accompanied by a certainty that if only the elusive being would return our smiles, come

for dinner or marry us, we would know bliss. Epochal happiness seems tantalisingly close,

wholly real and yet maddeningly out of reach. At such moments, we are often counselled to

try to forget the beloved. We should – given their lack of interest – try to think of

something or someone else. Yet this kindness is deeply misguided. The cure for love does

not lie in ceasing to think of the fugitive lover, but in learning to think more intensely

and constructively about who they might really be. From close up, every human who has ever

lived proves deeply challenging. We are all – at close quarters – trying propositions.

We are short-tempered, vain, deceitful, crass, sentimental, woolly, cold, over-emotional

and chaotic. What prevents us from holding this in mind in relation to certain people

is simply a lack of knowledge. We assume – on the basis of a few charming outside details

– that the target of our passion may miraculously have escaped the fundamentals of the human

condition. They haven't. We just haven't got to know them properly. This is what makes

unrequited love so intense, so long-lasting and so vicious. By preventing us from properly

growing close to them, the beloved also prevents us from tiring of them in the cathartic and

liberating manner that is the gift of requited love. It isn't their charms that are keeping

us magnetised; it is our lack of knowledge of their flaws. The cure for unrequited love

is, in structure, therefore very simple. We must get to know them better. The more we

discovered of them, the less they would ever look like the solution to all our problems.

We would discover the endless small ways in which they were irksome; we'd get to know

how stubborn; how critical; how cold and how hurt by things that strike us as meaningless

they could be. That is, if we got to know them better, we'd realise how much they

had in common with everyone else. Passion can never withstand too much exposure to the

full reality of another person. The unbounded admiration on which it is founded is destroyed

by the knowledge which a properly shared life inevitably brings. The cruelty of unrequited

love isn't really that we haven't been loved back, rather it's that our hopes have

been aroused by someone who can never disappoint us, someone who we will have to keep believing

in because we lack the knowledge that would set us free. We must, in the absence of a

direct cure, undertake an imaginative one. We must accept, without quite knowing the

details, that they would, of course, eventually prove decisively irritating. Everyone does.

We have to believe this not because we know it exactly of them, but because they are – in

the end – human and we know this dark but deeply cheering fact about everyone who has

ever lived.

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