Physics:Unrequited love

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Short description: Love that is not reciprocated
According to legend, the Greek poet Sappho fell from a rock out of unrequited love for the ferryman Phaon. Painting by Ernst Stückelberg, 1897.
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Echo and Narcissus (1903) by John William Waterhouse. The nymph Echo pines for Narcissus, who loves only his own reflection.

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] This might occur inside a relationship with unequal love, commitment, or effort between partners, or it might occur in a context where little or no relationship exists between the participants (even as in parasocial love for a celebrity).[1][2][4] Lovesickness is the resulting mental state.[2][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] Reciprocal love is called "redamancy".[8]

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."[9] The psychiatrist Eric Berne wrote that "Some say one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner."[10]

Unequal (unrequited) love is more common than equal love, according to a study of students.[1] In the ideal scenario, passionate or romantic love would progress with two people meeting, and developing a mutual attraction. This would culminate in a sudden rush of emotion, the escalation of intimacy and commitment, and increasingly more time spent together. However, this does not always happen, and often intense romantic love is one-sided.[11][12]

Interdependence

Rather than being a specific emotion itself, romantic love is believed to be a motivation or drive which elicits different emotions depending on the situation: positive feelings when things go well, and negative feelings when awry.[4][13][14] Reciprocated love may elicit feelings of joy, ecstasy, or fulfillment, for example, but unrequited love may elicit feelings of sadness, anxiety, or despair.[4][15]

The feeling of romantic love may also be either pleasant or unpleasant, regardless of the intensity level.[16][17] One of Dorothy Tennov's interview participants recalls being in love this way: "When I felt [Barry] loved me, I was intensely in love and deliriously happy; when he seemed rejecting, I was still intensely in love, only miserable beyond words."[17]

It is useful then to think of unrequited love in terms of interdependence theory, because the emotions felt and other outcomes are contingent on the actions of the people involved: the would-be lover's experience depends on the actions of the target of their love (the rejector), and vice versa.[18][19]

Among theorists of love, different perspectives have been given on whether the giving or receiving of love is more important. For example, Erich Fromm emphasized the giving and "the art of loving" as essential to happiness, whereas Carl Rogers emphasized the receiving of unconditional positive regard. Experiences of unrequited love, however, support the idea that neither giving nor receiving by itself is sufficient; rather, the mutual experience of reciprocated love is required for happiness.[20]

Prevalence

Unrequited love is common among young adults.[1] A study by Roy Baumeister and Sarah Stillwell found that 92.8% of participants reported at least one "powerful or moderate" experience of unrequited love in the past 5 years.[18] A different study found 63% had a "huge crush" at least once in the past 2 years (but not letting the person know), and unrequited love was four times more frequent than equal love.[1]

Another study found that 20% had experienced unrequited love more than 5 times, according to a definition that "When one is experiencing this emotion, it has been described as having one’s emotions on a roller coaster, finding it difficult to concentrate, and thinking constantly about the person with whom you are in love. The person is said to have the power to produce extreme highs and lows of emotion in you, depending on how he or she acts towards you."[21]

Reasons for unrequited love

Some people have a tendency to fall in love with people who are much more desirable than themselves, so their love tends to be unrequited; Roy Baumeister calls this kind of mismatch "falling upward".[22][20] Research shows that relationships tend to be successful when the couple is more or less even in attractiveness, so Baumeister suggests that a mismatched relationship may be doomed.[22] According to the "matching hypothesis", while a person might prefer a relationship with an extremely attractive person, they would rather not run the risk of rejection either, so relationships tend to be limited to partners who are similarly attractive.[23][18][1]

Unrequited love may find fertile ground to blossom in platonic friendships. Intimacy is the core of a love relationship, but the feelings may grow in only one person.[20][18][22][24] Another type of scenario where unrequited love may occur is the early stage of a romantic relationship, where after dating for a time, one person's feelings begin to flourish, while the other wishes to discontinue the relation. This may be confusing for both parties, because of the reinforcement from initial reciprocation, and because rejectors may lack insight into their absence of growing desire despite some initial interest.[20]

Those with an anxious attachment style are slightly more prone to unrequited love than other attachment styles, and their fear of abandonment can also drive people away.[22][24]

Another general factor is the misreading of the beloved's nonverbal communications, mixed messages or other responses.[18][25][24] Such misreadings are believed to create a partial reinforcement schedule which makes the feeling difficult to extinguish, prolonging the duration.[24][25]

