Unrequited (6 page)

“What
are
we now?” I asked, though I hated to hear the words come out of my mouth, petulant and demanding, so unlike the easy fondness of before.

“I still have some thinking to do.”

“Then why did you kiss me?”

“I thought it would help me decide.”

“And me? Where does that leave me?”

“I can’t tell you that.” He headed for the door.

I grabbed his arm. He asked me to let him go. “You are a cold man,” I said, keeping my grip. I didn’t understand how he could be so distant.

“I am not a cold man,” he said. I let go of him, and he left.

WHATEVER BENEFITS
I had received from unrequited love lasted only as long as my patience did. After B. kissed me, my patience dissolved. The Kiss, after all, is what historian William J. Fielding called the “
seal with which lovers plight their troth,” an unmistakable turning point in the story of true love. For the unrequited lover, The Kiss signals the triumph at the end of the long road of
forbearance, the moment when mutual love begins. Instead, the obstacles to my love became more and more significant, the situation more complex. If B. once intended for us to have a relationship, he had changed his mind, or his feelings for his girlfriend had become more binding than he’d imagined they could be.

What I hadn’t thought of when I chose B., when I cast myself into this scenario of unsatisfied desire, was what would happen if I never got what I wanted. I was expecting the obstacles to be overcome, the suspense to be over, the story to conclude, the last episode of the television series to fade to black as my unrequited love downshifted to mutual adoration. It didn’t matter if our love turned prosaic, as long as it was secure. I had yearned for him all summer. I needed resolution.

I didn’t get it, but I didn’t give up. There must be an explanation for how he was acting, I told myself. He must feel too guilty to leave his girlfriend for me. He’d told me all about his father, a wanderer and philanderer who died of a heart attack when B. was a senior in high school. It made sense that B. was terrified of walking in his father’s footsteps. But I was sure that his relationship would end—he’d said, hadn’t he, that it was bound to end? After he had some time to recover, we could be together at last.

My yearning in itself wasn’t going to be enough. It had to be the means to an end. I would hold out, defeat the obstacles, somehow make this—us—happen. My determination felt renegade. In fact, the aspiring lover follows a distinct social script, as psychology researchers Roy F. Baumeister and Sara R. Wotman describe in
Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love.
They offer the real-life saga of Nicholas and Alexandra as a prototype for this script. When he was a teenager, Nicholas, a Russian prince and heir to the throne, fell in love with Alexandra, a German princess living in London. She spurned his advances for eight years and insisted
she would never marry him. Finally, she sent a letter asking him not to contact her anymore. Instead of obeying, he traveled across Europe to convince her to change her mind. After two months of passionate courtship, she relented. The two became the czar and czarina of Russia, had five children, and shared a love so great that when they had to be apart, they wrote frequent love letters detailing their pain and longing. Their love lasted until they were executed at each other’s side when the Russian Revolution brought down czarist rule.

Political upheaval aside, the outcome of the script is clear: If you persevere, you can win over your beloved.

Holding out for love can mean bold pursuit à la Nicholas. It can mean faithful waiting in the wings. It can mean carefully nudging a friendship toward romance. But the mythic script always ends the same way: Unrequited desire is a visionary force, driving both the hopeful lover and the beloved toward a relationship that is meant to be. The beloved’s resistance, uncertainty, or obliviousness will one day yield. His marriage will dissolve, his girlfriend’s appeal will fade. Unrequited love is love that is not
yet
returned. It is a caterpillar in a chrysalis, destined to transform into a butterfly and take flight.

As in the story of Nicholas and Alexandra, the classic version of the script features the male as the aspiring lover, the female as the beloved who comes around. The script has since become equal-opportunity, on heavy rotation in our collective psyche. At the end of the 1987 John Hughes film
Some Kind of Wonderful
, tomboy Watts hides her feelings for her best friend, Keith, as he pursues Amanda, one of the most popular girls in school. Once Keith and Amanda decide they’re not right for each other, he finally notices that Watts is in love with him; he also realizes that she’s the right girl for him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he presses her (in a line that
alludes to Fred Astaire’s famous unrequited love script-ender in
Easter Parade
: “Why didn’t you tell me I was in love with you?” he queried his dancing partner, played by Judy Garland). “You never asked,” Watts says. The couple kisses, and Keith gives her the diamond earrings he’d intended for Amanda. They walk down the street together, two working-class outcasts, obviously meant for each other all along.

