Unrequited Love: The Other Side of the Story

[Goji]

Surprisingly, I was in such a situation once, back in late 2007. The younger sister of one of the Japanese friends I'd met online "fell in love" with me without ever talking to me. She did, eventually, talk to me and she was obnoxious in all the usual teenage girl ways (some things are universal). She asked that I send her pictures of me and I declined, so she got them from my friend (her sister) anyway and apparently plastered them all over her school notebooks. Fortunately for me, teenagers have the attention span of a weasel on crack and after about a month I never heard from her again. I met her sister a couple weeks after I landed in Japan and had forgotten about the whole thing until she brought it up. Apparently she thought it was very funny.

 

[DevilEyes]

I think we all have had, at least once in our lives, a case of unrequited love. It is an experience that most of us share. There is always someone, past and present, which we have thought about all the time. We have plotted for hours figuring out ways of seeing them or talking to them. We have made excuses to be around them as much as possible. I know many have also doodled on a notebook matching your names together. You don’t have to admit it but you know who you are. And for some, where are your nightvision goggles, camouflage, and diary? Are they in the trunk of the car? We probably even have a few restraining orders here don’t we. Oh yes, we do. I can sense it. Then there is the inevitable conclusion to this condition: We finally tell this person how much we love them, either out of desperation or intoxication. We also know how this usually ends… come on you, can say it… badly. The laws of averages give unrequited love a very small success rate. And like a burning rocket ship, our love and ourselves come screaming down into the ground leaving a smoldering pile of mental and emotional wreckage to sift through. How could something so innocent end so horribly?

But what about the people who have been on the other side of the coin? We never think about that, do we? Who here has had a person fall in madly in love with them and you didn’t or couldn’t return the favor? Raise your hands. I know we have people. You see we never think about what happens to them. We never see how difficult it is to crush someone and leave their dreams shattered and scattered across the surface of the earth. Once they dash your hopes you are so busy picking up the pieces you never really process what they are going through. It is understandable. You are busy treating emotional wounds. No one blames you.

So here is point of all this: This thread is not for the jilted. This thread is for the jilters. This thread is for the people who were forced to destroy someone who accidentally fell in love with you. So tell us, who were they, why they fell in love and why you had to emotionally beat them senseless over it. And here is the hardest question of all. Could you have, or did you, change your mind about that person over time?

And please remember, there is no blame here so the jilted need to be kind. We are just having a little confessional to cleanse the soul. (I also want to offer an olive branch to the jilted. You may post here but don’t bogart the thread.)

Oh and I intend to confess later. I just want to see where this goes first. Happy posting!

Yes, I have been the subject of unwanted advances, including "love", more than once or twice. And I can tell you that it's usually very goddamn unpleasant.

Once it was a guy who told me he was in love with me a week after we met, and after we had spent just 3-4 hours together (since he was out of town during that previous week). Now excuse me, but I think that's just someone obsessed with the idea of love, who is looking to find an object for his crush. There's no way you can be madly and deeply in love with a person you've only just met and that you don't even know that well yet. Strongly attracted, yes. But love? The moment he told me that he loved me, what could have been pleasant moments getting to know each other became very uncomfortable and awkward. The more I looked at him, the less attractive I found him, with his sad mopey eyes that seemed to try to do their best to make me feel guilty for not squeeing and falling into his arms.* He wouldn't try to be just friends and see how things develop, since he insisted in the most theatrical way that he was totally in love with me, so that was it.

*It's the same thing as with anyone that comes off too strong too early - it usually works as a real turn off, since I am feeling I am being pressured and pushed into something against my will, which I hate... But guys who can't stop telling you they love you even after you tell them you're not interested are in a way even worse than those that keep trying to touch your thighs or who keep following your around with sexual proposals - because you don't even feel able to just tell the former to go to hell, like you would the latter; no, there is emotional manipulation involved, where you are made to feel like you are being a horrible person who is, ah, shattering his dreams, even though you haven't done anything wrong, and even though they have no claim over you just by virtue of what they feel for you. But there's the problem: our culture is full of pathetic love poems and songs and absurd romantic comedies that celebrate the behavior that can most properly be described as stalking. We are being taught that this is romantic, and that this is what men are supposed to behave - to pursue a woman relentlessly and swear to their undying love, no matter how much she rejects them; in romcoms, we are being taught that the object of such love (usually a woman) will, in the end, change her mind about her stalker, pardon, pursuer, usually a man, and fall in love with him. Well, that's crap. If you're not attracted to someone, you're not going to become attracted to them just because they have been stalking you and moping around you.

