Unrequited love

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Unrequited love is love that is not reciprocated, even though reciprocation is usually deeply desired. This can lead to feelings such as depression, anxiety, and mood swings such as swift changes between depression and euphoria.

Contents 1 In literature 2 In music 3 Books 4 See also 5 External links 6 References

[edit] In literature

• Layla and Majnun Nezami's Mid Eastern tale, about a moon-princess who was married off by her father to someone other than the man who was desperately in love with her, resulting in his madness. This story was inspiration for Eric Clapton's song with Derek and the Dominoes, "Layla".

• The 1st Century BC Roman poet Catullus wrote about his unrequited love for Lesbia (Clodia) in several of his Carmina.

• Abraham Cowley wrote of the emotion^{[citation needed]}:

"A mighty pain to love it is,

And 'tis a pain that pain to miss;

But of all pains, the greatest pain

It is to love, but love in vain."

• Andrew Marvell, the famous sixteenth century metaphysical poet, wrote the poem 'To his Coy Mistress' which was centred around the idea of unrequieted love.

• Dante Alighieri for Beatrice Portinari- Perhaps the most famous example in Western culture of unrequited love. Dante apparently spoke to Beatrice only twice in his life, the first time when he was nine years old and she was eight. Although both went on to marry other people, Dante nevertheless regarded Beatrice as the great love of his life and his "muse." He made her the guide to Heaven in his work The Divine Comedy. Additionally, all of the examples in Dante's manual for poets, La Vita Nuova, are about his love for Beatrice. The prose which surrounds the examples further tells the story of his lifelong devotion to her.

• Petrarch is famous for his love for the lady Laura. He is best remembered for the sonnets he wrote her, despite her marriage to another man.

• A.E. Housman wrote a poem inspired by his life-long unrequited love for his best friend Moses Jackson:

"He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?

He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.

I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder

And went with half my life about my ways."

• Don Quixote and Dulcinea in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Don Quixote, who believes he is a knight, imagines that he serves a noblewoman named Dulcinea. Unfortunately, the object of his desire is actually an uncomely peasant in his hometown, and his love for her is not returned. Her name has come to be a metaphor for unrequited love, in the sense, "That woman is my Dulcinea."

• Shakespeare touched on the topic, in his plays Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night. A more threatening unrequited lover, Roderigo, is shown in Othello.

• The classic French play Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand, is about a brilliant swordsman and poet who is in unrequited love with his cousin for decades.

• Victor Hugo's two most famous works' Notre-Dame-de-Paris and Les Misérables feature characters (namely those of, from Notre-Dame-de-Paris; Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Frollo and Gringoire) and the character of Eponine from Les Misérables, a street-waif who later sacrifices her life to save Marius, the man she loves.

• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the beginnings of romanticism. Unrequited love combines two main themes in romanticism: Weltschmerz and love.

• Gaston Leroux's character Erik from The Phantom of the Opera, who was born hideously deformed (said to have looked like a 'Living Corpse') and yet whom falls for the young soprano Christine Daaé who, it turns out, also loves another man—the Viscount Raoul de Chagny.

• Stendhal writes in a more clinical manner in On Love.

• Unrequited love is the most potent theme in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, manifested mostly in the character of Pip. Another Dickensian character famously known for suffering from unrequited love is Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.

• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, contains an unrequited love subplot: the efforts of Mr. Hargrave to win Helen Graham.

• Charlotte Brontë's Villette describes isolation and unrequited love.

• The Slovene poet France Prešeren wrote a devastatingly beautiful sonnet cycle dedicated to his unhappy love for Julija Primic.

• In Russian literature, among innumerable examples, one could mention First Love, by Turgenev.

• T.S. Eliot writes of the unrequited love of Prufrock

• F. Scott Fitzgerald offers his ideas on unrequited love in The Great Gatsby, wherein the main character Jay Gatsby builds wealth through alcohol smuggling during prohibition to try and lure back his one time lover Daisy Buchanan. However, her shallowness, while allowing physical consummation does not provide the emotional security that Gatsby is seeking.

• The character Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is depicted as a man suffering from varying extents of unrequited love in his complex relationship with Catherine Earnshaw.

