Unrequited love

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Dante falls in love with Beatrice (in the yellow dress), who will never reciprocate his feelings. Painting by Henry Holiday , 1883

Of unrequited love is when a person love another person brings to, by that other person but either do not or hardly loved. “ Love ” in this context means a strong romantic attraction in connection with the longing to enter into an exclusive, physically intimate and emotionally intensive relationship with the person concerned. Unrequited love appears mainly in two scenarios: either a love relationship does not come about because the loved one does not share the feelings and desires of the loving person; or after initial mutual attraction, one of the partners ceases to desire the other. Unrequited love is one of the most common reasons for heartbreak .

To this day, unrequited love has only been studied sporadically in social psychology ; the most important exception is Roy Baumeister's research . This makes unrequited love all the more present as a topic in literature. There the unrequited loving person is almost always the focus of the depiction, while the perspective of the rejecting person is usually left out.

Definition of terms

Unrequited love is an everyday phenomenon and must be distinguished from erotomania . In the latter, there are not only small illusions on the side of the vain lover, but also markedly delusional features.

A distinction must also be made between unrequited love and cases in which the grief of a person fails after the death of a loved one in the sense that he is unable to open up to new love experiences, but continues to hold on to the love object that has become inaccessible. See: Complicated Grief .

Social Psychology of Unrequited Love

The rejected person

Love brings fulfillment when it describes a circular movement that is shared, escalating happiness between two people . It is not love as such that gives the lover satisfaction, but their reciprocity. Like a strong drug , love can, on the one hand, put people into unique, ecstatic states; like a strong drug, however, it also carries risks of torment and misery. A person who loves in vain, like a drug addict in rehab , is thrown into the brutal and painful process of learning to forego something that has been at the center of his life until then.

An American team of researchers - Baumeister, Wotman, and Stillman - presented a study in 1993 in which a number of people who had experienced unrequited love were asked about their memories. It was characteristic of the rejected persons (would-be lovers) that they remembered the failed love relationship with both positive and strongly negative feelings. The experience had seriously affected her self-esteem ; in order to rebuild it, they constructed what had happened in their memory in an idiosyncratic way: they remembered having been under the impression that the rejecting person actually returned their affection, the rejecting one had deceived them and never clearly communicated that he had love shown not returned. Overall, they found the other person to be inscrutable and his behavior inconsistent.

A team of psychologists from Indiana distinguished between five types of unrequited love in a 2013 study: being in love with someone who is unreachable (e.g., star crush ); Being in love with a loved one; Advertisement for a potential love partner who, in the course of the advertisement, gives the advertiser a “basket”, ie rejects him; Longing for a former love partner; a very unequal relationship. There are many possible reasons why people even fall in love with people who don't reciprocate their feelings. As examples, Baumeister and Wotman cite an inequality in the attractiveness of those involved as well as misunderstandings that result when the pure friendliness of another is mistakenly interpreted as a signal of love interest. According to a study by Charlene Corey Hazan and Phillip Shaver, the greatest risk of behaving awkwardly in love relationships and driving them away is those people who have experienced great insecurity in love in childhood and who can be assigned to an "anxious" bond type ; as adults, they are particularly prone to fear of being let down by other people.

The rejecting person

The memories of the rejectors interviewed by the American research team for the 1993 study differed significantly from those of the rejected. Unlike those of the rejected, their memories were often not ambivalent , but only associated with negative feelings. Yet they too were divided: although they were not aware of any moral guilt, they nevertheless felt guilty in the face of the massive suffering of the rejected person. In order to relieve themselves of these feelings of guilt, many of them described the courtship of the rejected person as abusive and annoying or accused him of self-deception and irrationality.

Many people who do not reciprocate the love of another initially feel grateful and flattered for the affection shown, then struggle to find a way to clarify the facts to the unloved counterpart in a non-hurtful way and feel, if this does not succeed, aversion to the person in the end .

Relevance of the topic for science

As psychologists Roy Baumeister and Sara Wotman have pointed out, unrequited love deserves research attention simply because it is so prevalent in life. For their investigation they had interviewed college students; the respondents were unmarried and on average 21 years old. Around 98% of them stated that they had already experienced unrequited love firsthand; on average they had experienced one major, two medium-sized, and three or four minor love disappointments.

