Reflection on Unrequited Love
with reference to Responseless Love Story Two
Dr. Tony Coates (Psychotherapist)

Why do we squeeze the knowing of our hearts?

For the most part it seems we have no choice over the person who becomes the object or our yearning. It happens sometimes just out of the blue, quite careless of social mores, political correctness, or moral up­bringing. To respond in such circumstances takes a resolve; a resolve to abandon all such societal concerns, and leap over the cliff top of our own desire, heedless of the gulf that yawns beneath.

If we do not take the plunge, life goes on. On the surface, to our friends and family it is as if nothing had happened, but underneath every­thing has changed. Because we now know the depth of the emotion that life has to offer, and in refusing its offer, we undertake to bear the poignant and anguished regrets of unrealized possibilities, and lost opportunities.

We pine away in secret loneliness, lost in dreams of what might have been, what we missed out on, that, as the years go by can never be.

Why is this? Why cannot we choose rationally whom to love. Indeed why shouldn’t we? Why cannot we choose sensibly the object of our de­sire? The correct person, the approved sex, the right looks, the right body, with the right interests who is suitable, and then just sort of pull a switch and turn on our passion? And if there is no response, simply turn it off and try someone else. But we do not and cannot.

And the memories seem to ring through the years of our lives with exqui­site poignancy.

Psychological theories are many. It is a leftover yearning for omnipo­tence at mother’s breast, a leftover of pathological maternal attachment. Perhaps a primitive drive to return to the womb, a striving for neurophysi­ological limbic resonance, or connection; repressed or twisted sexual de­sire for a parent, some sort of genital envy, a neuro-chemical imbalance that needs correction, or hormones out of control.

There are almost as many theories as there are therapists who espouse them.

We then explain it as if something has gone wrong with our compo­nents; something that needs fixing, like a carburettor that needs tuning, or a worn bearing that needs too much oil. For the most part none of these explanations make any difference. We might understand perhaps a little more but explanations make no difference one way or another. We go on ‘falling’ in love, and with love anyway, and yearning when it is withheld.

Why is this? The reason is not hard to find. The reason is because it is simply life happening. We have no choice over our birth, and for the most part have no choice over our death; neither do we have much choice over our emotions.

Life just seems to happen like this, and we would be all the poorer if it happened in any other way.

[Story]

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