What to read when you’re in love with someone who doesn’t love you back.
I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen
If you’re here because you idly clicked but don’t personally relate, then congratulations on avoiding one of life’s shittier predicaments. If you’re here because you lived it and wish to savor the distance between that you and this current one, welcome—aren’t you glad it’s over? But if you’re here because you’re presently pining, yearning, reeling from rejection, newly dumped, freshly ghosted, down bad, or sick of being strung along (no one breadcrumbs someone they love, they just don’t) then I say with sympathy, because you deserve it: I’m sorry.
You may fear that you’ll never stop feeling this gutted; or that you’ll always love this person, no one else; or that what’s keeping them from matching your affection is just you, fundamentally—that you’re defective in some way they find deal-breaking. The first fear is easiest to dispel. You will feel better eventually; no sane person can sustain this acute devastation forever. It’s a pain that burns hot, then burns out. I promise.
The second fear, however, may be half true—but only half. The opening line of Michael Chabon’s terrific story “Ocean Avenue” (from A Model World) is one I haven’t forgotten in the twenty years since I first read it: “If you can still see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible.” Years from now, you may very well think of the person on whom you’re currently stuck and feel a renewed burst of awe and admiration, a bittersweet pang. But you’ll observe it with comfortable detachment, then shake it off and go back to waiting on the gas pump or failing to fold a fitted sheet or, likeliest of all, hanging out with the person you now love instead. So, while you may indeed feel for your rejector forever in the Chabonian sense, it won’t preclude you from fully committing to someone new.
And the final fear I mentioned, the one that says this is happening because something is wrong with you? Give it no quarter. It’s bullshit. First, there’s at least one big thing wrong with everyone, and if that really were a dealbreaker nobody would ever get together. Second, if you travel down that road of self-loathing, not only will you find nothing of use at its end, but you will also have to expend gargantuan effort to return.
Which road to take instead? The one marked Faith. Faith in possibility, and in the exhilarating fact that you know nothing for certain about the rest of your life. There’s some person, startling and beguiling and earmarked for you, who is right now maybe two towns over, or in Lisbon or Accra or Wilmington, Delaware, but who will, however improbably, find their way to you. You likely don’t want to hear it—not now, not yet—but there will come a day when you’ll praise the awful disparity of feeling you’re suffering now, will be glad for it, because without it you’d have missed out on too much.
For the moment, though, that suffering may be a soupy fog choking your days. If you came here looking for fast relief, then I’m sorry again, because that I can’t provide. Only time can. But while time takes a while, many instructive and comforting books are here now, and I hope these selections ease and aid your journey to the other side. Even if reading them shrinks your sorrow only by an ounce, that’s still one less ounce to carry.
1.
Author: Daniel Handler; illustrated by Maira Kalman
Book; Young Adult Fiction (2011)
First, let’s talk about unrequitedness that occurs when a relationship ends in a manner most un-mutual—that is, when you get dumped and find yourself with a bunch of leftover love and nowhere to put it. There’s potency in the objects that a relationship touches, and this brilliantly illustrated novel for young adults (don’t let that stop you!) goes all in on rendering their haunted aura. In its opening pages, Min, the teenaged narrator, drops a box on the front porch of Ed, the other half of the titular breakup. Inside are the totemic items the lovers shared, all illustrated in Kalman’s saturated, idiosyncratic gouache paintings: a movie ticket, a tweed coat, bottlecaps, a pennant. Over the course of the novel, piece by piece, these objects tell the story of a young love and its brutal end. As Min reminds Ed of each item’s meaning, her voice rattles with furious pain. If you’re coming off a breakup, this book will help you cry it out. If you’re not, it will remind you, poignantly, how terribly young one feels when heartbroken—how the capacious emotion of lost love dropkicks us back to adolescence, a time when every sorrow felt this unwieldy, this permanent.
2.
Artist: Duane Michals
Photograph (1967)
Let’s move on to unrequited love of an even more confusing sort: The Bait-and-Switch. The “I Love You…Just Kidding.” Whatever you call it, it sucks.
This Duane Michals photograph (you’ll want to click on the link above before reading further), a candid of an embracing couple, is sweetly innocuous. But the text below it is devastating, and it’s hard to pinpoint why. Is it the statement’s matter-of-factness? The guileless, almost childlike locution of the final line? I don’t know. I just know that I try not to look at it too often. What is evident, though, is that once, this love was reciprocal, and then it wasn’t. It’s implied that the speaker—the man pictured, we presume—didn’t choose this outcome. Why does he now feel a need for “proof”? If you’re wondering this, I’d bet you’ve never been blindsided by a romantic reversal.
