Unrequited (3 page)

Unrequited love is more romantic than mutual love and makes a far better story. Our earliest understanding of the idea of love emphasized the state of wanting, not mutuality or possession:
In ancient Egypt, the hieroglyphic sign for love meant “a long desire.” The state of not having, though on its surface an anathema in our rapacious consumer culture, is truly the essence of narrative. Whether the protagonist seeks treasure, a military victory, or a beloved, not having generates tension and suspense with the constant and pressing question: Will they get what they seek?

Once that question is answered, what happens next can’t possibly hold the same drama. Passionate new love soon simmers down into the banality of a real relationship, with its petty arguments, trivial manipulations, and other small disappointments. In the concluding scene of
The Graduate
, the long quest to win Elaine by Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, comes to a triumphant end as he wrests her away from her wedding to another man. The exuberant pair hops onto a city bus. They don’t stay exuberant for long. Their smiles of victory fade to solemn, almost blank expressions. The newly freed lovers now must get to know each other not as glorious possibilities but as real people, about to experience the flawed and undoubtedly lesser reality of mutual love.

When I first fell for B., I was more than willing to wait for that flawed, lesser reality. I’d already had enough of it with my ex-boyfriend, who, once the early thrill of our romance faded, grew increasingly consumed by erratic work, disappointment over a broken book contract, and trading in his cantankerous BMW for
a new Subaru, with monthly payments that would desiccate his already shaky budget. I wanted to relish my longing for B. It gave my life purpose. When I sat down to write, I wrote for him—to become the kind of person he would be proud to love. I read books and watched movies I imagined myself discussing with him (initially, I often did). I primped in hopes of seeing him. Just walking through the neighborhood turned into a sexually charged game of Where’s Waldo? Is he there, in front of the Giant Eagle supermarket? Or huddled in a booth at the pizza shop? Or on campus, walking through the wrought-iron gates of the shadowy, cavernous ground floor of the Cathedral of Learning? I relished being in that story, that story of
not yet
. Whatever doubt or melancholy I went through in those early weeks was also sweet, my anthem sung in Lauryn Hill’s throaty alto again and again on my stereo:
When it hurts so bad / Why’s it feel so good?

At times I thought B. understood completely what was happening, that we were creating this drama together. For my thirtieth birthday, he had given me the Milan Kundera novel
Slowness
, in which a character recounts the affair between Madame de T. and a young Chevalier in the eighteenth-century French classic
Point de Lendemain
. They spend an evening together, both knowing that the night will conclude with lovemaking. But Madame de T. persists in delaying the act. She makes small talk, she becomes angry. She walks with him through her courtyards and gardens, discussing her philosophy of love, sex, and fidelity. The conversation creates tension and suspense, all in the service of, as Kundera puts it, “protecting love” and turning desire into something memorable, a work of art.

THE IDEA THAT
unrequited love can feel like an exalted state of being came to prominence in eleventh-century Arabia, in a blend of
Muslim and Platonic views about love and desire. Andalusian poet Ibn Hazm wrote admiringly of the lover’s yearning to spiritually unite with the beloved, even as he cautioned against lustful physical consummation of the attraction. The lover, he believed, should be the slave of his beloved. He should address her as
sayyidi—
“my lord”—or
mawlaya,
“my master.” The submissiveness bettered the lover, making him brave, strong, and generous. During the Crusades, these ideas spread to Europe, providing the foundation for what we now recognize as the courtly love ideal.

Like the spiritual longing Ibn Hazm described, courtly love entailed a strictly gendered division of responsibilities. Men loved. Women were loved. The vector of desire was supposed to go one way. Courtly love was never fully mutual and wasn’t supposed to be consummated. In the troubadours’ songs and poems and in medieval literature, the protagonist of the courtly love story had to either remain contented by the mere presence of his beloved, or
suffer the misery of rejection.

Courtly love was
fin amour—
emotional, “fine” love—in contrast to marriage, which was not based on romantic feeling. Most unions were arranged before the intendeds reached puberty, and the purpose of marriage was to increase property holdings and sustain bloodlines. In courtly love, the besotted knight, who could not marry or own property in his prime soldiering years, politely yet fervently pursued his married lady beloved. He hoped for permission to kiss her hand or sit beside her for a few moments. The lady might express some degree of affection in return, or even allow him to
see her naked body without touching it. Secret trysts did sometimes occur. But knights never expected to entrance a lady away from the bonds of marriage.
Courtly love gave the knight a higher purpose in life.

For all its adulterous and subversive elements, courtly love
served the needs of the court. The lady eventually had to spurn her knight’s love, sending him, as historian Barbara Tuchman describes, into “moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire.” Then he would be off on his steed to perform heroic deeds of valor in her honor, seeking to regain her attention and advance his status in the court. The court benefited from a warrior who
sublimated his desire into prowess on the battlefield, and the marriage of the lady and her lord remained intact, his bloodline secure.

But the idea that the unrequited lover had a mission that made his life more meaningful took hold in the medieval imagination. Unrequited love became the fashionable theme of the era, practically a cliché. From this cultural backdrop emerged literature’s most renowned bard of unrequited love, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Dante first spotted Beatrice Portinari in 1274, at a flower festival in their hometown of Florence. They were still children; she was eight, and he was nine. But he knew he was fated to love her. As he recounted in his verse autobiography,
La Vita Nuova
, “Here is a God stronger than I, who shall come to rule over me.” He pursued her in a wistful, boyish way, often going to places around Florence where he thought he might see her. When he was eighteen, she greeted him on the street, filling him with elation and providing the spark that night for the ultimate trippy unrequited love dream: A “lordly figure” held a naked Beatrice wrapped in a crimson cloth. He had a flaming object in his hand. “Behold your heart,” he announced to Dante, then commanded Beatrice to eat it. Reluctantly, she did. The figure, weeping in grief,
ascended with her to heaven. Dante woke up in anguish and began to write one of the
many love sonnets he would compose in her honor.

