It’s not, of course. Not when you have it pretty bad, when it is the only thing about which you can think. And not when you don’t, either. If all the songs, and films that are at least partly about unrequited love were to disappear, half the jukebox slots in America would be empty and the video stores would carry much less stock.
Unrequited love is only a bore when you have to hear about it from a suffering friend. And perhaps it is also a bore when you try, as I’m going to do in this essay, to think about how we deal with it. We express or listen to expressions of unrequited love all the time. But there is surprisingly little written about unrequited love that is reflective about the variety of ways in which we might respond to it. And that’s, in one way, surprising because, as I’m going to suggest, unrequited love, understood broadly enough, is one of the defining features of human life.
But in another way, it’s not too surprising that little has been written about unrequited love. The subject, narrowly conceived, is both too ubiquitous and painful. Most of us, at one time or another, have suffered from unrequited love. When we are in the throes of it, the last thing we are capable of doing is to be reflective about it. Nora Ephron once joked that, “just because your heart is breaking is no reason to stop analyzing the experience.” So we—or at least some of us—analyze love affairs gone bad obsessively. When I was in college we joked that a “Wesleyan relationship” consisted of a one month long relationship followed by six months of intense discussion about why the relationship failed. Reflection on why a particular love failed is not, however, reflection on what failed love means to our lives in general.
When we are not in the throes of unrequited love, we keep our distance. We may listen to songs and watch films about it. But some of them are comedies in which we stand back and laugh at the thwarted lovers. And some of them are tragedies in which our fears are expressed and, as Aristotle would put it, purged. Either way, we don’t have an occasion to think about alternative ways we deal or could deal with unrequited love.
And maybe we don’t think about that subject because we can’t imagine any other way to react but suffering. Unrequited love may just be an awful thing we do our best to avoid, even if, as a result we love more cautiously and less often than we might.
That, I’m going to suggest, is not the best approach. Instead, I’m going to urge us to embrace both love and its failures and to find a way to be both bold in love and to keep our equanimity when it fails.
The reasons I’ve been thinking about unrequited love recently are, as usually is the case, heavily over-determined. The first woman I ever loved recently posted a contemporary picture of herself on Facebook and I was surprised by how happy I was that she looked so good. Two of my young friends have recently had bouts of this condition. I’ve been listening to songs by my favorites, Rodgers and Hart, and noticing that Larry Hart’s lyrics tend to be about failed rather than successful love in a ratio of about 30 to 1.
And, I began writing this on the Jewish New Year, the time of the year when my thoughts tend to take a spiritual turn. At one of the services I read a commentary in the Machzor that said that when the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, was distracted from his prayers by a beautiful woman, he thought about how God created the beautiful woman and thus how much more beautiful God must be than the woman. This enabled him to return to his prayers.
Immediately on reading this, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was that I would have reacted in totally the opposite way. I, too, would have taken the beautiful woman and my reaction to her as an indication of the good world God has created for us. But I would have assumed that this was a good reason to think about the woman not God. Why would God got to the trouble to create a woman so beautiful that she can move me if not to give me that very wonderful experience and all to which it might lead?
And then it occurred to me that there is a deeper point here. I’ve fallen in love with beautiful women a few times in my life and sometimes—not always—my love has been unrequited. And maybe that is not so different to my relationship with God who I’ve loved without always feeling that my love was returned.
Let me explore that parallel just a bit.
I was sixteen when I first fell in love. I’m not sure that falling in the love is the best way to describe it. It was not exactly a mature relationship—I had my first and last serious fist fight over that girl. But I suppose what I felt was close enough to love to count. She made me laugh and smile, inspired me, and made me a better person (everyone I knew told me that). Her mere presence delighted me. I loved to talk to her and tried to share as much of my soul as I was capable of doing at that point in my life. I could not get enough of looking at her and touching her.
And when it fell apart so did I. If I remember correctly, my dominant emotion was a sense of injustice, that somehow it was unfair that this woman for whom I cared so much didn’t care for me in the same way. My teenage sense of entitlement led me to think that I deserved to be loved by the person I loved and it seemed deeply unjust that I was not.
