Wikipedia

‘Platonic friendships provide a fertile soil for unrequited love’. Thus the object of unrequited love is often a friend or acquaintance, someone regularly encountered in the workplace, during the course of work, school or other activities involving large groups of people. This creates an awkward situation in which the admirer has difficulty in expressing their true feelings, a fear that revelation of feelings might invite rejection, cause embarrassment or might end all access to the beloved, as a romantic relationship may be inconsistent with the existing association.

2 thoughts on “Wikipedia

  1. shinichi Post author

    Unrequited love has long been depicted as noble, an unselfish and stoic willingness to accept suffering. Literary and artistic depictions of unrequited love may depend on assumptions of social distance that have less relevance in western, democratic societies with relatively high social mobility and less rigid codes of sexual fidelity. Nonetheless, the literary record suggests a degree of euphoria in the feelings associated with unrequited love, which has the advantage as well of carrying none of the responsibilities of mutual relationships: certainly, “rejection, apparent or real, may be the catalyst for inspired literary creation… ‘the poetry of frustration’.”

    Eric Berne considered 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”.

    **

    Roman poet Ovid in his Remedia Amoris “provides advice on how to overcome inappropriate or unrequited love. The solutions offered include travel, teetotalism, bucolic pursuits, and ironically, avoidance of love poets”.

    **

    In the wake of his real-life experiences with Maud Gonne, in a further twist, W. B. Yeats wrote of those who ‘had read/All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing/Returned and yet unrequited love’. According to Robert B. Pippin, Proust claimed that ‘the only successful (sustainable) love is unrequited love’. According to Pippin, sometimes ‘unrequited love…has been invoked as a figure for the condition of modernity itself’. Examples of unrequited love include W. B. Yeats, Stendhal, Dante, Ayn Rand, Hans Christian Andersen, and Goethe.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *