Very few people, if they’re being honest, have not felt the glorious pain of unreturned love. Yearning is one of the most exquisite types of agony there is. Not only does it fuel great art (Yeats, Shakespeare, Dante, Van Gogh), it seems to enliven and energise those tormented by it.
It happens to the best of us: in How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran recounts the vividness of her early fictional romances.
“I imagine possible relationships all the time,” she writes. “My God, in my teens I was tragic for it. I scarcely existed in the real world at all. I lived in some kind of . . . Sex Narnia. My love life was busy, exciting and totally imaginary. My first serious relationship was conducted with a famous comedian of the time, and took place wholly in my head. I imagined our house, our dinner party, our social circle, our pets.”
Lisa A Phillips, an American professor and journalist, was so marked by her own first-hand experience of a one-way crush that she has written a compelling tome about it. Part memoir, part scientific inquiry, Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession digs deep into the phenomenon.
The story goes that Phillips, aged 30 and fresh from an unexpected break-up, ran into an old classmate from college, with whom she had “intellectual chemistry”.
“We started spending time together and I call it a ‘fine romance with no kissing’,” she says. “At one point he said he’d end his relationship, and when that didn’t happen I became very confused and upset. I didn’t know what to do with these feelings.”
Things “took a very dark turn” after a while. “I spent a lot of time yearning and acting obsessively, feeling very depressed about how my life was not entwined with his,” she recalls. “I’d call him and leave messages a lot . . . Thank God there was no social media or text messaging, or I’d have been a mess. Still, I was pretty invasive.”
Things came to a head when, convinced she could talk him around to her way of thinking, Phillips arrived at the object of her affection’s apartment in a bid to stage a grand romantic gesture. To say that she was met with a cold front is understating the case: he arrived to the door brandishing a baseball bat and threatening to call the police. Their respective versions of the relationship clearly did not tally. Phillips realised that her compulsion had made her someone she barely recognised.
The episode prompted her to look into the phenomenon of unrequited love, specifically as experienced by women. It tickled her to note that culture viewed men in the same predicament as noble troubadours, while women were deemed shrill hysterics or neurotic spinsters.
Immediate dating profile
Modern technology further compounds the problem, allowing us to click through to the dating profile, book or film that we want, immediately. “We have an impression that we can get what we want, when we want it,” says Phillips. “Pop culture also teaches us that if you try hard enough, you will get that person in the end.”
The complex psychology behind yearning also gets teased apart. “I think that when people are motivated into loving someone who doesn’t love them back, they either think they have a chance of getting that person, or they actively enjoy the state of yearning,” says Phillips. “You hook really important life goals and intellectual fulfilment on to a person, but the truth is that the person is interchangeable.”
The object of one’s desire, in other words, becomes a physical manifestation of the type of person one would like as a life partner. I throw my own theory into the mix, too: that people without a steady partner often need someone – anyone really – to inhabit the space in the brain reserved for romantic thoughts. In an idle moment, the brain drifts towards this sanctuary. Let’s face it, daydreaming about a crush and piecing together an imaginary relationship is comforting, a balm in times of stress.
“I think I was lost and in a lonely place at the time,” says Phillips. “My friends had moved away and were getting into their own family units. There was a lot of instability and uncertainty in my life. And when you think about it, unrequited love is the one relationship that you can completely control, because it’s happening entirely in your head. It becomes frustrating only when you start chasing the imagined ideal and wanting to make it real. The state of being in unrequited love was fun, because I didn’t feel I was ready for a new relationship. But as things intensified, I can’t say I enjoyed that state of mind. ”
Phillips also discovered that, although her childhood was emotionally stable, she tends to veer towards what psychologists call an insecure attachment style in relationships. “I tend to place a little too much value in intimate relationships and would feel very needy and stricken when they weren’t going well,” she says.
Other psychologists have pinpointed traits in those predisposed to lurching from one ill-fated crush to the next. “If you know someone isn’t there for you [in early life], that’s what you know, and it’s what you gravitate towards,” says Phillips. “If you don’t feel worthy of love, you are going to gravitate naturally towards those who don’t give you love.”
Still, one-sided love isn’t all doom and gloom. Quite apart from the benefits to one’s creativity (Phillips finished a novel around the time of her obsession), the author notes that crushes are an integral and healthy part of growing up. Teenage crushes are, after all, the halfway house between Barbie and one’s first sexual partner, a place where young women can navigate their sexuality at a pace they can control. Phillips notes how the shrieks of Beatles obsessives gave way to the first stirrings of the sexual revolution. In this day and age things go awry, One Direction-style, when youngsters don’t have the cognitive sophistication to deal with the ocean of information available about their crushes.
“For a teenager, a crush can provide a dress rehearsal for intimacy,” Phillips says. “You can learn a lot from it, what you value in a relationship and what you don’t. However compelling the fantasy, there’s no significant obligation.”
Erstwhile crush
Phillips, who is married and has a daughter, thought briefly about contacting her erstwhile crush prior to the release of her book, but decided against it.
“It didn’t make sense to reach out to him and dig back into all that,” she says. “I wish he had made different choices on how he treated me, but I do wish him very well.”
Others afflicted with yearning could do worse than occupy themselves with activities that move them away from that emotional landscape. Freud pinpointed sublimation – where we shift our drive for sex into other activities – which goes some way towards explaining all that great art.
“If you feel your crush isn’t healthy or fulfilling, or you can’t use it to inspire and change, and you feel you can’t have that person camping out in your brain, you have to end all contact,” says Phillips. “It’s not something anyone wants to hear. I was lucky insofar as my crush was unequivocal in his feelings, and that was mercy enough for me. But most others need to summon the strength to provide that mercy for themselves.”
- Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession by Lisa A Phillips is available from amazon.co.uk
