Unrequited love

Unrequited love is a love which is not reciprocated, one-sided or more generally unequal, resulting in a yearning for more complete love. Lovesickness is the resulting mental state. This might occur in a context where little or no relationship exists between the participants (even as in parasocial love for a celebrity), or it might occur inside a relationship with unequal love, commitment or effort. Unequal (unrequited) love is more common than equal love. Reciprocal love is called "redamancy".

Unrequited love generally pertains to the romantic, passionate, infatuated, obsessive or limerent variety of love (also called "being in love"): a state which is conceptualized as a motivation or drive. This state is commonly distinguished from other types of love: companionate love (or attachment) and compassionate love (or agape).

According to the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, the state of "being in love" is distinguishable from the many other uses of the word "love" (such as caring or concern), for: 'Affection and fondness have no "objective"; they simply exist as feelings in which you are disposed toward actions to which the recipient might or might not respond.' The psychiatrist Eric Berne said in his 1970 book Sex in Human Loving that "Some say that one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner."

According to Roy Baumeister, what makes a person desirable is a complex and highly personal mix of many qualities and traits. Falling for someone who is much more desirable than oneself—whether because of physical beauty or attributes like charm, intelligence, wit or status—Baumeister calls "prone to find [its] love unrequited" and states that such relationships will not last.

"Platonic friendships provide a fertile soil for unrequited love." Thus the object of unrequited love is often a friend or acquaintance, someone regularly encountered in the workplace, during the course of work, school or other activities involving large groups of people. This creates an awkward situation in which the admirer has difficulty in expressing their true feelings, a fear that revelation of feelings might invite rejection, cause embarrassment or might end all access to the beloved, as a romantic relationship may be inconsistent with the existing association.

"There are two bad sides to unrequited love, but only one is made familiar by our culture"—that of the lover, not the rejector. In fact, research suggests that the object of unrequited affection experiences a variety of negative emotions exceeding those of the suitor, including anxiety, frustration, and guilt. As Freud pointed out, "when a woman sues for love, to reject and refuse is a distressing part for a man to play".

Unrequited love has long been depicted as noble, an unselfish and stoic willingness to accept suffering. Literary and artistic depictions of unrequited love may depend on assumptions of social distance that have less relevance in western, democratic societies with relatively high social mobility and less rigid codes of sexual fidelity. Nonetheless, the literary record suggests a degree of euphoria in the feelings associated with unrequited love, which has the advantage as well of carrying none of the responsibilities of mutual relationships: certainly, "rejection, apparent or real, may be the catalyst for inspired literary creation... 'the poetry of frustration'."

Eric Berne considered that "the man who is loved by a woman is lucky indeed, but the one to be envied is he who loves, however little he gets in return. How much greater is Dante gazing at Beatrice than Beatrice walking by him in apparent disdain."