Unrequited love

Unrequited love is love that is not openly reciprocated or understood as such, even though reciprocation is usually deeply desired. The beloved may or may not be aware of the admirer's deep affections. The Merriam Webster Online Dictionary defines unrequited as "not reciprocated or returned in kind."

As the literary selections suggest, the inability to express and fulfill emotional needs may lead to feelings such as depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and rapid mood swings between depression and euphoria. A universal feeling, by some estimates affecting 98% of all people during their lifetimes, unrequited love has naturally been a frequent subject in popular culture.

The object of unrequited love is often a friend or acquaintance, someone regularly encountered in the workplace, during the course of work or other activities involving large groups of people. This creates an awkward situation in which the admirer has difficulty in expressing his/her true feelings, as a romantic relationship may be inconsistent with the existing association; revelation of the lover's feelings might invite rejection, cause embarrassment or might end all access to the beloved.

In terms of the feelings of the hopeful one, it could be said that they undergo about the same amount of pain as does someone who is going through the breakup of a romantic relationship without ever having had the benefit of being in that relationship. On the other hand, some research suggests that the object of unrequited affection experiences a variety of negative emotions, including anxiety, frustration and guilt.^[2]

Unrequited love has long been depicted as noble, an unselfish and stoic willingness to accept suffering, though contemporary western culture may give greater weight to practical, goal-oriented and self-assertive behavior. Literary and artistic depictions of unrequited love may depend on assumptions of social distance which have less relevance in democratic societies with relatively high social mobility, or less rigid codes of sexual fidelity. Nonetheless, the literary record suggests a degree of euphoria in the limerence associated with unrequited love, which has the advantage as well of carrying none of the responsibilities of mutual relationships.

Moreover, while it is not identical with puppy love, it can be associated with the underconfidence and emotional immaturity of extreme youth, as illustrated by its prominence as a theme in the work of Charles Schulz; his Peanuts character Charlie Brown suffers from unrequited love for the Little Red-Haired Girl, as does Peppermint Patty for Charlie Brown, Lucy van Pelt for Schroeder, Sally Brown for Linus van Pelt, and Linus for his teacher, Miss Othmar (and later a girl in his class, Lydia). Charlie Brown famously notes in one strip: "Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love." According to Aron, Aron and Allen, "incidence of unreciprocated love [is] greatest for those whose self-reported attachment style was anxious/ambivalent."