Unrequited love: Agony or Ecstasy?

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” – The very first time that I read this line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ was many years ago, when I hardly knew what love was, let alone unrequited love. But recently I reread the book and the very same line seemed to make a whole lot of sense, and why wouldn’t it, when a lot of things had happened in my life, between the first time I read it and the second time I read it, including love, and that too an unrequited one.

It is strange how love which can be your biggest strength at times, can sometimes also be your biggest weakness. When one is in love, one feels that one can achieve anything in life, there is an immense confidence in oneself, mostly because of the faith that there is someone by your side who thinks the world of you. But when that very source of strength decides to let go of you, decides to break your faith, it can totally rip you of all the confidence you had in yourself. I have often wondered why people go into depression and some even tend to take their lives, when their love fails, when their lovers leave them – is it because the pain of heartbreak is that unbearable, or is it that one totally loses their self-esteem when they realize that someone felt that they were so dispensable that they left them despite of your undying unconditional love for them? I really don’t have an answer to that because I have been through a heartbreak and I have felt both – the pain of heartbreak and the loss of self-worth that it caused.

I have always been a believer of love that lasts an eternity, I still am, but time and again, life keeps giving me instances that prove me wrong. I sometimes feel like I am blast from the past when it comes to my beliefs in love, partly it is because of the movies that I have grown up watching and the books that I have read. I remember having this lunch break conversation with my colleagues almost a year back, when we were discussing the movies that we watched recently. ‘Premam’, a Malayalam movie, a blockbuster hit was hitting the roof of popularity at that time, and naturally our conversation went into that. Everyone at our table was all praise for the movie, when I said that I didn’t like the movie and their jaws dropped, one of my colleagues almost fell of a chair I think in utter disbelief. The movie was the story of coming of age of the protagonist ‘George’, played brilliantly by actor Nivin Pauly. What I didn’t like about the movie was the storyline, of how George falls in love with three women, during different phases of his life. Though all my 80’s friends loved the movie and called it realistic, I was struggling to accept the fact that unrequited love was so easy to get over that the protagonist just kept falling in love at the drop of a lover, sorry hat! Maybe the current generation is totally cool with this idea of moving on in life, one major lifestyle brand even made that their tagline to attract customers in the youth segment! Well, as they say, ‘To each their own’.

But the experience that shook all my beliefs of love and shattered the very foundation of all my beliefs, was my very own love story. It’s strange how those people who proclaim that they will never fall in love, are always the first ones to fall head over heels in love as compared to others, and I was no different. All through my life, I kept telling myself that I will never fall in love, and then one fine day (or should I say, a not so fine day), it happened, I had fallen truly, madly, deeply in love. Being in love – It was a beautiful feeling, a zillion times more beautiful than what I had always thought it would be. All was well in my paradise of love, until that day when I came to know that I was alone in that paradise, when I realized that the person whom I loved was not there to stay, whereas I was in it for life. I have always been a lover of words, I am at my happiest self when I read and when I write, but I never knew that words could also hurt, until that day when I read that e-mail from my now ex-boyfriend, informing me that he no longer wanted to continue our relationship. When I read it, I felt as if my whole life had come to a standstill, as if the ground beneath my feet was slipping and I was spiralling down into an abyss with nothing to hold on to. I read and re-read the message through my eyes filled with tears, and each time I read it, it was becoming very clear to me that he no longer wanted me in his life. In his message, he was asking me not to hate him and to forget and forgive him, but all those lines conveyed only message to me - a “Goodbye forever". So, there I was, with my heart broken into pieces and self-respect hurt beyond repair, tears flowing incessantly, an inexplicable pain in my heart, wishing that it was just a bad dream and that I would wake up soon, only to realize that it was not real. I was not prepared for a situation like this, I was not sure as to what to do next. Should I talk to him, should I go meet him and persuade him to take me back into his life? I thought, I thought a lot about it, and like any self-respecting individual, I decided to walk away with my self-respect intact, but little did I know back then that I was walking into one of the darkest phases of my life. With a lot of pain, I wrote back to him, saying that I respect his decision and that I would stay out of his life. I took the decision to move on, but I was not sure if I would ever be able to. There are times that I wished I could just leave his memories the way he left me! The days, months and the year that followed saw me going from depressed to angry to dejected. Hatred characterized that phase of my life, hatred towards love, towards myself, my beliefs of eternal undying love, towards others, towards everything in life. Those were the days when I used to cry myself to sleep, I used to keep checking my phone constantly for a call, a text, an e-mail from him which never came, I used to put a fake smile on my face to convince the people dear to me, that I was fine when in fact I was crying out loud inside for help, to forget the pain, to forget the hurt. Then there was also one day where I decided to throw self-respect out the window and picked up my phone, dialled his number, begged him to reconsider his decision. If I could undo one day, just one day of my life, then that day definitely is the one I would, because it was the day that made me hate myself, the day I felt that I had let down every single person who cared about me, the day I had fallen in my own eyes.

