2025-04-26 07:49 Note Type: ongoing Tags: love

I have been thinking about unrequited love for a long time, partly in light of my own experiences, and partly because other people have been kind (or desperate) enough to share their own pain with me. The agony and complicated shame of unrequited love sets it apart from other expressions of human love.

As with all human loves, unrequited love can come with a heavy payload of lust and envy. Envy is an often-overlooked component: the sinful desire to have what is not yours – either the person (who perhaps belongs to another, or to God), or their attributes which you yearn to find in your own heart and do not find. This is a variation on idolatry: you are praying for a gift you can never receive.

Even the most shattering and selfish adulteries get more positive airtime in human history — poetry, love songs, fiction, drama — than unrequited love, which is often dismissed as childish and ridiculous. Solitary heartbreak, it seems, is for losers.

It is no less joyous for this; perhaps this is its eschatological dimension, where it anticipates the joy of communion in heaven with perfected others.

unrequited love is full of pain from two specific sources: grief and shame

But because it is shot through with the effects of the Fall, unrequited love is full of pain from two specific sources: grief and shame. The sense of grief and loss is very real, but without the closure and public sympathy that accompanies a divorce or a death. All the stages of grief are felt by the unrequited lover: denial and isolation, guilt, anger, bargaining, hope, and acceptance. Shame is the other side of this pain, because unrequited love grows in silence and feeds on a deep inner sense of lack of worth. And yet there is no shame in loving another human being; we are specifically designed for it.

Phillips argues in her penultimate chapter, ‘Primal Teacher’, that unrequited love can and should be transformational. Unrequited love forces the lover to notice what is missing from their own life. All forms of love are creative, and unrequited love is no exception. It can trigger immense creativity in the lover, but instead of being directed towards humiliating gestures that are rejected, it can be reclaimed and used, and can serve as a guide towards genuine accomplishment in real life. The traditional and perennial solution to unrequited love is the expression of that creativity. People write, paint, sculpt, plant, refurbish, build, and do all kinds of other creative things in the grip of unrequited love. This can both help to work it out of their system and do some good at the same time.

The unrequited lover sees the beloved as perfected; as the finished product. This is how some have argued that God sees us outside of time, which is why he can continue to love and forgive us with infinite patience. Perhaps unrequited love is a mercifully brief flash of insight into the love which God has for each one of us.

References:

https://www.macrinamagazine.com/posts/toward-a-theology-of-unrequited-love