WHEN I WAS in the grip of despair about a situation of unrequited love, I decided to make a list of the benefits of that state. Alas, I cannot find that list, and I don’t remember a single thing I wrote in an effort to assuage my pain. What I do remember, though, are three masterful articulations of unrequited love, each of which I read repeatedly—and still do, even if I happen to be in a state of blissfully requited love, as if keeping my emotional muscles toned for potential future hurt.
I consider Mary Oliver the best and most prolific living poet. Attend one of her public readings and you’ll hear her fans shout out requests, as if the septuagenarian had walked on stage with a bass guitar slung over her shoulder. They’ll likely call for her to read her iconic “Wild Geese,” which begins with the memorable lines, “You do not have to be good./ You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.” This is not exactly a poem about unrequited love, but it is a love poem to everyone, assuring us that we are loved: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,/ calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—/ over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.”
But it is her poem “Doesn’t Every Poet Write a Poem about Unrequited Love” that addresses the topic head-on. In this work, the narrator knows that to bring her object of affection flowers picked from the “wild dunes” would be the wrong thing to do. For she knows that “your smile would have been nowhere/ and maybe you would have tossed them/ onto the ground. In matters of love/ of this kind/ there are things we long to do/ but must not do.” Yes, that means not picking those wildflowers, not buying that tchotchke you know the one you love would like, not writing the love letter or sending the Valentine’s card. After all, “the flowers, anyways,/ are happy just where they are, on the pale dunes,/ above the cricket’s humble nest,/ under the blue sky/ that loves us all.” See, you are loved back, just not by the one you desire most. Another place where I often seek refuge and solace when I’m in love with someone who loves me not is the Poet’s Corner in New York’s St. John the Divine. There, incised in stone as they should be in our minds, are W. H. Auden’s simple lines from his poem, “The More Loving One”: “If equal affection cannot be,/ Let the more loving one be me.” How right he is. As much as we can feel victimized by feelings that are not returned, we need to remember that many of us have hurt others, perhaps inadvertently, who may have desired us in ways that we could not return. It’s not that it’s easier to be the more loving one, but it is certainly a state in which, paradoxically, we have more control. There, we are the master of our feelings and the only person we are hurting is our self. Another philosopher of love and among its best elaborators was the late (straight) writer Laurie Colwin. Her short story “The Lone Pilgrim” is perhaps the most honest articulation of love in contemporary fiction. “Woe to those who get what they desire,” the narrator says in the story, the title for a collection published in 1981. “Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects.” To occupy that state of unrequited love is to pine and pace and the like. On the fact that the narrator is caught in the situation, Colwin writes of her female character: “Being in love with him brought me all the things in life I counted on: a sense of longing, something to turn over and over in my mind, and that clear, slightly manic vision you get with unrequited love.” And: “The solitary mind likes to reflect on the pain of past love. If you are all alone, it gives you something to react to, a sort of exercise to keep the muscles flexed.” There is, oddly, a kind of joy in unrequited love. It is a fixation at once immediately familiar, so much so that it can be, for spells, oddly comforting. But as it fades, and it will and does, we seek out that state less and less. I once asked a close friend, Lee Stern, whom I often consider to be my casual, go-to philosopher, what the evolutionary purpose of unrequited love might be. He said to me: “ Maybe it exists because it makes people create art.” David Masello writes about art and culture from New York City.