Self-expansion

The self-expansion model of interpersonal relationships is a variant of the reward theory of attraction which proposes that people have a basic motivation to expand their physical influence, cognitive complexity, social or bodily identity, and self-awareness, and that the psychological reward from falling in love is whatever creates this "expansion of the self".[26][27] Relationships are an important area for self-expansion, via a process called "inclusion of the other in the self", where aspects of a partner (e.g. traits, skills, attitudes, resources, abilities, and worldviews) are incorporated into one's own self concept.[28][29]

The theory is used to explain unrequited love, because falling in love may be a desirable experience even when no relationship occurs. Unrequited love may occur then if the reward from self-expansion exceeds the relative probability of reciprocation.[26][24]

Readiness

This section is an excerpt from Reward theory of attraction § Readiness[ edit ]

Rejectors

Roy Baumeister has observed an important difference in the possible outcomes of unrequited love, when analyzing the perspectives of the would-be lover and rejector separately. Even though in some cases, the would-be lover can experience more intense suffering than the rejector is likely to experience, the possible outcomes for the would-be lover also include the opposite extreme: the mutual bliss of living happily ever after, if love was reciprocated. By comparison, the possible outcomes for the rejector are all bad, assuming he or she cannot come to love the other. Baumeister calls the situation a "high-stakes gamble to the would-be lover", but a "no-win situation for the rejector".[18]

While the perspective of the would-be lover is made familiar by our culture through popular media, the rejector's side is largely ignored, incomplete, or inaccurate.[30] In fact, Baumeister's research found that an object of unrequited desire experiences unpleasant emotions as well—like anxiety, frustration, and guilt—and these were mentioned about a third more often in accounts by rejectors than pursuers.[22][18]

Would-be lovers and rejectors often perpetuate the situation with a "conspiracy of silence", because both parties want to avoid the painful communication. Would-be lovers do not want to hear the rejection, and rejectors do not want to cause the would-be lover to suffer. As a result, rejectors tend to soften the message with compliments or only vague reasoning, and would-be lovers tend to perceive the message as unserious.[31] Dorothy Tennov advocates in her discussion of limerence that an individual who is the object of such an unwanted attraction ought to give the clearest possible rejection, rather than ambiguities such as "I like you as a friend, but...".[32]

Consequences

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

Rejection has been the inspiration behind famous literary creations, such as Astrophil and Stella (Sir Philip Sidney), Amoretti (Edmund Spenser), and many of Shakespeare's sonnets.[33] Maurice Evans, a professor at the University of Exeter, calls such works "poetry of frustration".[33][34]

Eric Berne opined 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."[35] Dante's lifelong unrequited love for Beatrice is considered a historical example of limerence, in which the obsessed individual spends much of their time fantasizing about the love object.[36][37]

Participants in Baumeister's study claimed to have learned more about themselves from their experience with unrequited love, but this appears to have been largely about the futility of one-sided passion, with a new caution formed about love and relationships.[38]

Disadvantages

Apollo and Daphne, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, depicts Daphne turning into a tree to escape the pursuit of Apollo, after an arrow shot by Eros made him fall in love with her[39][40]

Unrequited love can be destructive to the emotional well-being of the people involved, and to the interpersonal bond between them.[38]

One consequence of unrequited love would be attempted suicide on the part of the lover.[41] In Dorothy Tennov's research survey on being in love,[42] half of an apparently normal group of college students reported depression about a love affair, 42% had been severely depressed, and almost a third were often depressed; 17% had often thought of committing suicide, and 11% (more than 1 in 10) claimed to have seriously attempted suicide.[43] Unrequited love has been described as a clinical syndrome.[24]

Baumeister's findings indicated that rejectors tended to look back with a desire to erase the incident from their memories; in many cases, they had lost a special friendship.[44] (By comparison, would-be lovers actually tended to look back with a fondness on the memories—what Baumeister calls "the irony of retrospect".)[45]

Stalking is another possible consequence of unrequited love.[46][1] A 1999 study found that stalkers who were pursuing a relationship with their victim could be categorized as being either ex-partners, delusional (erotomanic or otherwise), socially or intellectually incompetent, and having personality disorders.[47] A preoccupation with the fantasy of a special and unique relationship with the object of one's love is normal in the early part of romance or infatuation; however, in the case of the stalker, where pathological narcissism is an issue, the humiliation of rejection is expressed through rage and pursuit of the victim.[48]

