Unrequited love is a love which is not reciprocated, one-sided or more generally unequal, resulting in a yearning for more complete love.[1][2][3] Lovesickness is the resulting mental state.[2] This might occur in a context where little or no relationship exists between the participants (even as in parasocial love for a celebrity), or it might occur inside a relationship with unequal love, commitment or effort.[1][2][4] Unequal (unrequited) love is more common than equal love.[1] Reciprocal love is called "redamancy".[5]
Unrequited love generally pertains to the romantic, passionate, infatuated, obsessive or limerent variety of love (also called "being in love"): a state which is conceptualized as a motivation or drive.[3][4][6] This state is commonly distinguished from other types of love: companionate love (or attachment) and compassionate love (or agape).[7][6]
According to the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, the state of "being in love" is distinguishable from the many other uses of the word "love" (such as caring or concern), for: 'Affection and fondness have no "objective"; they simply exist as feelings in which you are disposed toward actions to which the recipient might or might not respond.'[8] The psychiatrist Eric Berne said in his 1970 book Sex in Human Loving that "Some say that one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner."[9]
According to legend, the Greek poet Sappho fell from a rock out of unrequited love for the ferryman Phaon. Painting by Ernst Stückelberg, 1897.
Route to unrequited love
According to Roy Baumeister, what makes a person desirable is a complex and highly personal mix of many qualities and traits. Falling for someone who is much more desirable than oneself—whether because of physical beauty or attributes like charm, intelligence, wit or status—Baumeister calls "prone to find [its] love unrequited" and states that such relationships will not last.[10]
"Platonic friendships provide a fertile soil for unrequited love."[11] Thus the object of unrequited love is often a friend or acquaintance, someone regularly encountered in the workplace, during the course of work, school or other activities involving large groups of people. This creates an awkward situation in which the admirer has difficulty in expressing their true feelings, a fear that revelation of feelings might invite rejection, cause embarrassment or might end all access to the beloved, as a romantic relationship may be inconsistent with the existing association.
Rejectors
"There are two bad sides to unrequited love, but only one is made familiar by our culture"[12]—that of the lover, not the rejector. In fact, research suggests that the object of unrequited affection experiences a variety of negative emotions exceeding those of the suitor, including anxiety, frustration, and guilt.[10] As Freud pointed out, "when a woman sues for love, to reject and refuse is a distressing part for a man to play".[13]
Advantages
Dante looks longingly at Beatrice Portinari (in yellow) as she passes by him with Lady Vanna (in red) in Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday
Unrequited love has long been depicted as noble, an unselfish and stoic willingness to accept suffering. Literary and artistic depictions of unrequited love may depend on assumptions of social distance that have less relevance in western, democratic societies with relatively high social mobility and less rigid codes of sexual fidelity. Nonetheless, the literary record suggests a degree of euphoria in the feelings associated with unrequited love, which has the advantage as well of carrying none of the responsibilities of mutual relationships: certainly, "rejection, apparent or real, may be the catalyst for inspired literary creation... 'the poetry of frustration'."[14]
Eric Berne considered that "the man who is loved by a woman is lucky indeed, but the one to be envied is he who loves, however little he gets in return. How much greater is Dante gazing at Beatrice than Beatrice walking by him in apparent disdain."[15]
"Remedies"
Roman poet Ovid in his Remedia Amoris "provides advice on how to overcome inappropriate or unrequited love. The solutions offered include travel, teetotalism, bucolic pursuits, and ironically, avoidance of love poets".[16]
Cultural examples
A wrapped, unopened Valentine's Day gift with heart-shaped helium balloons attached sits discarded in a dumpster.
Western
In the wake of his real-life experiences with Maud Gonne, W. B. Yeats wrote of those who "had read/All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing/Returned and yet unrequited love".[17]
According to Robert B. Pippin, Proust claimed that "the only successful (sustainable) love is unrequited love",[18] something which according to Pippin, "has been invoked as a figure for the condition of modernity itself".[19]
The comic strip Peanuts presents many examples. Some of it is based on creator Charles M. Schulz's love for Donna Mae Johnson, the inspiration for the strip's "little red-haired girl". Many of the characters are attracted to others who do not feel the same to them.
Eastern
The medieval Japanese poet Saigyō may have turned from samurai to monk because of unrequited love, one of his waka asking: "What turned me to wanting/to break with the world-bound life?/Maybe the one whose love/turned to loathing and who now joins with me in a different joy".[20] In other poems he wrote: "Alas, I'm foreordained to suffer, loving deep a heartless lass....Would I could know if there be such in far-off China!"[21]
Mural of a text message reading "I love you" and an ellipsis as a typing awareness indicator on the left.In China, passion tends to be associated not with happiness, but with sorrow and unrequited love.[22]
↑ 2.02.12.2Money 1997, p. 119, 132–133: "The English language lacked a noun singular for the state of being love smitten, or having fallen in love, until Dorothy Tennov (1979) coined the term, limerence, to fill the void. It is formally defined as follows:
limerence (adjective, limerent)
the personal experience of having fallen in love and of being irrationally and fixatedly love stricken or love smitten, irrespective of the degree to which one’s love is requited or unrequited.
[...] Unrequited love is a synonym for unrequited limerence. It leaves a person vulnerable to an attack of lovesickness. Lovesickness may be transitory or prolonged, and major or minor in degree. It may be brought on by a person's anticipatory uncertainty about getting or not getting a reciprocal response to his/her limerence. Lovesickness may be brought on also by unequal proportions of limerence, for example, 100:70 instead of 100:100. The most unequal match is 100:0, total rejection.The formal definition of lovesickness (Money, 1986) is as follows.
lovesickness
the personal experience and manifest expression of agony when the partner with whom one has fallen in love is a total mismatch whose response is indifference, or a partial mismatch whose reciprocity is incomplete, deficient, anomalous, or otherwise unsatisfactory."
↑ 3.03.1Baumeister & Wotman 1994, p. 6: "Unrequited love refers to romantic, passionate love that is felt by one person toward another person who feels substantially less attraction toward the lover. It is not necessary that the object of unrequited love be thoroughly indifferent (or be negative and hostile [...]), for as we will see many rejectors do feel some friendship and liking for their admirers. But the discrepancy between liking and loving is apparent to all, and people in love typically find it quite inadequate to hear that the other likes them but fails to love them. We shall also use the term 'love' broadly, referring to any strong romantic attraction."
↑"To love or be loved in vain: The trials and tribulations of unrequited love. In W. R. Cupach & B. H. Spitzberg (Eds.), The dark side of close relationships (pp. 307-326). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Carpenter, L. M. (1998)Spitzberg, p. 308
↑Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (London 1988) p. 9
