Opera Ghost 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 Turgeniev.

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.

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.

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:

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

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". 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 noticebly Boston Rose.

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. 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 band 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.

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,

"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 get women easily, rapper Slug from Atmosphere tells it how it is to suffer from unrequited love, not only from one individual, but from an entire ilk. He states in ''Like Today,
"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.

A great example of unrequited love is in the song "Auf Achse" by Franz Ferdinand, especially in the opening four lines: 

"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."




Other songs about unrequited love include:





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.  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.


In 1995, very early in the days of the World Wide Web, Joe Loong created a satirical website called "Joelogon's Foolproof Guide to Making Any Woman Your Platonic Friend".  The site features sarcastic and bitter commentary about experiences in which one party wishes for a romantic relationship, but the other party wants to "just be friends".  Before long, Joe began posting comments and stories from visitors to the site.  The stories span the entire "sweet" to "creepy" range, and can be a great source of commiseration and perspective for those who are trying to cope with unrequited love.



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See also





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