But then, a year since the break-up, something happened in my life, something which changed my whole perspective towards life, I escaped from a situation from which I never thought I would come out of unhurt, let alone alive. It taught me the value of life, it taught me to appreciate life and to live life without any regrets. It put a lot of things in perspective, including my unrequited love. I realized that it was nothing but a part of this journey of life. In life, we sometimes suffer setbacks, but that does not mean that we stop living, we pull ourselves together and go on. So many hearts break in this world, so many love stories end on a sad note, some love stories end, even before they begin, but life goes on. What I considered a dead-end in life, was nothing but a road block, all I needed was a detour. As compared to the suffering in the world, as compared to the struggles that many go through everyday to make ends meet, as compared to the fights that many go through to stay alive in this world, my broken heart and its pain were hardly anything. There were bigger, better things in life to devote my time, my skills, and my efforts to. I realized that I had blessings that would take me a lifetime to thank my creator for. I realized that I had a gift, a way with words, which I could use to make people laugh, make people think, make people go on a journey into a world that I have created with my words. I started writing more often. I realized that I was fortunate to have got a loving family whose happiness depended entirely on my happiness. I realized that I couldn’t make them happy unless I was happy. But for that to happen, firstly I had to do something, I had to forgive someone. No, it was not the one who had left me, it was the one whom I had left, whom I had stopped loving and caring about – myself. I had to first forgive myself for completely ignoring myself as I mourned over my lost love, for hating myself for having loved someone who was, perhaps not worthy of that love. I realized that I was wrong in punishing myself for a fault that was not mine, I had not left anyone heart broken, and I never would, it is the worst, most demeaning thing that you can do to someone. Once I forgave myself life was easy, life slowly started coming back to normalcy, I was now happy, my writing improved, my work improved, my life improved.

Well, love teaches you a lot of things, but love that remains unrequited teaches you a lot more. If you are able to live through a heart break, be assured that you have a strong heart, and if you are able to forgive the person who broke your heart, then be assured that you have a beautiful one too. I never thought that I would be able to do the “forget and forgive” because the more you try to forget, the more you remember and the more you try to forgive, the more it reminds you of the pain that the person inflicted on you. It took me years to do that, but forget and forgive I did, and it was liberation. What I thought would be the final nail in the coffin, the marriage of my ex-boyfriend (for which I was obviously not invited, but thanks to social media and common friends I came to know), even that didn’t hurt, not even a little. Guess, that’s the power of forgiveness. Unrequited love also taught me a very good lesson in terms of expectations. It is only when we have expectations, we get disappointed in life, when things don’t go as we expect. I had a lot of expectations from love, from the person I loved, which is why I was dejected when they failed. One of the keys to leading a content life is to have nil expectations from people, and from life in general.

I have often wondered if unrequited love is a pain or a pleasure, agony or ecstasy. I still haven’t figured that one out yet, as at times I feel that it is pure agony, a deep sorrow, a pain like none other, but then there are times when I feel like it is one of the most beautiful feelings in this world. Knowing that you were able to love someone so deeply, is indeed a beautiful feeling. Another interesting thing about unrequited love is that one never really gets over unrequited love completely, it is always there somewhere at the back of one’s mind, it may not make its presence felt at all times, but some triggers bring it to the forefront. Well, I can never look at the rain without being reminded of the tears that I have cried over my lost love, or look at the sea without being reminded of that sea inside in those days post breakup. Unrequited love has perhaps left me with a handicap for life when it comes to falling in love; Love and heart break are two roads which once taken are very hard to go down again. However it has made me fall in love with a person who is totally worthy of all the love in the world, and whom I am sure will never break my heart – me, yes it has made me fall in love with myself. Yes, unrequited love is agony, but once you have passed through that initial phase of pain, it is more of an ecstasy. I guess no one can really figure that one out, whether unrequited love is agony or ecstasy. Love is an inexplicable feeling and so is unrequited love, the only way in which one can know how it feels is to experience it, but I would never want anybody’s love to remain unrequited, but to those who know the feeling “Cheers and Happy Valentine’s Day to us”! We are special and so is our love, as it’s ours and ours only.


P.S: There was a time when the mere thought of unrequited love used to bring tears to my eyes, but now I have written a full-length article on it and I still have a smile on my face. As they say "All is well that ends well"; I guess all is well in the world!