Unattainable Unrequited Love.
It’s human to desire things we can’t get. This is equally applicable to unattainable romantic partners. Why is the unattainable so hot? The standard answer is that The Unattainable is in some sense rare and that makes it so precious. Rare things are valuable. When we hold someone valuable, we want that man or woman we can’t get.
So, there is unrequited love and then there is unattainable unrequited love. Unattainable love is always unrequited but unrequited love is not always unattainable. Confused? Ok, so if you fall in love with a best friend and your love is not reciprocated, it is unrequited love, but it is not unattainable. Your friend might start reciprocating your feeling someday. However, if you fall in love with Brad Pitt, your love is definitely going to remain unattainable love, and also unrequited. He doesn’t even know you exist!
Our psychology plays an important role in making us obsessed with getting what we can’t get. It is true that rare is precious and all that, but there is definitely more to it than just this. A number of factors play a role in making us fall in love with the unattainable. As I have written in my post Hopeless Unrequited Love, a good relationship is where both partners feel the support of being pushed to achieve their best, yet being loved for what they are. However, there remains some kind of attraction in falling for just the opposite of what we know will lead to a fulfilling relationship.
The potential affirmation that the feeling of getting the guy or girl that you and no one else can get brings, makes you think you would be very special if they were to fall in love with you. This keeps you going on in unattainable love. The fools that we are, we often do not realise that we are just wasting our time!
Moreover, when we don’t know a person, a star, an artist, or a celebrity, it is easy to see them in a very positive light. The unattainable leaves room for idealization. Because they are always at a distance, you are not exposed to the real person with all of his or her flaws; their flaws are seldom visible or known.
The unattainable love is mysterious. Again, mysterious is desirable. It makes us crave for more. It arouses us and fascinates us. When we cannot interpret the character of a person in normal ways, they become more interesting to us. If you have ever found yourself in a trance-like state while you are with friends and all you have been thinking about is that one special person, while your friends were talking, and you don’t seem to have heard a single word of the conversation for 20 minutes at a stretch, there is scientific evidence to support that you are (insane?) experiencing a normal stage of love.
Love has been found to range from ‘empty love’ when a couple is high in commitment, but lacks any intimacy and passion, to ‘infatuation’, when the passion is pumping but devoid of intimacy or commitment. These are just simplistic notions of love. Actually, love comes in multifaceted forms. The three sides of the triangle usually triangle work in tandem to form more complex experiences. When a couple is on the way to high intimacy and passion, they constantly feel romantic love for each other. This period feels like a honeymoon, because it is that phase of the relationship where you are in a state of intense euphoria and there is a release of reward-activation neurotransmitters, like dopamine in the body. Standard theories of mind don’t apply in unattainable love. The object of our unattainable love is generally uncommunicative. They don’t say a whole lot, nothing to us at all. We see them only briefly. They often have no facial expressions aimed at us. They prevent us from assessing their intentions and emotions. We cannot interpret their intentions. They are unpredictable and unreliable. We don’t know what they are going to do next. It’s the fact that we can’t place them in our ordinary schemes for interpreting people that inspires the strange feeling in us, that we generally start associating with love. The moments of unreturned, unrequited love or lust may be tough. They may even feel vulnerable, gut-wrenchingly sad, lonely, confusing and bare. Yet they are a tough reality of togetherness and separateness. And yet all of us keep falling in and out of unrequited all the time. There is not one person in the world who hasn’t felt unrequited love at some point in life. The unattainable love object puzzles us and allows our brains to dwell on them in order to try to understand them, thereby fueling our attraction.