According to J. Reid Meloy, "Violent behavior toward self or others as the denoument of unrequited love is as old as antiquity."[49]

Remedies

A wrapped, unopened Valentine's Day gift with heart-shaped balloons discarded in a dumpster

Based on the addiction theory of romantic love, Helen Fisher and colleagues recommend that rejected lovers remove all reminders of their beloved, such as letters or photos, and avoid contact with the rejecting partner. Reminders can cause cravings which prolong recovery. They also suggest that positive contact with friends could reduce cravings. Rejected lovers should stay busy to distract themselves, and engage in self-expanding activities.[50]

In Remedia Amoris (c. 1 CE), the Roman poet Ovid gave advice on how to remedy unrequited love.[51][5] Ovid's suggestions include travel, teetotalism, bucolic pursuits, and avoiding love poets.[51]

Neuroscience

This section is an excerpt from Biology of romantic love § Rejection[ edit ]
This section is an excerpt from Biology of romantic love § Rejected lovers[ edit ]

Cultural references

The Rose of the World

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.

Mural of a text message reading "I love you" and an ellipsis as a typing awareness indicator on the left

Western

  • Unrequited love is one theme explored by the comic strip Peanuts. Charlie Brown's unrequited crush on the "little red-haired girl" was inspired by Peanuts' creator Charles M. Schulz's own unrequited love for a woman named Donna Mae Johnson. Schultz drew cartoons in her appointment books every morning so she would think of him; however, she chose another man.[52]
  • William Yeats' unrequited love for Maud Gonne was the inspiration for many of his poems.[53][54][55] Gonne is reported to have told Yeats that "you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that. [...] Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you."[54]
  • Unrequited love is a central theme in Remembrance of Things Past, a novel by Proust.[56] According to Robert Pippin, the novel suggests the idea that unrequited love is the only sustainable love, with the powerful desire of romantic love being formed under the influence of idealization and fantasy.[57] Love's intensity would diminish as a relationship becomes habit.[58] Pippin states that unrequited love could be "a figure of sorts for the condition of modernity itself"; society itself "looks to be little more than a tissue of lies, evasions, delusions, vain pretensions, a hall of mirrors for social posturing".[59]

Eastern

  • A cross-cultural survey in the early 1990s found that Chinese people thought Western ideas about love were inaccurate, and that Chinese participants linked "passionate love" to concepts like "unrequited love", "infatuation", "sorrow" and "nostalgia". Many seemed to as much want to "fall in love" as to develop a mental illness.[60]

