Unrequited Love Blog

I’m thinking this will be my final post on this blog.  It seems a good day for it, I have a sore throat and a fever so I’m kind of out of it and have more distance on everything.

What to say?  Jessica just feels so far away from me now.  She’s probably had kids or will be having them shortly, probably has moved, is surely further along in her career.  I still think about her and miss her but I can’t continue to focus on her.

So what has it all meant?  It was very difficult for me to recognize and admit that I was in love with Jessica, and it was very difficult for me to see that her not loving me back didn’t have to be a tragedy.  To see that the meaning of this love falls somewhere in between — in between crush/limerence and committed love is real romantic love, in between comedy and tragedy are real non-hyperbolized feelings, in between labels of “can’t live without her love” and “of little consequence” is “vitally important.”  My ability to feel and recognize my love has been vitally important for me.  It has served as a catalyst for change in my life — my divorce, re-evaluating what I am looking for in a relationship, taking more risks, becoming more engaged with life.

So why was this experience so intense for me?  Did I love Jessica more than other women, unrequited or within a relationship?  No, not really.  Did the love feel different in substantial ways?  Well, sort of.  The physical and psychological “symptoms” of being in love are pretty consistent with all my previous experiences.  But the longing, sense of grief, and edge of desire were much stronger with this one.  Overall, it somehow felt more “real” to me.  Probably simply because I am older, more self-aware, more confident, more ready for an experience that envelopes all of the qualities of love — strong desire, sustained intimacy, and responsibility or purposefulness.

I hope I fall in love again, I hope I fall in love with someone who loves me back.  But even if I don’t fall in love again or get what I want, this experience has been meaningful and worth it.  Although I hope I never fall in love with another student or otherwise unavailable person, it’s just too disappointing and painful.   My love for Jessica has been real, has been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun.

Thanks for listening…

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Well, I’ve begun having recreational sex.  I started a blog about my experiences but nevermind where and under what name.  Since in the current blog it’s not inconceivable that any number of people I know might actually deduce my identity at some point, I thought I would spare all of us the sordid details and blog about my sexcapades anonymously elsewhere.

The point is, after driving home yesterday from a somewhat abortive casual sex encounter with a man, I had the most powerful sexual fantasies about Jessica that I’ve had in quite a while.  I had this whole fantasy of her answering an ad placed by me and the guy for a threesome.  She shows up, we sort of pretend not to know each other, and we all begin having sex.  I really become focused on Jessica and we have very exciting, emotionally-driven sex, with lots of intense eye contact.  The guy, Steve, watches and participates a bit, we don’t mind and don’t want to fully leave him out (it’s his place and our threesome, afterall).  There’s lots of sunlight and I have a very happy feeling.  I’m rocked by these fantasies for at least half-an-hour, all while driving home.

So, what the hell?  I’m having sex, it’s feeling good, but instead of helping me forget about Jessica it has actually made my sexual feelings stronger and sexual fantasies more specific than they’ve been in a while.

I’m screwed, but still screwed.

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Last night I had a dream about Jessica.  It was like we were all in high school, only I was either a late arrival or more like a graduate student or teacher’s aide or something.  A bit on the outside.  Anyway, Jessica was there, and she was so attractive, I felt such longing for her.  But she had a longterm boyfriend.  Jessica (and her friends) knew I was in love with her.  Jessica felt flattered but removed, and didn’t know what to do with my feelings.  She told her friends something like “yes, I know she’s interested but I’m with John.”  I felt so sad and bereft.

Dreams are often the way that inconvenient or inappropriate sexual attractions first announce themselves to me.  Like, if I develop sexual feelings toward a patient I won’t know it until I have a sexual dream about them, or when I fell in love with a close friend of mine.

My love for Jessica first announced itself in a dream, as well.  It was shortly after the end of the semester, just after I received the first email from her.  I really wasn’t all that conscious of my feelings or what was going on with me.  I felt viscerally pleased when I read the email, and flattered, but that was about all I was aware of.  I shared the email with my Spouse.  That night I had a dream that somehow I was giving her a ride home in my car, and it became clear to me that she was sexually interested in me, sort of curious or intrigued about being with a woman.  She said something like “I’m curious about how sex with a woman works,” and I said something like “Yes, I got that, I thought that you were.”  And we were getting along really well, enjoying each other’s company.  We went to my home, to a sort of a sunken living room/bedroom area.  Suddenly we were in pajamas on the bed and unsure how to start things.  I was feeling I’m not sure if this is going to work or not.  She was sort of laying on her stomach, and I was on the bed behind her, and I just bent down and kissed the back of her neck.  She moaned, and I felt my anxiety melt into tentative sexual arousal.  She turned over, I kissed her, and suddenly whether things were going to work or not was not an issue, I knew sex was going to work fine between us, be good, and I felt much more strongly and confidently sexual.  But then my Spouse’s mother walked into the room, and say Hi or something, and interrupted us.  Suddenly, Jessica was not there anymore, and my Spouse walked into the room.  A saw a sort of mannequin of Jessica in another room, later, and felt sad and empty.  She wasn’t real or alive to me anymore.  I felt annoyed with my Spouse’s mother for her intrusion, and very sad at losing Jessica.

The next afternoon I told my Spouse “I was so god-damn grateful that student Jessica wrote me a nice email that I had a sexual dream about her.”  Spouse laughed.  I swear I still wasn’t fully getting that I had fallen in love, or even that I was so strongly interested in Jessica.

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Christ,  I am horny.  I just went online to craigslist looking for easy sex, with a man cause they are so much easier than women, and I started emailing back from an address that revealed my name, because I was in such a hurry to get laid. 

Spouse is refusing to let me out of marriage right now.  She wants me to support her through school, another year or so.  I don’t think I can make it!  She said I could have sex with others, since we are not married anymore, but then I am supposed to financially support her?  WTF!?  I think I must be retaliating.  Saga of a bad marriage.  Saga of a less-than-fully-conscious deprived romantic.

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Well, it seemed so to me.  I don’t know what else to call it.  I stuttered in front of Jessica, couldn’t think, got confused, blushed, kept trying to ignore her but couldn’t stop staring at her, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, lost weight, thought about Jessica incessantly, had incredibly powerful and preoccupying sexual & emotional fantasies, went around buoyant or high on love for quite a while (intermittantly tempered with grief and despair), demonstrated poor judgement (sort of made a pass at her when she was straight, engaged, and a recently former student).

I suppose you could call all this stuff a crush, not love. Especially considering how little contact I actually had with her, how limited our interactions were.

However, the fact that it’s gone on so long (about 18 months for the physical symptoms and the emotional stuff still continues), and how strong my feelings have been, and how it’s lead me to make major changes in my life (get a divorce, return to the city, rethink what I’m looking for in a relationship), all this makes me think it was more love than crush.  Unrequited love.

The danger in calling a crush “love” is in giving it too much weight, too much impact on your self-esteem, on your ability to see available others as attractive, too much emphasis on over-interpreting fantasy.  However, there are also dangers in refusing to recognize love when it is there.  It’s emotionally dangerous to deny such an important emotion as romantic love when it happens to you because you’re too intellectually focused to feel it, or because you can’t risk the shame of acknowledging it if the love is not returned, or because it seems unacceptable or unwanted in some way.  This kind of emotional tyranny may result in a pretty narrow life.  Which is just what I’m trying to avoid.  I’m trying to move away from making conventional choices simply because that’s what others say we should do, trying to move away from filtering emotions through a maturely reasoned set of accepted worldviews.  I suppose this is at least one reason why I call my feelings for Jessica love, and not a crush.

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