On Unrequited Love

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From the Diaries of John Henry

3 min readSep 2, 2016

Ray Charles — Careless Love

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself…

… most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.”

— Carson McCullers, from her collection The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

A friend recently shared this passage online, and I’ll be honest it made me a little sad about how it depicted romance. There’s an objectification about this kind of love, but there’s also an inherent loneliness in the kind of love between a pursuer and their crush. Up until the moment that the chasm between two is crossed, it is easy to feel like there is an invisible wall preventing eye contact, or even as McCullers says like the two are in different countries.

Ray Charles — You Don’t Know Me

I suspect that most romances start with some imbalance of attraction. We are not all blessed with beauty, grace, and eloquence that could trigger the ‘at first sight’ kind of affection. From my experience ‘love at first sight’ is usually more a product of inebriation than anything of substance. Would you rather get asked on a date by someone you just met or someone you have had a chance to interact with over time and gotten to know first? To me, the approach of an acquaintance, someone trying to bridge the gap between friends and something more meaningful, carries so much more weight than that of the fumbling of a stranger — there’s much more on the line.

In the end I think we are probably more alike than we may realize. To those of us still single, we are all at least a little scared, we all build our own walls of protection, we all have our shells that we hide in. To some those barriers might serve to keep out the love of others, to others it might be a cage keeping our arms from being extended. Some of us enjoy being persued and some don’t, but we can only succeed when that dichotomy breaks down and we find a way to share in common that innocent thirst for a deeper connection that mere friendship can’t afford.