RM Journal

the first time my heart was broken, my mother, who'd never read a single self-help book in her life, passed me a tissue and informed me that no man in the universe was worth one of my tears. i was going to wallow, write tormented poetry and spend six months in my pajamas. after two days, she parted my curtains, flung open the windows to let in some fresh air and declared: 'it's enough now' - adding various assurances about there being many fish in the sea.
with the equanimity and grace of what is inescapably now my middle age, i understand it was love - not cold-heartedness - that drove her insistence on steel reinforcements for the sandcastles of my heart. being a romantic by nature, i'd probably still be mooching over a lost love were it not for my practical mother, who wears sensible shoes and has superlative time-management skills.

to love and be loved are the greatest human needs, as deep as hunger, as primary as thirst, as necessary as oxygen. romantic love is, of course, the queen of love, with delicious promises of gropes beneath the sheets and tingles down under. but there's also good old platonic love, love at first sight, arranged love, the 'love-that-dares-not-speak-its-name', long-distance love, maternal love and, the biggest bitch of them all, unrequited love.

some of the greatest works of literature have been inspired by love unreturned. while it certainly plumbs the darkest depths of emotion, and therefore appeals to artists seeking out extreme experiences, there are few better ways to torture ourselves (other than with, say, an eating disorder or a relationship with a married man) than engaging in the masochistic torments of unrequited love.

i've been there. so i'm sympathetic to those suffering the agonies of unrequited love, which induces, as a web site on how to cope with it states, 'low self-esteem, anxiety and mood swings between depression and euphoria', making it sound more like a mental disorder than a state of the heart.
a man i know believes that unrequited love is love at its most uncontaminated and pure, remaining forever elusive and tantalising. real relationships, he claims, lead to domestic arrangements, hair in the sink, complaints about toilet seats and uncapped toothpaste tubes.
this man is 76 years old and still lives with his mother, so obviously that philosophy is working a treat for him.

there are, it seems, only two options: wait it out or confess.
women are socialised into waiting, which is nothing but meekness dressed up in bras and frills.
apparently, stating what you want is unladylike, even slutty.
i've seen too many woman wait. for Valentine's Day cards. for dates. for marriage proposals. i'm all for exercising patience in the right context, but at a certain point waiting becomes less like the seasons and more like concrete. it sets and we find we can't move. there is 'a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.' waiting is no way to live.
we grow pale waiting. ovaries dry up. lust becomes mouldy. there's an expiry date on sitting on an egg, waiting for it to hatch.

fear of rejection is paralysing, only slightly less terrifying than actual rejection itself. but this i know: you can get over rejection. it is easier to move on from a clear no. the heart has a plasticity. we can fall in love again. unrequited love keeps us stuck in a place of incomplete regret.
if we spent more time learning to love ourselves and less on someone who doesn't love us, we'd be a lot closer to the kind of love that gives back and doesn't only ache.
a patient once told a doctor: 'doctor, when i press my toe, it hurts.' the doctor replied: 'don't press your toe.' which is just what Eleanor Roosevelt meant when she said: 'no-one can make you feel inferior without your consent.'
unrequited love has a lot to teach us about how to love ourselves. self-love, you'll notice, is never unreciprocated.

- Joanne Fedler, Vogue Ausralia Feb 2010.


after reading it, i found this article an important one to be aware of and in representation of a topic that should perhaps be kept at the front of anyone's mind.
i omitted some sentences or sections that i found to be less interesting or a little irrelevant. i tried to keep the word count down, but as usual seemed to fail in that.