Dante’s unrequited love for Beatrice shaped his life’s work. He was undaunted by the fact that they rarely saw each other, or that their parents had arranged for them to marry other people, or that
she once got miffed at his lover’s games (he pretended for a time to love another woman in order to screen his passion for Beatrice). The impossibility of their love stirred him rather than dissuaded him; he eventually decided he didn’t want to try to see her, because he would just fall apart in her presence.
He preferred instead to write “words of praise” about her. His passion endured after her tragically early death at twenty-four. In his masterpiece
The Divine Comedy,
Beatrice becomes an angelic Christlike martyr figure who guides him through heaven. His unrequited love wasn’t really about a flesh-and-blood person. It was about devotion to an ideal, a way to glimpse the transcendent.

What Dante did with the idea of Beatrice underscores the fundamental narcissism of unrequited love. It is much more about the lover than it is about the beloved. It may feel submissive, but it is also egocentric—all about what extreme feeling for another can do to transform the
self
. As Dante writes in
La Vita Nuova
: “Thus pallid and void of all power, I come to behold you, thinking to be made whole.”

Beatrice never made Dante whole by requiting his love. But his quest for wholeness through her gave him privilege—a subject to write about, a way to exalt himself through his feelings for a woman he barely knew. His desire was about asserting himself in the world through his fantasy love. As medieval studies scholar Howard Bloch put it, “
The gaze is not upon the woman so much as on the reflection of the man in her eyes.” What the beloved says or does to the lover becomes less important than what he can make out of the idea of her. In Dante’s case, what he made out of Beatrice made his career and cemented his place in literary history.

Granted, the lady got a few benefits out of being adored. Scholars point out that in the glow of courtly love, women became
more than a means to gain property and perpetuate a bloodline.
They could bask in the respect, compliments, close attention, and sensual pleasure of being adored. They had the right of refusal, something unimaginable in the marriage agreements their parents carefully negotiated. However, the object of affection in courtly love had no quest of her own. She did not have the privilege of asserting herself through unrequited passion. Being wanted is an inherently passive position. Her only privilege was the new view from her pedestal—but the surroundings hadn’t changed. Medieval portrayals of women who
did
quest for impossible love make it clear that their infatuations were inappropriate, not enriching or heroic. In Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur,
Sir Lancelot has no inclination to bask in the attentions of Elaine of Astolat. He chastises her for trying to make him feel “constrayned to love.” Before she perishes of heartbreak,
she arranges for her funeral barge to greet him at Camelot and prepares a letter explaining how she died. Her dramatic self-destruction is arguably a kind of masochistic self-exaltation—but a far cry (to put it lightly) from an ennobling quest or literary fame. The privilege of the unrequited lover was unlikely to extend to the medieval woman.

That’s no shock, given the era. But as ideas of unrequited love and human equality evolved, this gender disparity has had considerable staying power. The nineteenth-century French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, known by the pen name Stendhal, took up the cause of unrequited love in postrevolutionary Europe. He was famous for being a serial unrequited lover, a man who, though he had a reputation as a plump womanizing dandy, glorified desire over consummation. His love affairs were rocky and transient; most were one-sided.
He had a reputation for being sexually impotent, and
the protagonists in his novels wrestled with timidity in romance. He never wed. In his autobiography,
The Life of Henry Brulard
(Henry Brulard was one of several pseudonyms he used),
he took stock of all his loves and proclaimed that “my victories . . . did not bring me a pleasure even half as great as
the deep sorrow caused me by my defeats.” Unrequited love, for Stendhal, was a vital experience. He saw himself as picking up where courtly love left off. He may have begged his lovers to let him sit beside them, but he was just as enamored with the effects of
not
being with them; absence fueled his longing and imagination.

As he wrestled with his fiercest and longest passion, for Countess Mathilde Dembowski, he wrote
On Love
, the treatise that would ensure his place in history with its apt and poetic description of how passionate love affects the way the lover sees the beloved—and how the lover experiences the world. He called the process “crystallization”:

The image Stendhal offers here is both magical and organic. The process of crystallization comes from nature. But the result is that the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and only through the gaze of the lover. Crystallization is a state of mind. It shapes the way aspiring lovers see not only their beloved but also the world around them. Love is “a new goal, to which everything is referred and which changes the face of everything,” Stendhal wrote. “
Everything is new, everything is alive, everything breathes the most passionate interest.” Love, he believed, allows you to connect more deeply with
all
that is beautiful in the arts, nature, and human emotion.

Stendhal allowed that women could love deeply and unrequitedly. He professed to admire their hearts, and he advocated for their “moral liberty.” Women, he believed, were particularly vulnerable to love; they had “too much grandeur of soul to love otherwise than with passion.” In principle, it seemed, women could be the desirers as well as the desired, the crystallizers as well as the crystallized.

But with limits. Stendhal held that the experience of yearning was a far lesser one for women. “A woman at her embroidery—an insipid pastime that occupies only her hands—thinks of nothing but her lover; while he, galloping across the plains with his squadron, would be placed under arrest if he muffed a maneuver,” he wrote. As Christina Nehring wittily points out in
A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century,
Stendhal saw crystallization as “ultimately
creative
business for men, and
pathetic
business for women. The girl who ‘crystallizes over her embroidery’ is a target for pity. The man who crystallizes on the back of his arching horse is an object of admiration.
The girl is a fool; the man a tragic hero.”