The Benefits Of Rejection

“You tell me.”

My unrequited love and I were standing outside a party when I’d finally mustered the nerve to ask what we were. He briefly turned away, so I prompted him again. After five months of a casual…thing, of daily talk and instantly gravitating towards one another any time we found each other in the same room, he finally fessed up to what I’d suspected in the couple weeks he’d grown distant: there was someone else. He didn’t want me.

This, as Lisa A. Phillips would describe — she’s the author of Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession and a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz in New York — is the soft version of unrequited love. Apart from a slight cry and week-long aversion to food not covered in cheese, I let the situation be. I avoided him, really, until I felt I could be around him (and his girlfriend) again. Phillips, on the other hand, compulsively called her unrequited love B. after he’d rejected her. It all came to head when B. threatened to call the cops, cutting off any lingering ties.

“That was mercy,” she told Medical Daily. “I was so exhausted and I was ready to listen.”

Since then, Phillips made good on her promise to understand this bizarre transformation. She dove into the history and literature on romantic obsession, courtship, and love, as well as surveyed more than 260 women online about their experiences of loving someone who didn’t love them back. To her surprise, unrequited love is incredibly common. It's also more of an opportunity than we realize.

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