We are a practical species, and when we think of love, it is normal to focus on the sort
that goes places, that is mutual, that leads people to form couples and perhaps one day
households. But the more peculiar reality is that the greatest share of humanity’s
love stories have unfolded in a directionless form in the recesses of the mind of only one
party. It seems that we are – in aggregate at least – committed first and foremost
to the unrequited version of love. At any point, millions
of love stories are quietly being spun by one person while the object of their adoration
goes about their business blithely unconcerned. Someone watches someone else on a train, casts
surreptitious glances at a delegate at a conference; carefully notes a fellow shopper’s manner
in a grocery store – and the earth spins on undisturbed. Unrequited lovers are easy
to dismiss as not far from pathetic. If we were better designed and a little saner, we
would of course never develop feelings for people who were not prepared to develop them
for us – nor squander our days on desires without logical or practical outcome. Related
image But, looked at more benevolently, there is something hugely salutary and noble about
our capacity to entertain tender daydreams. It is a feat to be able to detonate powerful
longings without causing any inconvenience to other people. The ability to daydream is a significant
human achievement. Rather than wishing that we stop doing so, we should be worried by
what might happen to us if we couldn’t daydream, if we were faced with the choice of either
accepting reality in all its barrenness or else of barging into the lives of others with
unwanted desires. Daydreaming is a vital and artful safety valve, mediating between resignation
on the one hand and uncontained effusions on the other. Along the way, unrequited love
provides us with an occasion to exercise our aptitudes for optimism in a highly salutary
way. After a few decades on the earth, it is only too easy to start to hate our fellow
humans for their mediocrity, selfishness and idiocy. But with our beloved in mind, we can,
for once, give free reign to a boundless generosity that a god or the parent of a newborn might
deploy. We can tell ourselves that we have found an angel, an exalted being, on the basis
of nothing more than how wise their green eyes look or how delicately they open their
yogurt for lunch. Our verdicts are a delusional exaggeration, but – given how much grounds
there is to despair at the human experiment – perhaps a noble and forgivable one as
well. Related image It’s the privilege of unrequited love never to have to encounter
the disappointment that follows from contact with reality. We are not after accurate knowledge
of what it would be like to coexist with this person. We don’t really want to know how
they might behave in the midst of a crisis at work or over a holiday with their parents.
We’ve been through enough such trials – and the results aren’t edifying. Of course they
would, after a time in our arms, prove less than ideal and
a little more like everyone else we know. We may be denied intimacy, but we are granted
access to something arguably far nicer: boundless hope. We can attach to the form and figure
of the person we desire everything we so want to be true about human beings. The beloved
becomes the repository of every desire: for a particular kind of intelligence, wit, temperament
and outlook. The older we get, the more unrequited love brings us back into contact with a passion
and hope that feels like an essential relief, like finding out that we can still run – or
giggle. In meditating on our beloved, we’re not getting to know a real person; we are
gaining an insight into our ideals. One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, we’ll
be surrounded by a thought police that will look inside our minds at will and ruthlessly
condemn for us for all the phantasmagoria that goes on in them. But for the moment at
least, we can have any thought we like with impunity: we and the beloved can go on holiday
to Portugal, can have four adorable children together, can dance in the town square all
night – and the armed guards will never know. Image result for le rayon vert It is
hard to share with most acquaintances quite what we are going through. But those who do
understand become the targets of particular gratitude. A true friend will indulge our
folly and be generous to our melodramas. They will avoid the easy task of censoring and
upbraiding us. They will have enough of an impression of our basic mental health to shepherd
us only gently back to melancholic sanity. Episodes of unrequited love force us to develop
a sense of humour about ourselves. It is impossible to think too well of who we are in their aftermath.
Unrequited love edges us inevitably towards a basic humility. We are at last confirmed
as truly ridiculous. With any luck, no one gets hurt, it is just that, for a time, the
world seems a bit more wondrous, more exciting and more blessed than usual. A natural impulse
is to try to convert our longings into something more sensible, either to start a proper love
affair or else to dismiss our dreams as too silly to nurture. Maybe we should do neither,
but rather let the unrequited love exist on its own, neither fully grown up nor wholly
damnable, neither deeply horrible nor quite sane. It is just the mind, a very complicated
machine, constrained by the narrowness of existence, turning its wheels, tantalised
by a vision of happiness and sensing, quite rightly and quite hopelessly, that there could
have been so much more to life than there ever will be.
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Our book, Sorrows of Love, helps us all handle the inevitable sorrows of love.