When my daughter was seven, she and her friends favored the girl-power version of this theme in the video for pop star Taylor Swift’s song “You Belong with Me.” Still gorgeous behind comically huge black-framed glasses, Swift plays a geeked-out teen who has a crush on her next-door neighbor, a high school football player. They are close friends who exchange scrawled messages through their bedroom windows every night. But he’s dating a bitchy cheerleader, also played by Swift, in vampire-dark hair and tight clothes that scream “fast girl.” The geeky neighbor watches her beloved’s rocky relationship from afar, knowing that he (as he confided in one of their messages) is “tired of the drama.” She’s too shy—and too virtuous—to overtly try to steal him away. But the song’s chorus reveals her inner certainty and determination, cataloging all the reasons the cheerleader is wrong for him and all the reasons she is right:
I think I know where you belong / I think I know it’s with me.

The lyrics focus on her longing. Our heroine, like so many people consumed by a crush, never gets an answer to the question “Do you love me?” But the video my daughter and I watch on YouTube advances the story in keeping with the myth of perseverance. Geeky Swift appears at the prom, the glasses gone, her baggy T-shirts and jeans replaced with a virginal white gown, her beauty irresistible. Her neighbor pal promptly dumps the drama queen, who’s dressed in a sleazy vixen-red dress. He gives the
geek-turned-princess a deep kiss of approval. She was right. He
does
belong with her. Interestingly, Swift has since become one of pop culture’s most derided unwanted women. She’s been lampooned as predatory for turning her high-profile breakups into song material. At the 2013 Golden Globe Awards, comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler jokingly warned Swift to “stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son,” prompting Swift to parry back with the quote: “
There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

From Nicholas and Alexandra to the “You Belong with Me” video, we see the details of the unrequited lover’s script emerge: The journey from unrequited love to real romance may be challenging, but with patience, hard work, or a combination of the two, you can overcome the obstacles and make it to your destination. You may struggle with doubt, but you should not give in to it. You have both your own happiness
and the happiness of your beloved
at stake. If Geeky Swift had abandoned hope and started dating a guy from the Math Club instead, she wouldn’t have been able to attract her neighbor away from a girl who was clearly making him glum. Geeky Swift doesn’t just win her man—she makes him happier than he realized he could be. And she overturns the faulty social order of high school, which dictates that the handsome jock will date the popular cheerleader, no matter what their true selves need. Geeky Swift’s visionary unrequited love propels her to restore the jock to his true self, a guy who would have a much better time with a girl he can confide in and who shares his interests. The unrequited lover is the one who knows best, both for herself and for her unwitting beloved.

LIKE MANY WOMEN
I interviewed, Janey, a twenty-one-year-old college student, is in unrequited love with a man who once loved
her back. Their relationship ended not long after he moved to New York from Boston to go to law school. He confessed to her over Skype that he couldn’t stop thinking about his own unrequited love, a high school girlfriend who dumped him suddenly and painfully and was now living in New York as well. “It’s not fair to be with you and think about her,” he told Janey. He also confessed that the comfort he felt with Janey wasn’t really what he wanted, at least not at this point in his life. He was too young, he told her, to be experiencing such a smooth relationship. He felt like they had become a “calm, older couple.”

Janey was waiting for him to come back. He wasn’t far away anymore; she had transferred to a college in New York, a plan she hatched while they were together. She held on to the fact that, earlier in their relationship, they had been so in love that he spoke of marrying her. She told me she knew most people would say that staying attached to him wasn’t “smart” or “good for her.” She should shake him off and accept that their relationship wasn’t meant to be. But these pragmatic options were simply not possible. Moving on felt like a lie. Their love, she insisted, was exceptional—a relationship in which they benefited from each other and loved each other unconditionally. “With him, I’m always learning, changing,” she said. “We always have something to talk about. If we spent our lives together, I would never get tired of him.” She told me that she couldn’t help wanting to wait for him. “I’ve always been emotional and just care too much,” she said. “I can’t sit there and act like it’s okay to not be in a relationship with someone I still love.”

