Of unrequited love

Just Google it and you’ll find 12.4 million results for unrequited love. Starting with a Wikipedia entry, to beautifully designed Pinterest quotes, books of poems, essays, journals – one gets a distinct feeling that this brand of love is even more popular than ‘real love’.

Search engines aside, there is no one I know who hasn’t felt, known or regretted the pangs of unreciprocated affections. Some regret it because they gave too much of themselves to its vanity and others because they didn’t do enough. Either ways, many of us, at some stage of our lives or another, have loved someone more than our very being (at the time) and then chose to let them go in the spirit of *being sensible*

In many ways, being sensible isn’t bad, on the contrary it’s good. To find someone who loves us back, respects us for who we are, treasures us, wants to make a life with us – thats good, very good. Yet, every now and then when the mind wanders, the heart is back to that very subject of our unrequited love, to the (very) deep sadness that is parked in our souls.

All of this grand emotion and to what purpose, I wonder? If our very DNA is built for survival, why would our hearts get wrapped up in this act of self-destruction?

Maybe it is not self-destructive, after all. Maybe it’s about something bigger than our intelligence. Maybe it’s about knowing that we are capable of loving like love is meant to be – unconditional, omnipotent and omnipresent.

Or maybe it’s just bull! Maybe unreturned love is about our ego. It wouldn’t be so sad, if we were on the receiving end of someone’s selfless and infinite love, right? I wonder if the misery of such fruitless love is nothing but a grown-up version of children who throw big tantrums, cry copious tears  when parents don’t buy them the toy they really, really want.

Lets not get this wrong. I am not for a moment trivialising the pain of endless waiting that goes hand in hand with unappreciated love : the hours spent staring at the phone for it to beep, or many a nights spent dreaming delicious fantasies only to wake up alone in a love-less bed. My question is that why on earth does this thankless love have such a precious hold on our person, that even time cannot dull its (non-existent) lustre?

After much contemplation, and no real answers at hand, all I can think of is that at the end of the day it simply boils down to whether we are more inclined to love intelligently like cats or unconditionally like dogs. To think of it, isn’t it ironic that while cat-love and dog-love are universally understood, it is human-love that remains a huge mystery especially to humans themselves! Perhaps human-love is about loving like dog-people but living like cat-people. No wonder we are so often so lost in this gibberish – maybe that’s why the minions have the taken the world by storm.