Unrequited love is a love which is not reciprocated, one-sided, or more generally unequal, resulting in a yearning for more complete love.: "The English language lacked a noun singular for the state of being love smitten, or having fallen in love, until Dorothy Tennov (1979) coined the term, limerence, to fill the void. It is formally defined as follows:
limerence (adjective, limerent) the personal experience of having fallen in love and of being irrationally and fixatedly love stricken or love smitten, irrespective of the degree to which one’s love is requited or unrequited.
[...] Unrequited love is a synonym for unrequited limerence. It leaves a person vulnerable to an attack of lovesickness. Lovesickness may be transitory or prolonged, and major or minor in degree. It may be brought on by a person's anticipatory uncertainty about getting or not getting a reciprocal response to his/her limerence. Lovesickness may be brought on also by unequal proportions of limerence, for example, 100:70 instead of 100:100. The most unequal match is 100:0, total rejection.The formal definition of lovesickness is as follows.
lovesickness the personal experience and manifest expression of agony when the partner with whom one has fallen in love is a total mismatch whose response is indifference, or a partial mismatch whose reciprocity is incomplete, deficient, anomalous, or otherwise unsatisfactory.": "Unrequited love refers to romantic, passionate love that is felt by one person toward another person who feels substantially less attraction toward the lover. It is not necessary that the object of unrequited love be thoroughly indifferent (or be negative and hostile [...]), for as we will see many rejectors do feel some friendship and liking for their admirers. But the discrepancy between liking and loving is apparent to all, and people in love typically find it quite inadequate to hear that the other likes them but fails to love them. We shall also use the term 'love' broadly, referring to any strong romantic attraction." This might occur inside a relationship with unequal love, commitment, or effort between partners, or it might occur in a context where little or no relationship exists between the participants (even as in parasocial love for a celebrity). Lovesickness is the resulting mental state.
Unrequited love generally pertains to the romantic, passionate, infatuated, obsessive, or limerent variety of love (also called "being in love"): a state which is conceptualized as a motivation or drive. This state is commonly distinguished from other types of love: companionate love (or attachment) and compassionate love (or agape). Reciprocal love is called "redamancy".: "REDAM'ANCY (s. from the Lat. redamo to love those that love us, but not used) The act of reciprocal love."
According to the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, the state of being in love is distinguishable from the many other uses of the word "love" (such as caring or concern), for: "Affection and fondness have no 'objective'; they simply exist as feelings in which you are disposed toward actions to which the recipient might or might not respond." The psychiatrist Eric Berne wrote that "Some say one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner."
Unequal (unrequited) love is more common than equal love, according to a study of students. In the ideal scenario, passionate or romantic love would progress with two people meeting, and developing a mutual attraction. This would culminate in a sudden rush of emotion, the escalation of intimacy and commitment, and increasingly more time spent together. However, this does not always happen, and often intense romantic love is one-sided.See also
Interdependence Rather than being a specific emotion itself, romantic love is believed to be a motivation or drive which elicits different emotions depending on the situation: positive feelings when things go well, and negative feelings when awry. Reciprocated love may elicit feelings of joy, ecstasy, or fulfillment, for example, but unrequited love or separation may elicit feelings of sadness, anxiety, or despair.
The feeling of romantic love may also be either pleasant or unpleasant, regardless of the intensity level. One of Dorothy Tennov's interview participants recalls being in love this way: "When I felt [Barry] loved me, I was intensely in love and deliriously happy; when he seemed rejecting, I was still intensely in love, only miserable beyond words."
It is useful then to think of unrequited love in terms of interdependence theory, because the emotions felt and other outcomes are contingent on the actions of the people involved: the would-be lover's experience depends on the actions of the target of their love (the rejector), and vice versa.
Among theorists of love, different perspectives have been given on whether the giving or receiving of love is more important. For example, Erich Fromm emphasized the giving and "the art of loving" as essential to happiness, whereas Carl Rogers emphasized the receiving of unconditional positive regard. Experiences of unrequited love, however, support the idea that neither giving nor receiving by itself is sufficient; rather, the mutual experience of reciprocated love is required for happiness.
Prevalence Unrequited love is common among young adults. A study by Roy Baumeister and Sarah Stillwell found that 92.8% of participants reported at least one "powerful or moderate" experience of unrequited love in the past 5 years. A different study found 63% had a "huge crush" at least once in the past 2 years (but not letting the person know), and unrequited love was four times more frequent than equal love.