When my mothers’ parents both died Valentine’s Day in 1968, my reaction was similar. I just thought about how unjust it was that they had suffered heart attacks in a doctor’s office. (The doctor, who didn’t practice for a month after, was pretty taken aback too.)
I thought especially of my grandfather who was a vital, ambitious, inquisitive life-loving man who suffered a stroke in his early sixties that left his speech terribly garbled, his right arm useless and his right leg almost useless and that cut him off from work he loved. I couldn’t imagine anything that could justify such a punishment and it was then that I started to doubt the traditional understanding of the world as being created by a good, all powerful God.
I was in college when I fell in love again in perhaps a slightly more mature way, with another woman who seemed to glitter. She was beautiful and brilliant and seemed to know everything. We became friends soon and talked all the time—jumping from philosophy to politics to art to music—all the while punning and joking and, sometimes, touching one another. But, despite my awkward attempts to move us beyond friendship to something more, we never got there.
And this time, I was angry. After a while, I started to blame her, to look for the deep flaws that led her to get involved in what seemed like superficial relationships with men who were far from her level. That was right at the time when the armaments available for blaming others for failed love were stockpiled quite high. Christopher Lasch had just published The Culture of Narcissism, and everyone was reading Otto Kernberg on narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. Accusing someone who failed to love you of having one of these personality disorders was far more satisfying than just saying that they were immature or afraid of commitment. I availed myself of these diagnoses and undoubtedly bored some friends to tears until the moment when I stopped myself and jokingly said: “you know I think Kernberg really helps us understand failed love but I just can’t figure out whether I’m the narcissist and she is the borderline or the other way around.” We all laughed so hard that the spell my anger cast over me was broken.
Anger is, of course, another way we deal with our disappointment at God. When my grandparents died, I thought God had failed. But when my Uncle Hesh died, at 43, of colon cancer a few years later, I was just angry at God. Hesh was a good, sweet and funny man and I knew that there was nothing he could have done that justified his suffering or that of his wife and my four cousins. The only thing I could do to deal with my anger was to stop believing in any God who intervened and directed particular events in the world. I remained angry at an impersonal universe for a time but anger at impersonal forces is very difficult to sustain. Instead, if one is at college studying philosophy, one slowly adopts a tone of painful resignation to the utterly randomness of the meaningless world in which we live and begins to smoke Gauloises. And if one goes to Wesleyan, one takes up existential old maid—a card game that is like exactly like old maid except that no one knows which card is the old maid.
There is something true in existentialism. But it now seems to be much more a response to the inflated, fantastical, and ultimately juvenile understanding of the universe embedded in some versions of traditional monotheism than an accurate picture of the world as it really is.
When you expect the world to work as if it were made by a good God who is in ultimate control over our lives, when you recognize that this is very far from how things are, and yet when you cannot accept the notion that everything is made right in the next world, it is a very short step to the conclusion that life is meaningless.
But the Ancient Greeks already knew no one was in charge. Many of us were taught in religious school to make fun of paganism. But when you stop to think about it—and as Shakespeare reminds us in King Lear—a world that is thrown about by semi-powerful gods who use us as pieces in a series of games they play with one another explains what we see around us much more plausibly than the picture given in Genesis 1 of a good all powerful God creating a universe made for us.
And, yet against this background of paganism and chaos, Plato and Aristotle discovered what non-biblical religions have also discovered, that for all the randomness of life, there is a way to live that makes sense for human beings. The core of that way of life is to live in loving and devoted pursuit of justice, friendship, beauty, and wisdom. This is a deeply spiritual ideal, even if no all-powerful (or even semi-powerful) God is there to back it up let alone reward us for living up to it.
