Unrequited Love

Posted By Lonesome Loser on December 30, 2008

Hi, it’s good to see folks visiting this website about the experience of unrequited love.  This is meant to be a participatory discussion, not a monologue. Please leave comments!  You don’t have to give personal information to comment.  The system will ask for your name and an email address but you can just make stuff up if you’d rather not give it.    You can leave comments on this “Home” page, and if you are so inclined, on my poetry page Musings.  Also, please consider participating in the polls below, and in the surveys on the Surveys page.

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Tags: limerence, romantic love, unrequited love

Posted By Lonesome Loser on March 7, 2010

Posts that are “coming soon” (as soon as I can find some time to craft them). Please offer any other suggestions either as a comment to this post, or email/contact me.

Survey/Questionnaire on being in love vs. being in like.

Survey/Questionnaire on level of passion you experience for Loved One.

Discussion of Dante, the original unrequited lover.

Discussion of unrequited love stories that actually worked out.

Discussion of famous examples of unrequited love relationships.

Advice for the Loved Ones.

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Tags: discussion, loved ones, nature of love, romantic love, surveys

Posted By Lonesome Loser on February 17, 2010

Hi, everyone. I have been working on posting another quiz but having some trouble getting it to work the way it needs to work. But I wanted to post something, since it’s been too long since the last posting.

Also, it’s a few days after Valentine’s Day. I know Valentine’s Day can be a difficult day for unrequited lovers, especially if your loved one has a significant other and tells you all about how the two of them spent the holiday, or something like that.

Have you heard of Vinegar Valentines? They are one page “cards” printed on cheap, thin paper mailed (often anonymously) to people you would like to insult. Typically, these would be certain “types” of people — spinster, wolf, hopeless case, moocher, etc. Originally printed in the late 1800s, Vinegar Valentines reached a height of popularity through the 1920s. Although greeting card departments don’t carry this particular type of Valentine anymore, the general sentiment survives in discussions of sending someone black roses or coal, that kind of thing. Calvin, of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, essentially gives “vinegar valentines” to Susie, his friend/enemy/crush.

You could fantasize about sending a vinegar valentine to your Loved One’s significant other — although I’m not advocating for actually sending them cards, it would be too hostile — and imagining their reaction. Here’s a site that has a few examples of vintage Vinegar Valentines. Check out “Wolf” and “Painted Doll” in particular. Of course, we would be likely to receive “Heart Agony” in return!

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Posted By Lonesome Loser on January 21, 2010

(Musicals on the mind today, sorry!)

I’ve been thinking about the tension between our perspectives, and those of our Loved Ones or others, and how opposed they often seem to be.

Would-be lovers see their love as “real,” whereas everyone else (including the Loved One) sees it as “unreal” or a “crush.”  Very frustrating!  This is just part of unrequited love — when you have intense feelings and the other person doesn’t, the more intense feelings get downgraded to crush status or something similar. When you’re in the middle of being “in love,” it seems very intense and real even when it’s not returned.  However, when someone loves you, you tend to see them as having a crush on you that will soon enough pass.  There’s nothing inherently right or wrong about either of these perspectives, they’re just different.

It’s like we’re all arguing with each other over what’s going on.  It’s just semantics, like the Gershwin song Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off in the film “Shall We Dance”:

You like [potayto], I like [potahto]
You like [tomayto], I like [tomahto]
Potayto, potahto
Tomayto, tomahto
Let’s call the whole thing off!

On another musical note, unrequited lovers tend to feel jealous and competitive with our Loved One’s significant other (duh!). We generally feel like we have at least as much to offer as the overvalued SO, who could not possibly feel the same way about the Loved One as we do.  Much like another showtune, Irving Berlin’s Anything You Can Do in “Annie Get Your Gun”, we want to sing out to (or at least in the general direction of) their significant others:

Anything you can do, I can do better,
I can do anything better than you
No you can’t! (they would say)
Yes I can! No you can’t!
Yes I can! No you can’t!
Yes I can, Yes I can!

We have to be able to laugh at ourselves, guys, lord knows everyone else does!

In case you aren’t familiar with these songs, here is a player to hear the basic tunes!

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Tags: crush, funny, loved ones

Posted By Lonesome Loser on December 24, 2009

I just want to argue for taking all this discussion, and every “expert” opinion on unrequited love (as well as romantic love in general) with several grains of salt.  Basically, deciding whether you are in love or not is your decision.  There is no surefire way to verify “for real” whether it’s love or not.  I believe that how we evaluate our feelings is basically a cognitive overlay on a fairly similar set of physiological and to a certain degree emotional processes (see “How Do You Know When You are in Love?” post).  So that whether we label our experiences as crush, love, sexual desire, or whatever, depends on our current circumstances.  In childhood and adolescence, the love-struck as well as people around them tend to define those feelings as a “crush.” In the early adulthood years of 20 to 30 or 35, these feelings tend to be experienced as “love,” then sometimes later re-evaluated and labeled a “crush” or a “mistake” in some way.  In mid-to-late-adulthood, the feelings are such a surprise that they tend to be evaluated as “love” by the person.

I would also argue that the impact and call to action of romantic love changes over time.  As children and adolescents, we’re simply overwhelmed by our feelings and believe we “like” the person, want to date them or spend time with them.  In early adulthood, when we first tend to evaluate our feelings as “love,” the call to action is fairly clear — marry, mate, this is “the one,” this is a certainty.  Then in later adulthood, we many of us have already married or are involved in longterm relationships, falling in love does not necessarily dictate a certain course of action.  How we evaluate the impact of love at that point tends to depend on our life circumstances, personal value systems, and capacity for change.  When people fall in love while in a committed relationship with another person, they may evaluate it as a call to change their lives, or as something to ignore for the sake of propriety or the children, or as some kind of falsehood or cruel joke of the universe.

Does this analysis make sense to you?  That whether we are “in love” or not depends not so much on some inherently real yet unquantifiable essence, but rather mostly on the meaning we make of it — in that fundamental sense, we are the architects of our own loves.

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Tags: crush, discussion, infatuation, limerence, nature of love, romantic love