• Carl Sandburg treats the theme of unrequited love with minimalist elegance in poems from his 1963 book, Honey and Salt. In the poem, "Little Word, Little White Bird", the narrator asks, "Love, can it hit one without hitting two and leave the one lost and groping?" And in the poem, Offering and Rebuff (also from Honey and Salt), the rebuffer says to the one professing his love, "Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely...Love is a fool star."^{[citation needed]}

• Charles Schulz; his Peanuts character Charlie Brown suffers from unrequited love for the Little Red-Haired Girl, as does Lucy van Pelt for Schroeder, Sally Brown for Linus van Pelt, and Linus for his teacher Ms. Othmar. Charlie Brown famously notes in one strip^{[citation needed]}:

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."

• The Bible; The Wife of Potiphar A great representation of the story is at the Getty Museum. (See external link below.)

• Félix Arvers' silent love for Marie, immortalized in poem "Un secret" also known as "Sonnet d'Arvers". This poem was taken from a piece he wrote aged 25, "Mes heures perdues" (My lost hours).

Felix Arvers found no way to express his unrequited love and alleviate his pain, he had no way but confide his feelings in a sonnet. The poem was so heart-wrenching and struck such a success and popularity with its powerful romantic description of profound feelings among the frequenters of the Paris literary salons that it was circulated for recite among them for years before becoming a classic of French romantic poetry after his death.

Un secret was the only well-known poem in his oeuvre titled "Mes heures perdues", Félix Arvers was referred to in French literature as "The Poet of a single poem." The sonnet is also known around the world as the Sonnet d'Arvers.

Teenagers often experience feelings of unrequited love, one loves the other but the boy/girl in question does not have the same feelings, and instead likes the best friend for instance. This can lead to great upset and what teens believe to be, 'depression,' but it instead is just a minor case of loneliness, which will soon be wiped away by the new 'crush'.

[edit] In music

Unrequited love has been a topic used repeatedly by musicians for decades. Blues artists incorporated it heavily; it is the topic of B.B. King's "Lucille" and "The Thrill is Gone," Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" and many early and later blues songs. Eric Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos devoted a whole album to the topic, Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, which included such famous songs as "Layla" and "Bell Bottom Blues".^{[citation needed]} Many Rock n' Roll musicians also based songs on unrequited love; from The Eagles all the way to Led Zeppelin, almost every classic rock band has at least one song on the topic. The exact term may be found in the lyrics of Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow 1995 song "Insatiable", among others. It is also heard in many of the songs by The Wolfe Tones, most noticeably Boston Rose.

The Doobie Brothers hit it on the head with "What a Fool Believes" which posits that for some, a fantasy, even an unrequited one, is preferable to loneliness.

In 1981, Rick Springfield had a hit song, "Jessie's Girl", which was obviously about unrequited love, involved a man in love with his best friend's girlfriend.

Radiohead had their first taste of success with their 1993 unrequited love hit "Creep". Although the band strayed away from the topic on the majority of their later work, songs like "There There" revolve around unrequited love.

Modern Rock musicians such as Weezer, Coldplay (notably the song "Shiver") and The Killers are some of the many who still continue this trend today. U2's tome on unrequited love, "All I Want Is You," was accompanied by a dramatic music video recounting the tale of a circus troupe where a dwarf is in love with a trapeze artist, and perhaps even dies trying to impress her.

The band Muse uses unrequited love as a theme heavily from their first CD Showbiz up through their newest release, Black Holes and Revelations. Songs such as Unintended^[1], Endlessly^[2], Space Dementia ^[3], and Map of the Problematique ^[4]have unrequited love as a central and powerful theme.

Although most rap and hip hop artists rarely dabble with such a subject, many R&B artists such as Usher and R. Kelly have written songs about it. The English singer Aqualung has also written a song, entitled, "Strange and Beautiful", which was featured in the sound-track to the 2004 film Wicker Park, in which the singer spends much of their life secretly in love with an unspecified person, eventually resolving to quietly prove his or her affections in the hopes of reciprocation.^{[citation needed]}

In the musical The Phantom of the Opera, the title character is in love with singer Christine Daaé who mistakes her affection for him as affection for her dead father. In reality, she fall in love with her childhood friend Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny.

