'It is said that man experiences his world. What does that mean?’ (Martin Buber)

In his essay ‘I and Thou’, philosopher and theologian Martin Buber speaks of the power of ‘the world of relation’. According to Buber, whilst relation is mutual, the world has no part in the ‘I’ singular, regardless of whether it relates to inner or outer experience.

Now you may be wondering what this has to do with unrequited love. The answer is everything.

When it comes to love, it is standard to give the ‘I’ singular predominance. But we cannot experience love until we are fully engaged in ‘the world of relation’, in a sphere of knowing, when we look at what is over and against us. But knowledge is not equivalent to Truth. It is composed of infinite ideas, whereas Truth is an absolute: the sum of knowledge and action.

Often when we speak of being ‘in love’ (regardless of whether that love is reciprocated) we are trying to offer an explanation or justification of an experience of love, when in fact it is only a description of our feelings or wishes. When love is described but not reciprocated it adopts a limited role of substitution, occupying a fictional space otherwise filled with experience.

Unrequited love is insatiable.

The prefix describes the differences inscrutably innate within it. ‘Un-requited love’ is the ultimate dichotomy: defined by disorder and disequilibrium. The very imbalances concurrent with human experience that Love seeks to disavow. We might just as well call it ‘unborn love’, a mere twinkle in the eye of Love.

Love is a state of revelation and influence. Without these fundamental conditions we cannot experience love, only describe it. In circumstances of ‘unrequited love’, love is an idea that we hide behind, an image onto which we project an idea of perfection, a boundless inclination (desire, impulse) towards love, rather than reciprocal influence:

A girl in love wishes the faithfulness and devotion of her love could be tested by the faithlessness of the man she loves.’(Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals)

According to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, we use love’s virtues to exploit our desires. He posits that when we claim to commit ‘self-sacrificial’ acts ‘in the name of love’, they are not wholly ‘un-egoistic’, as we do so not for love’s sake, but for our own: ‘man loves something of himself, an idea, a desire, an offspring, more than something else of himself.’

In Ovid’s depiction of the Narcissus myth of Greek legend, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection and in doing so becomes a victim of unrequited love. The obsession proves fatal, and Narcissus dies staring at his own reflection in a stream, too vain to draw away from his image or to drink from the water, afraid he might damage his reflection. The prophet Teiresias foretells of Narcissus’ fate to Echo, a nymph who pines for Narcissus’s love, saying that he could live to an old age ‘as long as he never knew himself’.

When love is deflected by the object of love (as in unrequited love) it is self-originating and therefore even less virtuous (‘un-egoistic’) than reciprocal love. But in the face of so much that is inexplicable, ‘unrequited love’ is just a complicated ‘idea’, a mere reflection or chimera of the realm of fear and self-doubt within which Love functions.

Often when we talk of love we speak of loss and gain, winning and losing, giving and taking. But when love is forsaken it becomes a justification in itself, for itself. When one loves for the sake of love alone, there is no victor.

Unrequited love is akin to Beckett vision of inertia in Waiting for Godot.  For those whom Godot will never come, waiting becomes an end in itself, his presence is substituted for ideas, and no one will be saved that cannot save themselves: ‘Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come –‘.

'I know it's over, still I cling
I don't know where else I can go.

And I know it's over
And it never really began
But in my heart it was so real
And you even spoke to me...’

(The Smiths, I Know It’s Over)

By Amanda Carey/MOLI