Unrequited love

Unrequited love is love that is not reciprocated, even though reciprocation is desired. This can lead to feelings such as depression, anxiety, and mood swings such as swift changes between depression and euphoria. The experience of being in unrequited love is often one of limerence.

Related Topics:
Love - Feelings - Depression - Anxiety - Euphoria - Limerence

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Unrequited love can result in obsessive behaviour or transform into hostility to the object of desire (emotional rejection), leading to behaviour such as stalking. This has often caused the afflicted person to be further victimised by name-calling (such as "pervert"). However, unrequited love has also been the inspiration for and topic of many great works of art.

Related Topics:
Emotional rejection - Stalking - Pervert

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Although being in unrequited love can be a torture, it can simultaneously be a source of great joy, and even provide the lover a sense of satisfaction at having somebody to love, even though that love is not returned. This may be seen as "worth" the emotional duress.

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Although unrequited love can last a very long time -- many years, or even decades -- the lover's feelings usually reach a breaking point as they continue to deepen. The love typically ends either when the lover receives reciprocation from the loved (consummation), such feelings subsides (starvation), acknowledgement that their feelings will never be returned leading to suicide, or the person channels their devotion towards another, more reciprocative, object (transformation).

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