In the musical Les Miserables, based on the novel of the same name, one of the most well-known songs is "On My Own", a vivid account of the crushing loneliness felt by unrequited lovers. In this song Eponine describes the division of her world between her fantasies of life with Marius and the reality of his disinterest. Such fantasies are a common, if not integral component of an unrequited love affair. She is painfully aware that she is marginal in Marius' life, singing^{[citation needed]},

"Without him

The world around me changes

The trees are bare and everywhere

The streets are full of strangers"

And, later, contrasting this with,

"Without me

His world would go on turning

A world that's full of happiness

That I have never known"

Despite most rappers portraying themselves as being able to attract women easily^{[citation needed]}, rapper Slug from Atmosphere recounts suffering from unrequited love, not only from one individual, but from an entire ilk. He states in Like Today,^{[citation needed]}

"from Anne Landers, to Ani DiFranco to Orphan Annie

I love all women, but most of them just can't stand me."

One of the most famous songs dealing with unrequited love is the 1980 George Jones smash hit "He Stopped Loving Her Today". The song was about a man who had an unrequited love for a woman for many years until his death. The moment he died is the moment he stopped loving her.

The song "Auf Achse" by Franz Ferdinand expresses many of the feelings held by sufferers of unrequited love, especially in the opening four lines^{[citation needed]}:

"You see her, you can't touch her.

You hear her, you can't hold her.

You want her, you can't have her.

You want to, but she won't let you."

Christian hardcore/screamo group Chasing Victory recorded a track by the same name, featured on their "I Call This Abandonment" album, released in 2005 on Mono Vs Stereo records.

A most recent venture into the unrequited love movement is the Irish singer/songwriter Damien Rice. Many of his songs are about the daughter of his clarinet teacher. "I Remember", "The Blower's Daughter", "Elephant", and "Accidental Babies", are all about the girl in question. Lyrics consist of "The pillow in your pillowcase is easier to touch", "Do you cum? Together ever with him? Is he dark enough, enough to see your light?" and "This has got to die, this has got to stop, this has got to lie down, there's someone else on top. You can keep me pinned, it's easier to tease, but you can't paint an elephant, quite as good as she."

Electronica artist Craig Armstrong, known for composing film scores, included the song "Let's Go Out Tonight" with The Blue Nile singer Paul Buchanan on his first solo album The Space Between Us. The song concerns a man who is asking a woman to go out with him to an unknown place with him as he asks for her prayers and for her love.

Symphonie Fantastique (1830) by Romantic composer Hector Berlioz is one example of a classical work about unrequited love.

"The Saturday Boy" by Billy Bragg is a well known song about unrequited love, especially for one involving a teenage boy:

We dreamed of her and compared our dreams. But that was all that I ever tasted. She lied to me with her body you see. I lied to myself bout the chances Id wasted. The times we were close. Were far and few between. In the darkness at the dances in the school canteen. Did she close her eyes like I did. As we held each other tight. And la la la la la la la la means I love you. I never understood my failings then. And I hide my humble hopes now. Thinking back she made us want her. A girl not old enough to shave her legs.

[edit] Books

• Loves me, loves me not: the ethics of unrequited love / Laura Smit., 2005
• The handbook of sexuality in close relationships / John H Harvey., 2004
• The Genesis of sex: sexual relationships in the first book of the Bible / O Palmer Robertson., 2002
• Interpersonal rejection / Mark R Leary, 2001
• The dark side of close relationships / Brian H Spitzberg., 1998
• Breaking hearts: the two sides of unrequited love / Baumeister, Roy., 1992

[edit] See also

• Erotomania
• Existential despair
• Limerence
• Love shyness
• Involuntary celibacy
• Courtly love
• Obsessive love

[edit] External links

• Personal experiences with unrequited love
• Unrequited Love Support Group
• How unrequited love can be an illness, or even fatal (BBC)
• Joelogon's Foolproof Guide to Making Any Woman Your Platonic Friend
• Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, by Guido Reni

[edit] References