Here’s a primer:
Imagine Dick and Jane, two friends. They’ve begun to note a low simmer between them. Pleased, they accelerate their contact, hungry for this new urgency. They talk constantly, meet up frequently. They spend a day, another, a night, holding hands and discussing art and life and their methods for enduring the latter. They remove some clothes, profess some love. Words are spoken, the kind people only say sincerely. Both say them. Then, Dick must go on a trip planned prior. There are aching promises of reunion. Jane floats atop her days. The longed-for thing is coming, the right and good finale: they’ll end up together. Dick returns. Let’s not be apart, he says. No, that took ages, she says. See you Saturday? See you Saturday. On Saturday, Dick is late. He is also strange, smirking, smug. Remote. Jane smells doom. Still, they fall into bed, their activities there rigid and cold. Are you okay, Jane asks. Definitely, Dick says, expression blank. On Sunday, Dick lets extravagant silences build between texts, and over the coming weeks he drifts, dwindles, replies flatly or not at all. Jane grows ill, searches for words that will reverse this, vomiting her attempts onto an indifferent Dick. Why? What changed? Was it the trip? Just tell me. But he won’t. I can’t talk now, Dick says again and again, but I’m sorry you’re sad. Finally, she provokes him into candor:
It's done, so why can’t you just let it be a nice thing that happened? Dick snaps.
The end.
Pining from afar, never confessing your love, hurts bad. Professing it to someone who doesn’t want it or can’t accept it kills, too. But a beloved loving you back, then changing their mind? That’s a matchless torture. More than rejected, one feels tricked. All certainty ruptures (who can be trusted?); all would-be loves inspire suspicion (Have you come to dupe me, too?).
Can I say for sure that a bait-and-switch is what the man in the photograph has experienced? No. But the desperation in his tone—See for yourself!—so clearly evokes the agonized disorientation that an amorous about-face inflicts. In light of love’s sudden withdrawal, the one who’s been left, jolted by their jilting, can begin to feel insane. Had it all been imagined? The speaker in Michals’ image, it seems to me, isn’t trying to convince us that their love was real. He’s addressing himself.
If some Dick has dicked you over in this way, set aside the bewilderment and sit instead with the pain. Don’t look away from it toward a hopeless hope that the person will do another 180. Don’t bash yourself against it with tearful calls and wee-hours texts and howling demands for explanations that, even if offered, won’t satisfy you. Don’t numb it. Instead, feel the gut-punch of that experience and see it for what it is: a not-nice thing that happened, one that will teach you a vital lesson, which is that people are impossibly weird. They do inexplicable things. It’s not for you to try to understand the specific, intricate ways in which that person is screwed up. Your job is to grieve it out of your system, put them in your rearview, and go find someone who’s screwed up in a more compatible way.
3.
Author: Walt Whitman
Poem (1867)
Now, a palate cleanser: the good side of unrequited love. (No, really.) There’s no sense summarizing something short enough to quote in full, so here it is:
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs).
I could tell you how even this, the bummer that you’re living, is a gift—that anything that makes us feel something is precious and valuable. But Uncle Walt’s done a fine job of telling you himself: No genuine love, returned or otherwise, is ever wasted.
Extra Credit: If you’re feeling the verse vibe, see Richard Brautigan’s “I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t.” The first two lines belong in the enjambment hall of fame—plus, it’s funny. Here’s the poem in full:
I feel horrible. She doesn’t
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that’s just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.
If you find a more evocative literary reference to a turd, please send it my way.
4.
Author: Chris Kraus
Book; Fiction/Memoir (1997)
Man, sure are a lot of Dicks in this newsletter!
This selection continues where Whitman leaves off, further elucidating the value of loving one-sidedly. In this squirmy, hilarious, cerebral, stealthily feminist work of autofiction, Chris Kraus, the protagonist, and her husband, Sylvère, spend a friendly, mostly unremarkable evening with an acquaintance named Dick. (Why, what did you think the title referred to?) Something about Dick sends Chris into obsessive freefall. In the days that follow, she speaks incessantly with Sylvère about her all-consuming feelings for this man. (Their marriage is…weird?) They whip themselves into a joint frenzy, a folie à deux a Dick—while the object of their fixation appears not to think of them at all. Inscrutable and peevish, Dick fails to return their calls, so Chris and Sylvère begin to write him mountains of letters they don’t intend to fax. (It was the ‘90s.) Chris’s infatuation—and Sylvère’s infatuation-by-proxy—strangely invigorates their relationship. Believing these letters are coalescing into an intriguing art piece, Sylvère tells Dick about the project and solicits his involvement. You’ll have to read the book to find out how that turns out—but the point is, with regard to Chris’s obsession, the outcome doesn’t matter. Dick is incidental, a vessel, a means to an end. Chris thinks she loves Dick, but what she really loves is how her feelings for him rattle the cage of her stagnant life.