She hung on the words he’d chosen to explain why he was leaving her. “He’s not saying he doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to be with me,” she said. “That comforts me. He’s just not looking for the thing we have at the moment. He wants something lively, passionate, reckless.”

He also still wanted a lot of attention from her. He texted her often and saw her several times a week. They cuddled and sometimes spent the night together. “It felt like nothing had changed, except we weren’t in a committed relationship,” she said.

He was giving her plenty of reasons to hold out. He
was
still interested in her. He
did
want many of the things a committed relationship entails: closeness, constancy, physical intimacy. These signs sustained her, becoming the foreshadowing for the anticipated conclusion of her script: the restoration of their mutual committed relationship. Yet her daily reality was a kind of purgatory. However much Janey craved her ex’s attention, the time they spent together stung. Right in front of her was a man she didn’t truly have. Being with him as a friend painfully reminded her of
how much she wanted him back. All the time she spent either with her ex or thinking about him kept her socially isolated and moody. Much of the time, she was miserable.

WHY DOES THE
unrequited lover stay on script? Her perseverance often rests on
whatever signs she can grab on to that the rejecter might change his mind. “The seeker has a confirmation bias, looking for positive signs and discounting the negative ones,” Baumeister said. “If there’s ambivalence, it’s going to prolong the hope, because there are enough positives to seize on and overinterpret. The negatives you can brush aside.” Janey’s bond with her ex sporadically rewarded her desire for love, increasing his allure and spurring her to look for more. Behavioral psychologists call this “intermittent positive reinforcement.” The impulse is similar to what prompts gamblers to keep placing bets, even when they’re losing. All they can think is that the next time they put a token in the slot, they’ll win,
because sometimes they do. But in gambling and in love, this isn’t a satisfying way to live.

What about her ex, with his mixed messages? There is no way for me to know what he really wants. Janey, like many of the women I interviewed,
didn’t want me to contact the object of her longing. He may not know himself what he’s after. He may be too self-centered to realize how much the undefined nature of their relationship distressed Janey. He may be the kind of ambivalent guy others warn you to stay away from. Maybe he’s a narcissist basking in her adoration, yet unable to get too attached. Whatever the case, the rejecter’s advantage seems unjust. He is getting what
he
wants.

He may loom in our minds as a bad guy, even a sadistic tormentor. However, there’s something else going on, something more basic than the endlessly intriguing but likely unanswerable question of what’s wrong with the guy who doesn’t want you back. Unlike the unrequited lover, a rejecter has no good script. He has an obligation to tell the unrequited lover that he doesn’t feel the same way. Yet he knows that doing so will cause pain. The moral dictate to “tell the truth” dukes it out with another: “minimize harm.” Either option leaves the rejecter open to criticism: How could he just break up with her when he used to talk about
marrying
her? How could he spend the night with her when he knows how much she loves him? No move he makes—except fully returning her love—will be right.

Pop culture sides overwhelmingly with unrequited lovers. It’s their song that plays over and over on the radio, their plaintive expressions in close-up on the movie screen. A rejecter often doesn’t know what to do or say. He may try to dodge the situation by avoiding the unrequited lover. Or he may go along passively with whatever the woman wants—putting off the moment when he’ll have to say
no, this isn’t going to work.

There is much to dread about this inevitable moment of truth. For one, it hurts another human being. A rejecter may be asked to
justify his feelings, while the real reasons would only compound the pain: You’re so needy. You’re unattractive to me. The sound of your laugh grates on my nerves. Your kiss made me squeamish. Often a beloved is at a loss to express precisely why he can’t move forward beyond the simple, devastating truth: “I don’t love you.” A rejecter grapples with guilt and regret when he didn’t intend any crime—he simply (just like the unrequited lover)
felt
. “They don’t want to hurt someone or be the bad person, but they are thrust into a position where those are the main options,” Baumeister explained. “It’s like someone else is killing himself or herself and handing you the knife afterward and you have to take it.”