See also

Notes

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Bringle, Robert G.; Winnick, Terri; Rydell, Robert J. (2013-04-01). "The Prevalence and Nature of Unrequited Love" (in en). SAGE Open 3 (2). doi:10.1177/2158244013492160. ISSN 2158-2440. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244013492160. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Money 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. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Baumeister & 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."
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Langeslag, Sandra (2024). "Refuting Six Misconceptions about Romantic Love". Behavioral Sciences 14 (5): 383. doi:10.3390/bs14050383. PMID 38785874. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Leonti, Marco; Casu, Laura (2 July 2018). "Ethnopharmacology of Love". Frontiers in Psychology 9. doi:10.3389/fphar.2018.00567. PMID 30026695. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Fisher, Helen E.; Aron, Arthur; Mashek, Debra; Li, Haifang; Brown, Lucy L. (2002-10-01). "Defining the Brain Systems of Lust, Romantic Attraction, and Attachment" (in en). Archives of Sexual Behavior 31 (5): 413–419. doi:10.1023/A:1019888024255. ISSN 1573-2800. PMID 12238608. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019888024255. 
  7. ↑ Berscheid, Ellen (2010). "Love in the Fourth Dimension". Annual Review of Psychology 61: 1–25. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100318. PMID 19575626. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100318. 
  8. ↑ Ash, John (1775). The New And Complete Dictionary Of The English Language: In Which All The Words are Introduced ... : To Which Is Prefixed, A Comprehensive Grammar; In Two Volumes, Volume 2. Dilly. https://books.google.com/books?id=ZPtIAAAAcAAJ&pg=PT159. Retrieved 12 June 2015. : "REDAM'ANCY (s. from the Lat. redamo to love those that love us, but not used) The act of reciprocal love."
  9. ↑ Tennov 1999, pp. 15–16, 71
  10. ↑ Berne 1973, p. 119
  11. ↑ Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, pp. 307–308
  12. ↑ See also Tennov 1999, p. 133
  13. ↑ Aron, Arthur; Fisher, Helen; Mashek, Debra J.; Strong, Greg; Li, Haifang; Brown, Lucy L. (July 2005). "Reward, Motivation, and Emotion Systems Associated With Early-Stage Intense Romantic Love" (in en). Journal of Neurophysiology 94 (1): 327–337. doi:10.1152/jn.00838.2004. ISSN 0022-3077. PMID 15928068. https://www.physiology.org/doi/10.1152/jn.00838.2004. 
  14. ↑ Hatfield 1988, pp. 193–194, 197
  15. ↑ Hatfield & Walster 1985, p. 9
  16. ↑ Hatfield & Walster 1985, pp. 58, 104
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Tennov 1999, pp. 24, 44–45
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 18.6 Baumeister, Roy F.; Wotman, Sara R.; Stillwell, Arlene M. (March 1993). "Unrequited love: On heartbreak, anger, guilt, scriptlessness, and humiliation." (in en). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (3): 377–394. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.64.3.377. ISSN 1939-1315. https://doi.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.64.3.377. 
  19. ↑ Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, p. 312
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 20.3 Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, pp. 310–311
  21. ↑ Hill, Craig A.; Blakemore, Judith E. Owen; Drumm, Patrick (20 May 2005). "Mutual and unrequited love in adolescence and young adulthood" (in en). Personal Relationships 4 (1): 15–23. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6811.1997.tb00127.x. ISSN 1350-4126. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-6811.1997.tb00127.x. 
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 Goleman, Daniel (9 February 1993). "Pain of Unrequited Love Afflicts the Rejecter, Too". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/09/science/pain-of-unrequited-love-afflicts-the-rejecter-too.html. 
  23. ↑ Aron & Aron 1986, p. 38
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 24.4 24.5 Aron, Arthur; Aron, Elaine N.; Allen, Joselyn (1998). "Motivations for Unreciprocated Love" (in en). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24 (8): 787–796. doi:10.1177/0146167298248001. ISSN 0146-1672. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167298248001. 
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Frankel, Valerie (2002). "The Love Drug" (web). Oprah: p. 3. https://www.oprah.com/relationships/the-science-of-being-love-sick-relationships-and-limerence. "'You know, limerence can be unending,' Tennov says. 'I've interviewed subjects who've nursed a fixation on their limerence objects—LOs—for decades.' What's the trick? 'Their feelings were unrequited,' she reports. 'Their LOs gave them mixed signals, like ignoring them for months and then calling. Hope, confusion, and uncertainty kept it going. The phenomenon is defined, in part, by feeling a loss of control. The limerent person can't stop thinking about the LO: What did he mean by that? How can I interpret his tone of voice? How is he responding to me?'" 
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Aron, Elaine N.; Aron, Arthur (March 1996). "Love and expansion of the self: The state of the model" (in en). Personal Relationships 3 (1): 45–58. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6811.1996.tb00103.x. ISSN 1350-4126. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-6811.1996.tb00103.x. 