The reward of a life devoted to creating the justice we want to see in the world, to taking care of our friends, and to pursuing beauty and wisdom, is to make us, in so far as possible, immune to many of the twists and turns of life that are the product of chance or luck. We are never entirely invulnerable to them. At any time, we can be struck down by illness or accident or an outbreak of violence. But if we can’t totally protect ourselves from the effects of chance or luck, we can find much happiness in life. To do so, howevr, we put aside the struggle for those goods that are most a product of chance or luck: riches, prestige and power. Instead we have to focus on the daily joy of taking small steps toward justice; in standing up for what we believe; in taking time to appreciate music, art and nature; or in using our powers to formulate an aesthetic, moral or philosophical vision of the world and ideal by which to live. These daily joys—and the connection we can make to our friends and lovers who share them with us—give us the sustenance to survive and even flourish against the inevitable injuries of life—both the small defeats and failures we all suffer each and every day and the terrible losses that occur when we lose the people closest to us.
I’m comfortable in saying that a life lived in pursuit of justice, friendship, beauty, and wisdom is lived in pursuit of God. I now see that the vision in Genesis 1, of a good world made for human beings, is realized by the deep order in life that makes the spiritual quest I have described good for human beings. All those facets of the world that make it possible for us to find everyday joy—the work on behalf of justice that we do, which would be meaningless if it were easy; the hard won wisdom we find; the friendships we make, which are so important precisely because there is so much that divides us; and the beautiful things in the world that we have to take time to appreciate—flora and fauna, music, and art, and of course, beautiful women—are there for us to find, appreciate, and take into our lives. They point to the deep order in the world the underlays the chaos and unpredictable events that will throw us this way and that if we don’t keep our soul fixed on what makes sense to me to call God.
If we are lucky, we can find someone to hold our hand as we walk in pursuit of God. We can find someone to love who loves us back as we together try to find the everyday joy the world offers us. But there is no guarantee of finding that kind of love. It is a product of luck and chance.
In the Symposium Plato has Aristophanes tell a wonderful story of how we were once two sided beings, with two heads and four arms and for legs. The Gods split us in two because we challenged them—the implication is that we tried to steal the secret of immortality. And since then, we search, our whole lives if necessary, for our other half.
It is a lovely tale. A life lived with our other half, with someone who shared our ideals and concerns and hopes and dreams, would be just wonderful. But, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, the underlying point of the story is that the pursuit of love is, as often as not, going to end in failure. What, after all, are the odds, of us finding our other half in a world with four billion people? And what if our other half dies before or after we have found him and her? And, even if we find our other half, can we entirely over the split that divides us? Maybe some of us can get this far. But others of us are going to have to compromise and settle for someone who shares some things but not everything with us. And others of us are going to fail in the pursuit of our other half entirely.
The last time I loved a woman who did not love me back—it’s a long time ago now—I was struggling to understand this Platonic-Aristotelian take on life and also to decide what path to take in my life and work. Meeting her made an enormous difference in my life. She, too, was on a spiritual quest. And thus I felt, for the first time in my life, I could open up about so much that was really important to me. I had, finally, found someone who could appreciate my quest and me. And, of course, she was not only beautiful, but smart and funny and had a wonderful way with words. Her passion and compassion moved me. And she inspired me to write and think and, it turned out, live, like no one I had ever met before
We became fast friends but, to my great disappointment, no more than friends. But this time, I saw no injustice and was not angry. For a moment I had trouble believing that our connection would go no further. But when I needed it, she graciously helped bring the point home. And so we remained friends for a time. And during that time, I continued to care for her and she for me. More importantly, she continued to inspire and stimulate me like no else. I never entirely lost a small sense of regret that we couldn’t be more than friends, but that was far overshadowed by the joy and delight I took in friendship with her. She made me smile when I was with her and when I thought of her. Those smiles and much else made my life richer and made me a better person.
So, from the time I recognized that we would not be more than friends, but could be great friends, I never suffered from the pain of unrequited love but was, instead, incredibly grateful for our friendship.
