~~ Unrequited Love ~~

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you initially, and slowly you just give the whole of your being. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you or held your hand with the most tenderness you ever knew, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like “maybe we should be just friends” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real “gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart” pain. I hate love or should I say, I hate not be recognized to be in love.

I've found almost everything ever written about love to be true. Shakespeare said "Journeys end in lovers meeting." What an extraordinary thought. Personally, I have not experienced anything remotely close to that, but I am more than willing to believe Shakespeare had. I suppose I think about love more than anyone really should. I am constantly amazed by its sheer power to alter and define our lives. It was Shakespeare who also said "love is blind". Now that is something I know to be true. For some quite inexplicably, love fades; for others love is simply lost. But then of course love can also be found, even if just for the night. And then, there's another kind of love: the cruelest kind; the one that almost kills its victims. It’s called unrequited love. Of that I am an expert. Most love stories are about people who fall in love with each other. But what about the rest of us? What about our stories, those of us who fall in love alone? We are the victims of the one sided affair, like one way traffic. We are the cursed of the loved ones. We are the unloved ones, the walking wounded. The handicapped without the advantage of a great parking space! Yes, you are looking at one such individual. And I have willingly loved that man for over the most memorable and miserable time of my life! The absolute worst years of my life! The worst Christmas', the worst Birthday's, New Years Eve’s, and worst special occasions…no matter what, brought in by tears and valium. These years that I have been in love have been the darkest days of my life. All because I've been cursed by being in love with a man who does not and will not love me back. Oh god, just the sight of him! Heart pounding! Throat thickening! Absolutely can't swallow! And all the usual symptoms. When he is not around my sun goes under a cloud. His presence in my life is such a bright joy that everything seems in shadow when he is not here. I feel the lack of his glowing energy and contagious vitality. It’s so miserable that he can make me feel so incomplete, like a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a love greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but you are enlarged by your own shining.

It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels a huge burden is off your shoulder and feels independent once again. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of love is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, a deity enshrined in the deepest core of the heart.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, and it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. My mother and father had it, they had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from their branches they found that they were one tree and not two. That’s love.

I understand feeling as small and as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn't know you had inside you. And it doesn't matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of chardonnay you drink with your girlfriends... you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he'll see the light and show up at your door. And after all that, however long all that may be, you'll go somewhere new. And you'll meet people who make you feel worthwhile again. And little pieces of your soul will finally come back. And all that fuzzy stuff, those years of your life that you wasted, that will eventually begin to fade.

What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught, to be held and needed. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels. Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. I was supposed to be the leading lady in my own life, for God's sake! In the movies we have leading ladies and we have the best friend. And I, I can tell, am a leading lady, but for some reason I am behaving like the best friend or rather a co-star. Isn’t it so right? No matter for how long you've been going to a therapist, but she'd never explain things that well. That was brilliant. Brutal, but brilliant.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing. To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

Falling in love with someone isn't always going to be easy... Anger... tears... laughter.. It's when you want to be together despite it all. That's when you truly love another. I'm sure of it. I'm not supposed to love you, I'm not supposed to care, I'm not supposed to live my life wishing you were there. I'm not supposed to wonder where you are or what you do...I'm sorry I can't help myself, I'm in love with you. I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out. I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.

When in love, you experience a variety of emotions. At times, love makes your spirit soar with happiness. At other times, falling in love can bring negative emotions such as jealousy. Then there are times when love treats you like a doormat. But that is the beauty of love. You have to live the experience to know what love is. Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important. There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love. Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one.

I love you. And not, not in a friendly way, although I think we're great friends. And not in a misplaced affection, puppy-dog way, although I love you. Very, very simple, very truly. You are the epitome of everything I have ever looked for in another human being or rather in myself. And I know that you think of me as just a friend, and crossing that line is the furthest thing from an option you would ever consider. But I had to say it. I just, I can't take this anymore. I can't stand next to you without wanting to hold you. I can't look into your eyes without feeling that, that longing you only read about in trashy romance novels. I can't talk to you without wanting to express my love for everything you are. You can't express every feeling that you have every moment that you have them. The only feeling of real loss is when you love someone more than you love your self. Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together and seeing beauty in the multitude of patches.

When you love someone, and you love them with your heart, it never disappears when you're apart. And when you love someone and you've done all you can do. You set them free. And if that love was true....It will all come back to you. The one thing I am proudest of my whole life, is that you were happy with me. If I couldn’t, if couldn’t tell that I was unhappy you sometimes, because I didn’t want to risk hurting the one person I treasure most. I’m so sorry.

Love is like “Rumba”. The rumba, a Latin dance, is the vertical expression of a horizontal wish. You have to hold her, like the skin on her thigh is your reason for living. Let her go, like your heart's being ripped from your chest. Throw her back, like you're going to have your way with her right here on the dance floor. And then finish, like she's ruined you for life.

In love some mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Maybe the desperation cannot be quiet any more and so you fall out of love and similar other institutions of love. The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.

All these promises that we make and we break...why is it that you think people get married? Because we need a witness to our lives. There are a billion people on the planet, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness.”

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up and it just lingers on and on...till the last breath of your life....