Unrequited love is also a factor that has a strong influence on people's attitudes toward love and intimacy, the sexually preferred gender, and themselves. The physicians Donald Smith and Marianne Hokland ( University of Aarhus ) showed in 1988 that people whose love is not reciprocated also tend to have health problems, such as a weakened immune system .

In general, the phenomenon of unrequited love shows how much love means taking risks: You cannot love without exposing yourself to the risk of being hurt.

Unrequited love and sex

In the survey of college students conducted by Baumeister and Wotman, the male respondents reported more rejections than the female. The social psychologists Charles Hill, Zick Rubin and Letitia Anne Peplau had already observed in 1976 that men fall in love more easily than women, while women lose interest in a partner more easily than men. A study from 2017, on the other hand, showed that, at least in the case of unmarried couples, the initiative for separation comes as often from the man as from the woman.

Cultural Psychology of Unrequited Love

Modern western ideal of love

Unrequited love has not only a socio-psychological, but also a cultural dimension. In modern western societies, love is extremely important. It constitutes one of the highest social values , and passionate love has attained the rank of a high ideal in which individuals seek human fulfillment. People whose love remains unrequited can easily gain the impression - beyond their personal disappointment and emotional trauma - that they have failed in one of the most important points in life .

Supportive narratives

Nikolaus and Alexandra, official engagement photo (1894)

Often the unwavering clinging to an unrequited love is supported by the existence of relevant narratives that suggest that perseverance will always be rewarded with success in the end. As an example of such a narrative, Baumeister and Wotman cite the fate of the last Russian tsar Nicholas , who for many years had unsuccessfully advertised Alix von Hessen-Darmstadt , but was finally accepted as a spouse and even met with lively support. Much more likely, of course, such courtship results in the person being courted perceiving the persistent harassment as increasingly unbearable.

Holding on to unrequited love is supported in a completely different way by many works of literary romanticism (approx. 1795–1848). One example is Friedrich Hölderlin , whose works, such as the Diotima novel Hyperion , tell of an extreme contrast between ideal and reality on the subject of love. The ideal of love is hung so extremely high here that real love relationships never come about.

Self help

In the 1st century AD, following his Ars amatoria , the Roman poet Ovid wrote an didactic poem Remedia amoris with advice on how to put an end to love when it brings more misfortune than luck.

As is not surprising with such a widespread topic, many articles and books from the genre of self-help literature are still written about it. In Psychology Today , in 2015, psychotherapist Diane Barth gave advice to unrequited lovers. This includes the admission of emotional hurt , the understanding that it is the same for many people, the search for patterns in one's own love biography and the abandonment of the idea of ​​a final clarification ("closure").

In 2019, the psychologist Gary W. Lewandowski advised unrequited lovers in the women's magazine Women's Health to cut off contact with the object of their longing and prepare for a kind of grief . If all else fails and the person affected is so restricted by the unrequited love that he can no longer cope with his everyday life, psychotherapy should be started.

art

In the literature

When Werther met Lotte, she was already engaged to Albert. (The Sorrows of Young Werther)

Unrequited love is a common theme in literature, including world literature . Some examples:

Also, children's literature is occasionally unrequited love. Among them are Charles M. Schulz 's comic stories about The Peanuts (since 1947), in which several of the characters are constantly heartbroken, including Charlie Brown because of a red-haired girl who knows nothing about his shy crush on her.

The subject of unrequited love has always found new treatment in poetry . One of many examples is Heinrich Heine's poem A Young Man Loves a Girl (1822).

In addition to the theme of unrequited love, there is also the motif of the (fetched) Fernidol in literature .

In the movie

Many of the above literary works have also been successfully filmed . In addition, however, there are also fictional films that are based on original material or that have become many times better known than the literary models on which they are based. An example of this is Robert Zemeckis ' film Forrest Gump (1994, based on a novel by Winston Groom ), in which Forrest spent half a lifetime trying to get close to his beloved Jenny. As early as 1975 François Truffaut brought his film The Story of Adèle H. to the cinemas, the title character of which tries in vain to win the love of a British officer and ends up mentally deranged in a sanatorium.

In music

Art song

A well-known example of the use of the theme in the art song is Schubert's cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (1823), in which a journeyman miller cannot win the love of the title character and throws himself into a brook out of disappointment.

