I grew up in England and there was no shortage of unrequited love stories in the books I read and the movies I watched growing up. Sense and Sensibility Little Women, The Remains of the Day, then along came movies like Forest Gump, The Great Gatsby, oh and My Best Friends Wedding, now there’s a corker!
I always thought it was a very romantic notion, this “pure” love, and as a teenage girl, I fell for it. I watched the popular boy from afar thinking “one day he may notice me and then he’ll know we are meant to be together”. Forget the fact I was a geek with a bad haircut and it was highly unlikely that if he had noticed me he would have been interested in me anyway!
The truth is that unrequited love or “one-sided love” is a strange but inevitable part of life, the “unrequited” on one side, and the “rejector” on the other. However, when the notion is held on to in adult life, if we do not learn to move past it, it can be extraordinarily damaging, and I have since come to the conclusion that perhaps it is not “love” at all, it’s really just infatuation.
The myth, the legend
I was “in love” when I was in high school. He didn’t know it. I thought he was the cat’s meow. He didn’t know I existed, except when he needed help. I made myself available whenever he needed me to help him study for his exams. During those sessions, I would smile, laugh at every joke — no matter how inane — and commiserate on how misunderstood he was, always willing to spend my time convincing him that he could be so much more. Sound familiar?
Unrequited love is depicted in literature and movies as “pure” love, one that is noble, unselfish…and long-suffering. We cater to the others' needs, try to throw ourselves in their path as much as possible, hoping they notice us, and yet none of the trappings of a real relationship exist. Let’s face it. We are exalted ego boosters.
In the end, unrequited love becomes just a method for us to feel better in the face of perceived rejection. It assumes that the “rejector” will come to their senses eventually. Does that mean they have no sense, to begin with? That they are blind to our attributes and are just silly for not noticing? If so, is that really someone we want to be with? Someone who does not understand their own feelings and their own thoughts? Hmm, maybe they aren’t all we dreamed of after all.
The missed opportunities
I was so absorbed with my crush that I was blind to all other opportunities to meet boys or to develop my own emotional and psychological growth. I switched classes so I could be in the same class or have “spare” class time with him. I would be invited to go to parties and would only go if he was going to be there, then agonized over what to wear and how I would act when I saw him. Usually, he wouldn’t show up and I’d sit dejected in a corner somewhere. Ridiculous in retrospect.
Unrequited love is actually more in line with the definition of the obsessed, i.e. the stalker. A stalker is someone who “harasses” someone else with unwanted and obsessive attention, isn’t that what the unrequited do? The only difference is that when the “rejector” realizes we are obsessed they may give us just enough attention to keep us on the ropes.
We refer to it as and we know it as “leading someone on” or rather taking advantage of the obsessed. In the worst cases of unrequited love, the “rejector” becomes aware of the obsessive love that the other person feels — not like we try to hide it very well! — and either by being kind or by seeking to take advantage of it, leads us on. But we have to take responsibility for that too, because only we can allow them to manipulate us, to keep us on the “hook”, so it’s our own fault!
When we are so busy paying attention to the rejector we are blind to the others that are actually interested in us because our peripheral vision is turned off. We hold on to that unrequited love and miss other opportunities though real love is sometimes just on the periphery. Even if we think of the movie “In Her Shoes” with the storyline of the obsessive love for the slick guy, but the “nerdy” guy actually being right for her and in his own way being unrequited! We are the “rejector” to our own “unrequited”. It’s a vicious cycle.
The psychological damage
I have learned through the years I indulged in unrequited love that the damage we do to ourselves in believing that we have been consistently rejected is something we need to let go of, and only then can we come out of it with positivity and hope.
I was in love, yup, the real — I finally got what the music and movies were all about — kind of love. It was true love, for me and I believe it was true for him at the beginning. It fell apart, as all relationships do when the couple stops communicating, but he was my best friend, so it was additionally devastating to lose both my boyfriend and my best friend, but worse than losing him was holding on to the hope that we would return to each other eventually. I chose to become the unrequited for a short time.
Unrequited love is that much more devastating when we have experienced the beauty of love, but then the other person lets us go. This is the one-sided unrequited love that comes with its own special level of torture.
We are capable of torturing ourselves with the most devastating and devaluing assumptions. We are not attractive. We did something wrong. We are not worthy. And we hold on to the hope that one day they will come to their senses and more importantly, come back to us.
The statistics show that it is one in a thousand stories — nay, a million stories — where that is actually true and we hold on to the hope that we are that one in the one million that will get the true love back!
The voice in our head is a powerful one and with unrequited love, the damage can be everlasting. It demeans us, it makes us question our own desirability, and can prevent us from feeling the confidence we need to move on and meet new people. It is unnecessary and it is foolish.
In the end, I realized that if he wanted to be with me, he would be with me. He wasn’t. I also reframed the loss of him as a friend. He taught me what love could be like and that is something I am eternally grateful for. So I chose to move from being unrequited to be eternally grateful. No more long-suffering for me.
A different kind of love
I read The Four Agreements twenty years ago and come back to the learnings time and time again. And unrequited love falls firmly into the agreement — Don’t Make Assumptions.
A woman told me not too long ago that she was still in love with a mutual friend of ours. That she didn’t understand why they couldn’t be together. They had dated in the past, and now two years on they were best friends and loved spending time together, so she pined for him. The advice I gave her was to have a conversation with him. Tell him how she felt and ask him if there was a possibility to be together.
“Ask him. And then you know for sure. Then you can move on one way or another. If you don’t ask you will never know and it will haunt you forever. If you do ask, you will know, and if the answer is no, it will hurt, but you will finally be able to move on.”
It takes confidence and strength to ask for what you need, but if you don’t make assumptions and if you ask them directly, then you either get all you dreamed of and make it a reality, or you move on to create a new reality for your life.
The answer in this case — as is often the case in unrequited love when both parties are aware of it and openly discuss it — was “no, he didn’t feel that way about her”. So she moved cities and opened herself up to new experiences. I fear there is still a little hope there but she’s trying to move on.
More importantly though, by asking him directly she is able to walk away confident that she has done all she could to attain that love, and can feel infinitely stronger. She can walk away with her head held high, with confidence, feeling open — crucially open — to a new possibility of who she is and the love she can eventually find.
And that self-love is priceless.