  27. ↑ Aron & Aron 1986, pp. 45–46, 52
  28. ↑ Emery, Lydia F.; Hughes, Erin K.; Muise, Amy (8 September 2025). "Self‐Expansion Theory: Origins, Current Evidence, and Future Horizons" (in en). Social and Personality Psychology Compass 19 (9). doi:10.1111/spc3.70082. ISSN 1751-9004. https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.70082. 
  29. ↑ Aron & Aron 1986, pp. 27–30
  30. ↑ Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, p. 308
  31. ↑ Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, p. 313
  32. ↑ Tennov 1999, p. 267
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 Ward 2009, pp. 45–46
  34. ↑ Evans, Maurice (1977) (in en). Elizabethan Sonnets. Dent. pp. vii, rear cover. ISBN 978-0-460-10554-5. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Elizabethan_Sonnets/nx8dkgEACAAJ. "The fulfilment and the frustration of passion have been the two great subjects of love poetry since time began, and whether, in Yeats's words, the imagination dwells most upon a woman won or a woman lost is a question not easily answered. The Petrarchan sonneteer, however, would have no doubts about the matter: the love sonnet is the most committed form of that poetry of frustration which, taking its origin from Ovid, came down the centuries picking up refinements and elaborations on its way. From the Provençal love song and medieval Amour Courtois it gained romantic colouring and something approaching religious fervor on the one hand, and formal structure and a set of conventions on the other." 
  35. ↑ Berne 1973, p. 232
  36. ↑ Hayes, Nicky (2000), Foundations of Psychology (3rd ed.), London: Thomson Learning, pp. 457–458, ISBN 1861525893 
  37. ↑ For overview of Dante's story, see Tallis 2005, pp. 98–101
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, p. 323
  39. ↑ "Apollo Pursuing Daphne". https://www.thecollector.com/apollo-and-daphne/. 
  40. ↑ Grafton, Most & Settis 2010, pp. 54, 55
  41. ↑ Tallis, Frank (18 February 2005). "The Year of Relationships - Crazy for you". The Psychologist 18 (2): 72–74. https://cms.bps.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-01/talliscrazy.pdf. Retrieved 2 October 2025. 
  42. ↑ Fisher 2016, p. 20
  43. ↑ Tennov 1999, p. 149
  44. ↑ Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, pp. 329, 324
  45. ↑ Bratslavsky, Baumeister & Sommer 1998, pp. 319
  46. ↑ Cupach & Spitzberg 1998, p. 234
  47. ↑ Mullen, Paul; Path, Michele; Purcell, Rosemary; Stuart, Geoffrey (1 August 1999). "Study of Stalkers". The American Journal of Psychiatry 156 (8): 1244–1249. doi:10.1176/ajp.156.8.1244. PMID 10450267. 
  48. ↑ Meloy, Jr; Fisher, H (2005-11-01). "Some Thoughts on the Neurobiology of Stalking" (in en). Journal of Forensic Sciences 50 (6): JFS2004508–9. doi:10.1520/JFS2004508. ISSN 0022-1198. https://dl.astm.org/jofs/article/50/6/JFS2004508/23279/Some-Thoughts-on-the-Neurobiology-of-Stalking. 
  49. ↑ Cupach & Spitzberg 1998, p. 233
  50. ↑ Fisher, Helen; Xu, Xiaomeng; Aron, Arthur; Brown, Lucy (9 May 2016). "Intense, Passionate, Romantic Love: A Natural Addiction? How the Fields That Investigate Romance and Substance Abuse Can Inform Each Other". Frontiers in Psychology 7: 687. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00687. PMID 27242601. 
  51. ↑ 51.0 51.1 Grafton, Anthony; Most, Glenn W.; Settis, Salvatore (2010-10-25) (in en). The Classical Tradition. Harvard University Press. p. 668. ISBN 978-0-674-03572-0. https://books.google.com/books?id=LbqF8z2bq3sC. 
  52. ↑ Harris, Caroline (2023). "The Life and Legacy of Charles Schulz, Creator of Peanuts". Minnesota History 68 (6): 206–215. ISSN 0026-5497. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48769322. 
  53. ↑ O’Donoghue, Bernard (2016). "Yeats the Love Poet". Yeats Annual (20): 97–117. doi:10.11647/OBP.0081.04. ISSN 0278-7687. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90000764. "So what exactly is love as Yeats specializes in it? Well, everyone knows about Yeats and Maud Gonne: that his unrequited love for her was the inspiration for many of his best-loved poems, and indeed for many of his best poems. In this respect he is the classic modern version of a long-established persona: the unrequited lover has had a long innings in literary popularity. From the troubadours to the present day this lovelorn and ineffectual figure has been a dominant presence in all literatures[.]". 
  54. ↑ 54.0 54.1 Walsh, John (2016-02-12). "The woman WB Yeats loved knew that poets should never marry" (in en). https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/wb-yeat-s-beloved-maud-gonne-knew-that-poets-should-never-marry-a6869771.html. 
  55. ↑ Ward 2009, pp. 47–48
  56. ↑ Pippin 2005, pp. 311, 326
  57. ↑ Pippin 2005, pp. 323, 326
  58. ↑ Pippin 2005, pp. 324–325
  59. ↑ Pippin 2005, pp. 324, 326
  60. ↑ Tallis 2005, pp. 109–110: "Has the Western romantic tradition made us blind to love's madness? China has no equivalent tradition. In fact, during the Cultural Revolution, 'romantic love' was outlawed - considered by the communist elite to be a 'bourgeois' indulgence. [...] It would seem that for many Chinese students, they would as much want to fall in love as develop a psychiatric illness."

Bibliography

Further reading

ca:Amor no correspost



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