Madama Butterfly overestimated the depth of Pinkerton's affection.
Opera

A number of the above-mentioned literary works were reworked into libretti and entered cultural heritage as operas . This includes Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin (1879). Compared to Pushkin's verse novel, Onegin's transformation - from a cool dandy who rejects Tatjana's advances to a passionate returnee - is greatly shortened in the opera, so that the depth of Onegin's new feelings remains open. In any case, his desperation over his life decisions is credible.

Pietro Mascagni's opera Guglielmo Ratcliff was premiered in 1895 . The adaptation of a tragedy by Heinrich Heine tells the story of a Scottish nobleman who in vain loves the bride of a rival. In Mascagni's best-known work, Cavalleria Rusticana (1890), the dramatic plot developed from the fact that Santuzza loves Turrido, who in turn cannot forget Lola.

John Luther Long's story Madame Butterfly (1898) would be almost unknown today if Giacomo Puccini had not adapted the text for his opera of the same name . Both tell the story of the former geisha Cho-Cho-San, who committed seppuku when her short-term husband Pinkerton loses interest.

musical

The theme of unrequited love is worked out more strongly than in Victor Hugo 's novel of the same name in the musical Les Misérables (1980), in which Éponine dies in the arms of Marius, who until then had never noticed her love.

Popular music

The subject is also repeatedly taken up in popular music ( The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else , 1924; Schöner Gigolo, poor Gigolo , 1928; Living Next Door to Alice , 1976; Te amo , 2010). In the title Saturday Boy by Billy Bragg (1984), the narrator has to look up the word "unrequited" in the dictionary to understand that his love for a classmate remains unrequited.

literature

  • Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

Web links

Commons : Unrequited Love  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 6 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 7 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  3. ^ A b c Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 8 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ^ A b Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 17 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ^ A b Daniel Goleman : Pain of Unrequited Love Afflicts the Rejecter, Too. In: The New York Times, February 9, 1993. Retrieved May 24, 2019 .
  6. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 2 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 3 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  8. ^ A b Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman, Arlene M. Stillwell: Unrequited love: On heartbreak, anger, guilt, scriptlessness, and humiliation . In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . tape 64 , no. 3 , 1993, p. 377-394 , doi : 10.1037 / 0022-3514.64.3.377 .
  9. ^ Robert G. Bringle, Terri A. Winnick, Robert J. Rydell: The prevalence and nature of unrequited love . In: SAGE Open . tape 2 , no. 2 , 2013, doi : 10.1177 / 2158244013492160 .
  10. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 24–28 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  11. ^ Charlene Corey Hazan, Phillip Shaver: Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process . In: Published in Journal of personality and social psychology . 1987, doi : 10.1037 / 0022-3514.52.3.511 .
  12. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 5 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  13. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 11 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  14. ↑ Donald Smith, Marianne Hokland: Love and salutogenesis in late adolescence> A preliminary investigation . In: Psychology: A Journal of Human Behavior . tape 25 , 1988, pp. 44-59 ( abstract ).
  15. ^ A b Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 10 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  16. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 12 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  17. ^ Charles T. Hill, Zick Rubin, Letitia Anne Peplau: Breakups before marriage: The end of 103 affairs . In: Journal of Social Issues . tape 31 , no. 1 , 1976, p. 147-168 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1540-4560.1976.tb02485.x .
  18. ↑ Michael J. Rosenfeld: Who wants the breakup? Gender and Breakup in Heterosexual Couples. Retrieved May 22, 2019 .
  19. ^ Roy F. Baumeister: Meanings of Life . The Guilford Press, 1991, ISBN 978-0-89862-531-8 .
  20. ^ Roy F. Baumeister, Sara R. Wotman: Breaking Hearts. The Two Sides of Unrequited Love . The Guilford Press, New York, London 1992, ISBN 0-89862-543-2 , pp. 19–22 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  21. ↑ Hölderlin is annoying, isn't it? In: The time . No. 13 , March 19, 2020, p. 53 (interview with Karl-Heinz Ott ).
  22. ^ F. Diane Barth: 6 Ways to Get Past the Pain of Unrequited Love . In: Psychology Today, February 7, 2015.
  23. ↑ Lindsay Geller: 7 Ways To Get Over Your Unrequited Love — For Good . In: Women's Health of January 22, 2019.
  24. ↑ Andrew Collins: Billy Bragg: Still Suitable for Miners . Random, London 2013, ISBN 9780753549230 , p. 24 .