Why couldn’t we love one another in the same way? I don’t know. There is something mysterious about love, about how we connect with others. The three women I described were, quite obviously, similar to one another as they are to the woman I later fell in love with, married, and live with today. But it was not just the characteristics they shared that drew me to them but the distinctive and almost ineffable way in which those characteristics were held together by their inimitable way of being. I fell in love, in part, with the way these women were so much themselves. Somehow, they couldn’t fall in love with how I was myself. It is in a connection at that very deep level of our souls that love grows ups and envelopes two people in its binding power.
When love doesn’t happen, there is no point in seeing injustice or blaming others. Yes, some people are not ready for love. And some of us are damaged in ways that makes it impossible for us to love. But much of the time, when connections between two people don’t rise to the level of love, it has nothing to do with these flaws and everything to do with a failure to connect at the deep level in which our unique identity is formed. Finding our other half really is a matter of luck and chance. And there is nothing much any of us we can do about that.
Well not nothing. We can do three things to live a good life in the face of this contingency. One is to understand our situation rightly. The failure to find love is, most of time, not our failure. It’s not our flaws that keep us from love but the sheer, contingent difficulties of finding our other half. And thus, two, we have to keep trying. If unrequited love scars us so badly that we avoid pursuing it again, we run the danger of shutting down not just the part of our lives that pursues the love of another person but the whole complex of passions that bring us the everyday joy of being alive. For those passions are powered, ultimately, by a love of life and the world that will, unless it is repressed, always seek, even against the odds, the passionate embrace of another person.
And, finally, we have to recognize that, ultimately, loving someone rewards us even if our love is not returned. To find someone whose unique personality inspires and moves us to love is to find someone who can help us see the order in the world that underlies the chaos of life. To find someone we can love, even if they do not return our love, connects us to the vision of a spiritual order that makes life not just bearable but joyful.
And what is true with regard to the men and women we love, and God, is true more generally. For unrequited love is the permanent condition of human kind. Love, as Plato taught us, is the passion that drives us not only to find a partner or God but to accomplish all that we seek in our political and social as well as philosophical and aesthetic lives. Yet we all fall far from so much that we seek to accomplish, so much that we would like to achieve. Winston Churchill said that all political careers end in failure. No great leader has ever achieved all he or she had hoped for. The greatest artists and philosophers fall short of realizing their dreams, again and again. And what is true for the greatest among us is no less true for those of us with lesser ambitions. We are moved by love and passion, by our hope and dreams for the world to seek good things big and small. And much of the time, even when by the standards of the world we are successful, we live with failure. Our love is more often than not, unrequited.
It would be better, of course, if our love were returned. Those of us who have been lucky enough to experience it know that the grace of God, and a good woman or man with which to hold hands, makes life blessed, as do success in politics and philosophical and artistic work. Those of us have been successful at times, or who have found a reciprocal love, even for a time, know just how much it can mean to us. But, many of us have to live a life that is not blessed in this extraordinary way.
It is sometimes difficult to stay close to God or someone we love when we are disappointed that they don’t love us as we had hoped they would. And it is hard to stay true to our ambitions when we are defeated. Our hopes for God and our lovers and friends and the plans we make for our lives sometimes run away from us. However, to stop loving—to stop seeking to change the world or find God or find someone who loves us as we hoped to be loved; to put these dreams out of our life and minds and be angry at the people who inspired them—ultimately damages us far more than unrequited love itself.
The deepest philosophical and religious traditions teach us that the best life for us requires us to sustain our love even when it is unreturned; to stay passionate about our projects for making the world a good and beautiful place even when they fail; to continue to search for God even when she seems absent; and to keep loving the people who, whether they return our love or not, not, inspire, delight, comfort, and support us.
As Larry Hart knew, even if unrequited love’s a bore, we should be glad to be unhappy.
Fools rush in, so here I am
Awfully glad to be unhappy
I can’t win but here I am
More than glad to be unhappy
Unrequited love’s a bore.
And I’ve got it pretty bad
But for someone you adore
It’s a pleasure to be sad
Like a straying baby lamb
With no mama and no papa
I’m so unhappy
But oh so glad