If you’ve never experienced unrequited love, you may be the luckiest person in the world regarding matters of the heart.
When I was a sophomore in college, I was one of the unlucky people who experienced unrequited love. I even wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Unlaid, chronicling my quest to find a romantic relationship. In it, I wrote:
Unrequited love is cancer of the soul.
Is there a glitch in our wiring that we can love someone even when that person doesn’t care about us? What’s the purpose of unrequited love in human evolution?
Also, why is it so difficult to switch off this love when you discover the other person will never be romantically interested in you?
I called unrequited love a cancer because I don’t think it ever goes away. It’s a feeling that lingers in the deep corners of your heart and gets resuscitated whenever a thought of that person crosses your mind, or you hear their name.
Coincidentally, writing this has awakened my feelings for… She never loved me, and she’ll never love me, yet I still long for her.
If anyone invents a cure for unrequited love, I will gladly pay $1,000 to get it.