Love, Unrequited

The awful, beautiful pain of unrequited love! I am interested in poetics today, so I shall dispense with the definitions – fuck defining one of the most powerful emotions you will ever feel. Fuck intellectualizing and sermonizing. Fuck everything but the raw pain of love. The raw pain of loving someone who doesn't love you back.

We have all felt it. We have felt it from a distance – loving someone who may not even care that you exist. We have felt it within a relationship – loving someone who will never, ever love you with the same awful intensity. We have felt it within reach – loving someone who ought to love you back, who probably even likes you a whole lot.

Despite all this, we continue to love. What does this say about us? That those who love unrequited are masochists by nature, that the other half who refuse to love are sadists by nature, and, well, fuck happiness? That the creator – whatever it may be – has a keen sense of irony? That human nature destines us to fail at love, again and again?

Probably, or not. This is no place for conclusions, remember. This is the place where lust and love and fear and and pain meet. No wonder this feeling has been the catalyst for so much art – “The Divine Comedy” is the first thing that comes to mind.

I have never felt so much pain as when I love unrequited. It hurts – no doubt, it rips the heart wide – but it's an exhilarating pain. Nothing makes me feel more alive and more human than loving someone from afar, than loving someone who will never love me back. What a paradox, what terrible irony – that unrequited love, by its very definition without conclusion or satisfaction – should move me to such great heights of love for humanity.