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Suzanne Lenglen was the greatest female tennis star of her era. Alain Gerbault, a young, handsome tennis star, fell madly in love with her. Despite his being a major tennis star, World War I flying ace, author, playboy, and yachtsman, she rejected his love. So he quit tennis, bought a small boat and became a hermit, sailing around the world.
Years later his long-dead body was found in a hut on a small island in the South Seas. Ironically, the island he was found on was known by the natives as "The Island Of Lost Love."
The hardest things about unrequited love are not that I can't hold you in my arms, that I will never know the taste of your lips, that I can't make love to you. Those things can be difficult, but they aren't the hardest things. It's being unable to send you the love letters, being unable to brush that lock of hair back from your face, and to smile at your beauty as I do it. It is being unable to do all of the infinitesimal things that love requests me to do that really drives me mad. Love is like that. It desires, of it's own accord, to be expressed in some form. It is a constant force, driving my actions, telling me to reach out and just touch you, only for an instant, just the slightest brush of my fingertips against your face. Sometimes I think the endless bliss of such a thing would be enough to stop my heart. And what a sublime way it would be to go. Love moves all on its own. It requires no encouragement and no motivation. It is as if some sort of intricate and beautifully delicate perpetual motion machine has been set loose inside of me. Only you could do this. I cannot stop it and I cannot let it run free. It runs and runs, and I wonder what it would sound like if it were a real motor turning within me. An exquisite sweet hum, and perhaps a sound like wind chimes on a summer afternoon. Still, the actions which it desires must be held in check. To use a silly metaphor that only a girl as wonderful as you would appreciate, I have to hold my foot on the clutch all day long.
It's all worth it though. I still get to write the love letters, even if I can't send them. And I get to see that lock of hair fall down across your face, even if I can't touch it. Perhaps once in a great while you might accidentally brush against me with your hand, and even if it does not stop my heart, please do not be surprised when I stumble in mid-step because my knees have given way, and my voice falters as I try to explain the simple workings of a distributor cap. Only you could do this, and I would only ever want you to be the one who led me to such a state.
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The agony of it is that you didn't realise just how much you needed them until they put themselves firmly out of reach.
Unrequited love is the understanding that you need someone almost as badly as life itself, and even when they say 'no', you still need them just as much.
Unrequited love is the final knowledge that even in your emptiness you have reached for someone, and maybe, just maybe, have made their life better because of it.
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...I would assume that while we often determine unrequited love as love that isn't returned at all, I would define it as love that cannot or will not be returned to the degree that it is sent out...
The hardest thing about unrequited love is that you cannot remedy it. You cannot beat it into submission with logic, emotions, or the facts. Even the person you are dating and have made confessions of mutual love has the potential to not be able to return your love to the degree that you send it out, and the pain of this realization is enough to keep you up at night, staring at the ceiling, almost on the verge of tears but hot with anger and frustration. Then the little inquisitors start up:
Why can't you just love me back?
Why can't you just show it?
What are you so scared of?
Why can't you love me as much as I love you?
What is wrong with me that you can't love me back?
(all the above borrowed from here: www.everything2.com.)
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for me, it means not being able to share with her the things we should be sharing, not being able to see her smile, hear her laugh, hold her when she cries. it's not being able to start a conversation about something off the wall or totally silly at 3am. it means not being able to feel my arms around her as she leans against me on the chaise lounge as we watch the moon rise over the water. it means not being able to watch her sleep.
it means knowing that i'll never see her smile at me, never hear her eyes tell me "i love you".
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