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 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

Posted By Lonesome Loser on November 28, 2009

Here’s a post for those of us who like questionnaires, charts, graphs, all the various accoutrements of science that make us feel things are more official.

Briefly, attachment theory is a psychological theory of relationships that suggests our relationship styles with parental figures in early infancy predict our relationship styles as adults.  In other words, our relationships with parents and early caregivers echo down through the years, informing our adult relationships.  Now, this is potentially interesting for us sufferers of unrequited love, in that there is some research that suggests people who frequently fall in unrequited love tend to have an anxious-avoidant  (also called fearful-avoidant) attachment style.  This is a style of relating to others characterized by relatively high levels of anxiety in the relationship as well as high levels of avoidance of closeness.  I suppose that sounds a bit like unrequited love, no?

Other attachment styles include secure, characterized by an ability to form relationships with others and not worry excessively about being rejected or seen as clingy; dismissive (low anxiety-high avoidance), characterized by active avoidance of close relationships but no (conscious) anxiety about them; and preoccupied (high anxiety-low avoidance), characterized by constant worry about being abandoned or rejected while still being able to form close relationships with others.  Of course, very few of us fit neatly into the exact prototype of a category, there are many variations on the general theme.

Now, bear in mind that people with any attachment style can and do fall in unrequited love.  The difference may be the frequency of it happening, as well as the meaning we make of the experience (how positive or negative is it, how quickly are we able to recover our self-esteem, how well are we able to illuminate aspects of our self through the experience).  See some initial survey results on this site for the meaning some of us have made of our unrequited love.

At any rate, please go here (off-site) to take a brief questionnaire (designed by a research psychologist in the field of attachment) to determine your attachment style.  It takes about 5 minutes and is very interesting.  Then, please pop back to this post and take the poll below — let’s see if we can get an indication of our attachment styles.  Mine is secure, heading towards preoccupied.

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Tags: charts and graphs, nature of love, romantic love, surveys, unrequited love

Posted By Lonesome Loser on November 27, 2009

Please forgive the overly personal nature of this post.  I’m trying not to re-start my personal blog, I need it to be finished at some point, but I’m really feeling the desire to write from a personal perspective the last few days.

I’ve recently returned from Thanksgiving dinner at my (former) in-laws, while (ex)spouse is visiting a friend out of state.  The dinner was fine, no problem.  But I just find myself feeling lonely, thinking about how life offers no guarantees, and how most people seem to opt for stability and comfort in longterm relationships.  I see this in my in-laws marriage — affection, comfort, social status, financial security.  I bet they haven’t had sex in years.  And I mean years. I wonder if I’m making a mistake by giving up this type of stability, in favor of a dream of sustainable romantic love.  Sustainable being the key word there.

Many people do not have impassioned love affairs, do not really fall in love.  More like they fall in “like,” or fall in “security of societal approval along with genuine affection/friendship and (marginally) good sex.”  Really!  Do you know what I mean?  I just can’t do this, don’t want to do this any more.  I’d rather die young after doing a few things I really want to do (travel, write, lots of recreational sex, improved career involvement), than be married and exist in this half-dead sort of blandness for decades of my life.

I hope my Loved One is truly happy with her husband, that they are truly in love and he treats her well.  I hope this for them, as I hope I find it for myself.  It’s so hard to let go of the feelings and fantasies about her, the way it feels that she is the one I really want.  It’s so hard to give this up and hope that I can feel this way about someone else, when it feels like I never will.

Do you know what I mean?  When will I be able to give up her ghost?  And what ghost is really haunting me — her, childhood disappointments, my own fear of risk-taking and associated mediocrity, societal messages of couplehood, biological rhythms that drive the species onward?

Please let me fall in love again or just die early.

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Tags: loved ones, romantic love, sex, unrequited love