So: What function does the object of your unreturned affection serve? Ask yourself this, then hurry to the next book to continue that line of inquiry.
5.
Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession
Author: Lisa Phillips
Book; Psychology (2019)
Tracing the cultural evolution of lovesickness from Dante’s Beatrice to Glenn Close’s bunny-boiling, this deeply researched book explores the psychological mechanisms that make unrequited love so powerful and persistent. (Did you know there’s talk of adding limerence, the state of all-consuming romantic obsession, to the DSM-5?) Phillips illustrates her findings with her own decades-old tale of uneven ardor—a bold move in light of the depths to which it brought her. (She broke into the guy’s apartment. It wasn’t pretty.)
Phillips’ rational dissection of unreciprocated passion may feel antithetical to, even dismissive of, the emotions you feel right now. If you’re looking to keep the starry-eyed spell of your lovelorn anguish intact, you might not enjoy this book—but read it anyway. It will help.
Phillips’ thesis (like Kraus’s accidental one) is that the object of a one-sided affection is often irrelevant—it’s not really about the person. Instead, she argues, unrequited love can be a message from you to you, “a highly imaginative, life-altering experience that gives us insight about ourselves in a way that tamer emotions rarely do.” It can reveal what we truly want in a partner or from life, how we’ve been hurt (had a distant parent? Expect to chase the aloof type a time or ten), the qualities we admire in others and perhaps wish we ourselves possessed, or the way we manage difficult feelings. There’s also great significance to the person’s context. For example, are you crushing on someone unavailable or inadvisable—a happily married man, a hot priest? Perhaps you’ve chosen them because you don’t want them to return your feelings—after all, that would require engaging intimately with someone, which can be some scary shit.
Unrequited love also tells us plenty about social mores and how we relate to them: “We’re far more comfortable, and, historically, more familiar with the idea of women as the objects of desire and pursuit,” Phillips writes. Loving someone who doesn’t love you back, then, can for women be a kind of assertion, even protest: “Unrequited love, even when endured in secret, without overt pursuit…is a form of rebellion.” To truly inhabit and embrace your feelings, returned or not, is a powerful thing, and good practice for an authentic life. Which is Phillips’ most crucial point: there’s merit in the “emotional honesty of allowing yourself to feel love, even when it can’t be returned.” While some might swallow inconvenient emotions, refusing to acknowledge them, you’ve chosen to face yours. Well done. Whether or not the grand romance pans out, feeling an exhilarating, generative, openhearted geyser of sentiment expands you. Maybe it teaches you that people are unpredictable, like it did for “Jane.” Maybe it helps you write poetry, like it did for Whitman. Maybe it turns up the volume on your life, like it did for Kraus. Whatever your specific experience, in the brutal equation of mismatched love, the loved party remains constant, while the lover, having learned what heartache had to teach, grows exponentially.
And so, as W.H. Auden put it,
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
FURTHER READING:
A ton of literature centers on lopsided love. The House of Mirth, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Sun Also Rises, Cyrano de Bergerac, Love in the Time of Cholera…the list is comically long. Maybe skip the one so grim it once inspired a spate of suicides, or the one you already enjoyed on film in all its Merchant Ivory splendor, and instead turn to a few lesser-known characters who get what you’re going through:
The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud (2013): Lonely, disillusioned, bitter teacher falls in one-sided fascination with brilliant, glamorous family in apartment below. Doesn’t turn out well…
The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa (2008): Narrator, bewitched by lady in question (she’s not interested), runs into her by chance countless times over course of life. Feelings remain stubbornly, painfully strong.
Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt (1975): Classic kids’ novel. Boy, girl fall in love. Boy previously sipped from pond that grants eternal life, wants girl to partake, stay with him. Will she? (Given focus on unrequited love, you can probably guess answer.)
Heartburn, by Nora Ephron (1983): Roman à clef depicting end of author’s marriage to Carl Bernstein, who was cheater, egoist, jerk (Exhibit A)—and yet beloved spouse not easily left.
“Off the Back of a Truck,” by Sloane Crosley (From How Did You Get This Number, 2010): Think Dick wounded Jane? Imagine Dick had girlfriend he never mentioned for whole year of dating. Poor, lucky Sloane: fell hard for liar, wrote exquisite essay. See? Always works out.
Him Her Him Again the End of Him, by Patricia Marx (2007): Age old story of smart, cool girl inexplicably, repeatedly drawn to narcissistic cad. Would be depressing if it weren’t so funny.
The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante (2005): Doting wife is brutally ditched, sinks into desolation, loses identity, utterly falls apart—then gets back up.
Next time: What to read if you badly need a break but don’t know how to take one…