Unrequited Love: An Essay on Loving Someone Who Doesn't Love You Back
by Professor Barry McCrea
I often wonder if behind any of the apparently calm faces in my classroom there lies a soul aflame with the torments of unrequited love. Unrequited love is a kind of parasite, and once it takes hold—like those wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of unwitting caterpillars— it radically changes the nature of its host. And just as the violated caterpillar— bloated and misshapen out of all recognition from its natural form—while no longer a caterpillar, but a living nest of baby wasps, is nevertheless forced to go through the motions of being a caterpillar, crawling up trees and munching leaves, so are unrequited lovers constrained to participate in the round of everyday life, as if they were still fully human. They must pretend to enjoy parties, to care about politics; they must feign enthusiasm about school, friendships, and football games, when in reality all that matters to them is the massive, overwhelming parasite of their love.
In the always callous jargon of campus life, I suppose what I am calling “unrequited love” might be termed an “obsessive crush.” But “crush” encompasses a range of much lighter, more manageable kinds of attraction than the phenomenon I am thinking of here, which is a state quite distinct from a straightforward or coherent sexual interest (the kind of desire that is a perfectly acceptable prelude to possible courtship and is known, in Ireland anyway, as “fancying” somebody). Rather, it is a highly specific and morbid form of desire, a passionate, desperate, apparently incurable love that is not returned and has little hope of ever being so.
Fully unrequited love differs from other forms of love because futility and irrationality are inherent parts of its dynamic. Unlike attainable love, radically unrequited love is not goal-oriented. In its purest form, the “crush” object is someone totally incapable of responding, the lonely longing for someone from an entirely different social sphere— say, the old high school movie geek and prom queen dynamic, or the silent passion of a gay student for his straight roommate (the reverse of the trite scenario dreamed up by the creators of Will and Grace).
The friends of the unrequited lover, if they know what is going on, frequently become frustrated with the “waste” of energy and time the lover invests in his or her obsession. To try to cure their friend, they sit them down and spell out that it is never going to happen: “She is married!”, “He is gay!”, or, as in the title of the recent bestseller, He’s Just Not That Into You.
But in this matter, the well-meaning friends misunderstand the nature of the illness. There is no logic in unrequited love any more than there is logic in a headache or a flu, and to try to make the lover submit his love to the conscious operation of reason is like trying to cure his migraine by taking his photo. They may even suggest other, more suitable recipients of their friend’s love. This behavior is akin to the Red Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, who responds to Alice’s complaint, “I am so hot and thirsty!” with the offer, “I know what YOU’D like! Have a biscuit.”
Whether the shy girl pining for the oblivious captain of the rowing team in her sociology seminar, or the gay boy gazing adoringly on the sleeping form of his affable, buddy-buddy straight roommate, all unrequited lovers inhabit a world subject to a fundamentally distinct system of laws to our own. The crush, in whatever context it begins, from within a friendship or directed toward a distant near-stranger, generally starts with a series of interruptions to the routine of life. The girl in the sociology seminar tells a friend that there is a “hot guy” in the class—she’s interested but not yet in love. In Week 2, she is excited and impressed by his contributions to the class discussion; in Week 3, she is slightly disappointed when he doesn’t show up to class: He was an attractive distraction. A few days later, she accidentally runs across him on campus, sitting on a bench smoking with some of his friends. He greets her and she walks away with a funny warm glow inside.
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