Being nineteen and in possession of a functioning heart and hormones, I have been in unrequited love many, many times.  In fact, I might dare to say that I am constantly in unrequited love.  Or – let me rephrase that – I constantly care more about some person, whether that be romantically or platonically, than they care about me.  When I was in middle school, my parents assured me that it was just my body trying to get used to the new feelings and new capacities that come with puberty.  When I was in high school, I assumed that I was just being immature, or perhaps that I was too ugly for people to care much about me.

But now I’m in college.  My second year of college, and I still continuously grow attached to certain people and have to fight that attachment back with tooth and claw, because it couldn’t be more obvious that they don’t care at all about me.  I figure that this part of my personality, for better or worse, is here to stay.

Like almost every other little girl in America, I was raised on Disney movies.  The traditional Disney movies, where the girl was beautiful and white and thin, and where she always got her man.  As I grew older, romantic comedies worked the same way.  Every heartbreak, every convoluted love story, was always resolved in 120 minutes.  Heck, even the classic literature I loved so much – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre – always ended up with the happy couple together.  I wanted to tell someone Reader, I married him.  

I still feel like a whiny teenage girl, typing all this out.  It needs to come out, though.  It needs to come out, because I’ve finally realized what the upside to all this is, the upside to being completely and hopelessly in love with someone who has no idea you exist.  The upside is this: selflessness.

Selflessness.  Wow, that’s an important lesson to learn in today’s society.  I still feel like I’m an important person in the world … that if I want or need something badly enough, it will simply come to me.  Is that because I was raised an only child in a first-world country?  Maybe, but I think it’s more visceral than that.  I think everyone, on some level, thinks that they are important and that their fairytale ending is coming.  Even J. Alfred Prufrock, the whiniest teenage girl in recent literature, writes: “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be …” to which my English professor rightly counters: “Who compared you to Hamlet, if not yourself?”

There’s also a sort of magic about unrequited love.  I think people get too focused on the depressing parts of it – the pining away, the vales of tears, the broken hearts, etc. etc. ad infinitum.  There are good parts, too.  Loving someone, caring about them very much, can get you up on a difficult morning.  It makes your day a little brighter when you see them.  Especially when they are happy.  Even if it’s not with you.  This might sound a little creepy, but I never feel quite as alone on Saturday night (the most difficult night of the week) knowing that someone else is out there, someone breathing quietly as they sleep, someone being happy or sad, someone living.  

I think I was born, figuratively speaking, with my heart on the outside of my chest.  It’s been a difficult life in some ways, what with me always running after people who never really acknowledge my existence.  At the same time, however, I’ve always been grateful that I am capable of caring about someone else to such an extent, perhaps more than I care about myself.  In the course of my love for someone, I stop desperately running after them at the exact moment when I realize, “Requited love would be nice, but it isn’t necessary for me to be happy.  It isn’t necessary for them to be happy, either.”

Disney movies and the media led me astray from the day I was born, making me believe that unrequited love is pitiable (and that “unrequited love” only refers to romance.)  In reality, unrequited love is one of the best things you can have.  It’s painful and not for the faint of heart – but by its very nature, it is selfless.  It teaches courage and patience like nothing else I’ve ever encountered.  Please don’t be afraid to love someone who doesn’t love you back.  One should never be afraid to take part in something so beautiful.