Unrequited Love is the Solution to Another Problem
In the position of unrequited love, I was confused by what seemed like an obvious absurdity. Things cannot be this way. It is like dropping a rock and watching it sail upward. Unrequited love is a direct violation of Newton's third law because one force is NOT met by its counterpart. There must be something wrong which can be set right.
Of course no efforts of mine changed anything in the slightest.
I was also surprised that I was experiencing it as if for the first time, which is absurd since I have experienced it plenty of times before. Yet none of my past experience seemed relevant. Why not?
I recall that about a billion poems and songs have been written on exactly this "problem". Hmmm. All of the centuries of one person in this joy/agony over another person who cares not so much for them. If Nature is economical, why this extravagance that leads nowhere? Why hijack my thoughts and feelings, yay even the state of my physical body (it must be expensive to create electricity in the veins) - to what end? So many centuries of people who, just like me, are convinced that things should be otherwise. Yet this one problem remains completely unsolved despite the application of the sharpest minds and subtlest hearts.
If a problem has no solution, then is it really a problem?
Perhaps the condition itself is a solution to some other problem.
What other problem? How about my own track record in returning the love, say, of my parents, or of the men and women who performed incredible labors that I might have a better life? Broaden that - what of the love I return to the Earth and Sun, which, in a physical sense, are almost entirely responsible for my existence. No, I would say that generally I do not return that love, worse, generally I am oblivious to it, and even return a callous regard. It is not too much to imagine the Earth loving all her creatures equally, giving them delicate conditions and abundant foods, and is that love requited by the average person? If I, a weak-hearted man, can feel to such intensity the pain of my love un-returned, try multiplying that by millions or billions, and consider what unremitting love and pain the Earth must feel because of humankind. Broaden still further to the Creator of All, and I think you can do the math. This heartlessness of humankind is a REAL problem, which I am contributing to. Some cultures (I recall Aztec) describe several Ages of humankind, each of which needed to be destroyed for "going off the rails", and a fresh start made of things. One of the Ages was destroyed because men and women stopped being grateful for the opportunity to live.
Why then do I say that my unrequited love is a solution to this problem? When I am all flummoxed because a woman cares little for me while I adore her, that agitation is almost constant. Which gives me the opportunity to constantly turn around, and look the other way, and consider all the love lavished on me by parents, Earth, Stars and God, and how it might feel when I am oblivious to them. In other words, my experience of unrequited love gives me the opportunity to return the love given to me.
To put it in a more fairy tale sort of fashion: The King and Queen of the Realm loved their subjects very much, and provided them all manner of beauty and nourishment, and even arranged things so that every lover found their beloved. But the men and women of the kingdom became ungrateful and coldhearted, and took all the beauty and abundance and equality in love for granted, and even started to complain about it all! The King and Queen loved their subjects too much to take away the beauty and abundance, but they did decide upon a change to "matters of the heart". The King and Queen ordained that henceforth, many times in the matters of the human heart, Alice would love Bob, but Bob would have eyes only for Carol, while Carol would care not a fig for anyone. And so on. This was done so that many subjects would be given the chance, if they could see it so, to very often realize how difficult it is to love without that love being returned.