Unrequited Love Doesn’t Exist in the World of Contemporary Fiction
I wrote this in 2017, so these thoughts are from my past self.
I have read hundreds of love stories and not one ended in unrequited love. Many of them started there but as the story progressed, their love progressed and you’d see mutual love from a distance.
A happy ending. Very cliché.
Reading is a form of escapism, so it is understandable that those who write fiction tend to write stories quite far from reality. But I think, in my case, I would rather read lonely endings as I want to feel understood.
I feel lonely.
And I believe I am not alone. Happy endings just turn people into hopeless romantics. I myself have become a hopeless romantic as a result of reading (and watching) too many love stories.
Nowadays, unrequited love is everywhere, causing unhappiness and broken hearts. Some even develop mental illnesses because they want to be heard, but they are afraid to be vulnerable.
Being loved is a mystery to some people. Unlike in novels, unrequited love doesn’t always transform into mutual love. It usually ends as is — still unrequited love.
A love that begins and ends without the person’s knowledge. A story in the first-person point of view without an actual ending because it never begins in the first place. Unrequited love is so sad.
Unrequited love happens, and there are people who want to read stories about it. Unfortunately, a plot that ends at the beginning — no ups and downs, no thrills — is boring.
It will not sell because it lacks the elements of a good story.
I searched for books about unrequited love on Google. I might be talking nonsense here. After all, just because I haven’t read any doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
Maybe there are books in those genres I don’t want to read that talk about unrequited love, or maybe I just forgot about that one book I read in the past that talked about it.
Upon scrolling through lists of books, I saw Paper Towns, The Upside of Unrequited, some contemporary young adult books I haven’t read, and some classics I am not interested in reading.
Paper Towns isn’t about unrequited love. It is about Quentin looking for Margo or about Margo’s love for mysteries that she became one. Heh.
The Upside of Unrequited, on the other hand, talks about it but not to such an extent that it talks about the unpleasant parts, such as dealing with (and crying over) relationship problems while single.
The upside, right? It is still about mutual love, like other contemporary young adult books.
In other contemporary young adult books, what happens is that if unrequited love didn’t work, new love would enter and the end would be a happy ending, which doesn’t always occur in real life.
And those classics that were mentioned? I haven’t read them but I read the synopses, and they are either forbidden love or mutual love that both chose to turn a blind eye to.
So, mutual unlove?
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