Through most of my adult life I’ve been obsessed with unrequited love. Ask me not why or how, for I know not. I simply, and continually, engage in repetitive fantasies of potential love ‘lost’ to my utter lack of confidence and prowess. Potential life partners, soul mates, lovers . . . . lost to hope and stupid, naive dreams.
In my early- to mid-adulthood at some point I realized that my “love” was more adolescent infatuation instead of true (real) love. Yet . . . What is the difference between love and infatuation? How would one define such?
I have paragraphs in my journal as to the potential differences. Yet still . . . I cannot deceive myself that my idiotic amour can be anything more than simple, naive attraction – completely devoid of ‘reality’ with respect to the potential “love” and any fictionalized relationship.
Some applicable quotes . . .
The one essential quality of love: Unattainability. The most intense joy lies not in the having, but in the desire. Delight that never fades . . . bliss that is eternal . . . is only yours when what you most desire is just out of reach. – C.S. Lewis. the movie Shadowlands
Unattainability, the lifetime of impossible dreams . . .
All men know that if one gets easily what he desires he holds it cheap and what formerly he longed for with his whole heart he now considers worthless.
– Andreas Capellanus
The Sufferings of Young Werther is the epitome of this hopeless and longing love . . .
Ah, distance affects us like the future! Before our soul lies a vast, dimly outlined whole in which both feeling and sight lost themselves, and we yearn, ah! To surrender our whole being, to let ourselves be filled with all the rapture of one great glorious emotion – But alas! When we hasten thither, when the there becomes Here, everything is just as it was, and we stand there in our poverty, in our limitation. and our soul thirsts for quickening water that has eluded us.
J.W, von Goethe from The Sufferings of Young Werther
So . . . is it a hopeless dream – devoid of reality? Unfortunately, I believe so.
Live on romantics! I resonate with your passions and desires!
Featured image: Unrequited Love by Ron Masters (flickr CC BY-NC 2.0 Deed)