Another study found that 20% had experienced unrequited love more than 5 times, according to a definition of "having one's emotions on a roller coaster, finding it difficult to concentrate, and thinking constantly about the person with whom you are in love. The person is said to have the power to produce extreme highs and lows of emotion in you, depending on how he or she acts towards you."
Reasons for unrequited love
Some people have a tendency to fall in love with people who are much more desirable than themselves, so their love tends to be unrequited; Roy Baumeister calls this kind of mismatch "falling upward". Research shows that relationships tend to be successful when the couple is more or less even in attractiveness, so Baumeister suggests that a mismatched relationship may be doomed. According to the "matching hypothesis", while a person might prefer a relationship with an extremely attractive person, they would rather not run the risk of rejection either, so relationships tend to be limited to partners who are similarly attractive. The matching of similar traits in marriage is also called "homogamy"; dissimilarity is "heterogamy".
Unrequited love may flourish in platonic friendships due to the already established relationship. Intimacy is the core of a love relationship, but the feelings may grow in only one person. Another type of scenario where unrequited love may occur is the early stage of a romantic relationship, where after dating for a time, one person's feelings begin to flourish, while the other wishes to discontinue the relation. This may be confusing for both parties, because of the reinforcement from initial reciprocation, and because rejectors may lack insight into their absence of growing desire despite some initial interest.
Those with an anxious attachment style are slightly more prone to unrequited love than other attachment styles, and their fear of abandonment can also drive people away.
Another general factor is the misreading of the beloved's nonverbal communications, mixed messages or other responses. Such misreadings are believed to create a partial reinforcement schedule which makes the feeling difficult to extinguish, prolonging the duration.
Self-expansion The self-expansion model of interpersonal relationships is a variant of the reward theory of attraction which proposes that people have a basic motivation to expand their physical influence, cognitive complexity, social or bodily identity, and self-awareness, and that the psychological reward from falling in love is whatever creates this "expansion of the self". Relationships are an important area for self-expansion, via a process called "inclusion of the other in the self", where aspects of a partner (e.g. traits, skills, attitudes, resources, abilities, and worldviews) are incorporated into one's own self concept.
The theory is used to explain unrequited love, because falling in love may be a desirable experience even when no relationship occurs. Unrequited love may occur then if the reward from self-expansion exceeds the relative probability of reciprocation.
Readiness
Rejectors Roy Baumeister has observed an important difference in the possible outcomes of unrequited love, when analyzing the perspectives of the would-be lover and rejector separately. Even though in some cases, the would-be lover can experience more intense suffering than the rejector is likely to experience, the possible outcomes for the would-be lover also include the opposite extreme: the mutual bliss of living happily ever after, if love was reciprocated. By comparison, the possible outcomes for the rejector are all bad, assuming he or she cannot come to love the other. Baumeister calls the situation a "high-stakes gamble to the would-be lover", but a "no-win situation for the rejector".
While the perspective of the would-be lover is made familiar by our culture through popular media, the rejector's side is largely ignored, incomplete, or inaccurate. In fact, Baumeister's research found that an object of unrequited desire experiences unpleasant emotions as well—like anxiety, frustration, and guilt—and these were mentioned about a third more often in accounts by rejectors than pursuers.
Would-be lovers and rejectors often perpetuate the situation with a "conspiracy of silence", because both parties want to avoid the painful communication. Would-be lovers do not want to hear the rejection, and rejectors do not want to cause the would-be lover to suffer. As a result, rejectors tend to soften the message with compliments or only vague reasoning, and would-be lovers tend to perceive the message as unserious. Dorothy Tennov advocates in her discussion of limerence that an individual who is the object of such an unwanted attraction ought to give the clearest possible rejection, rather than ambiguities such as "I like you as a friend, but...".
Consequences Advantages
Rejection has been the inspiration behind famous literary creations, such as Astrophil and Stella (Sir Philip Sidney), Amoretti (Edmund Spenser), and many of Shakespeare's sonnets. Maurice Evans, a professor at the University of Exeter, calls such works "poetry of frustration".
Eric Berne opined that "The man who is loved by a woman is lucky indeed, but the one to be envied is he who loves, however little he gets in return. How much greater is Dante gazing at Beatrice than Beatrice walking by him in apparent disdain." Dante's lifelong unrequited love for Beatrice is considered a historical example of limerence, in which the obsessed individual spends much of their time fantasizing about the love object.For overview of Dante's story, see
Participants in Baumeister's study claimed to have learned more about themselves from their experience with unrequited love, but this appears to have been largely about the futility of one-sided passion, with a new caution formed about love and relationships.
Disadvantages
Unrequited love can be destructive to the emotional well-being of the people involved, and to the interpersonal bond between them.