In fact, I am the subject of one such "love" right now. I haven't done anything to encourage the guy except talk to him and spend time with him, but for some guys this seems to mean that you have to be interested in them romantically. They don't seem to understand that someone might just be looking for friends, people to talk to. "No" means "maybe", and "maybe" means "yes"? Well, nope. In the beginning, our conversations were pleasant, we were just talking about Star Trek and other subjects. When he started sending me love poems in e-mails, calling me 'darling' etc. and acting like he was my boyfriend, and he seemed unable to catch any of the many signals I was sending that I wasn't interested in him that way, I had to tell him straightforwardly that I am not attracted to him. He said he didn't believe me Then he asked me why I am not attracted to him, to tell him exactly what I dislike about him Then he said I was 'toying with him' for my 'satisfaction', and nonsense like that. Some people seem incapable of understanding that you might just not be attracted to them - no, there has to be something wrong with you, and you can expect long tirades about how you need to change and become more open to people and more in touch in your emotions and less inhibited and so on... oh, and it's got to be that feminist course you attended, what did they teach you there? You have to spell it out for them, and it still doesn't work. Well, I told him to go to hell, slammed the phone removed him from my Facebook friends, but then he later started begging me to forgive him and said he wanted to just be friends. It was OK for a while, he was again sending me messages every day, calling me several times a day, including once at night to ask me why I am not asleep (he noticed I was online on MSN messenger) , now in the friendly way that makes it harder even just to tell him to leave you alone, until he goes too far as with that night call, when I asked him if he was crazy and shouted at him and told him to leave him alone. He occasionally even used terms of endearment, calling me honey and darling a couple of times, which really irritates me, and when I was on holidays in Italy he was still sending me messages every day and asked me to tell him when I'm coming back so he could meet me at the station, which I naturally declined.

I've called him a stalker, told him to leave me alone, that he should understand boundaries, and then he just looks at me with mopey eyes and acts like there is something wrong with me and why I am being like this. Today I really had enough and I hope this will be the end.

And the truth of the matter is, he is the one who gains by us spending time together, not me, because he obviously enjoys being close to me, talking to me on the phone or the messenger, etc., while I derive no enjoyment from it. When you're with someone you're not attracted to - and I don't find his personality nor his physique attractive at all, and the way he talks to me is something I just find annoying - and they can't stop pursuing you with their attention, it just becomes unbearable. Almost every moment spent with them is unpleasant and awkward, and you just find yourself wishing you could be on your own, or with your friends, or with a possibility of meeting someone you could actually be interested in. Maybe I have also been affected by the culture that teaches us that we're such horrible people if we don't allow ourselves to be forced against our will into relationships with people, only because they use corny words and sad glances instead of violence or power... because if I weren't, I wouldn't ever be uncomfortable about telling such people to just go away.

/rant

 

[Gary Mitchell]

A few years ago, during my mercifully brief stint on Myspace, I was contacted by a former high school classmate and exchanged a few back and forth emails and IMs with him, although I did not remember him. He remembered specific details about me, like the jacket I wore every day, where I sat in the drafting class we shared, etc.

Then I deleted my myspace account, and didn't hear from him again, for a long time.

Then out of the blue one day he IMs me. He's like "hey do you remember me?" and I'm like, "ummmm, yeah?" and he launches right into "I've been carrying a torch for you since high school and we were madeforeachotherforeverandever and my fiancee left me and I just lost my job pleasepleasepleasedropeverythingandmovetoMONTANAwithmerightnow so we can be together!!"

Naturally, my first impluse was to blurt out "are you fucking serious?" and my second was to tell him, 'sorry, but I don't really even know who you are, I have a boyfriend -"

That's as far as I got before he started a screaming all cap rampage, for having the gall to date someone instead of waiting for HIM, some random kid from high school I didn't remember. How dare I? How could I betray his love? Why wouldn't I let myself LIVE a little and just do what he KNEW my heart REALLY wanted, etc etc etc.

Recall, this is someone whom I had exchanged a handful of emails with 3 years prior, whom I did not remember at all from when we supposedly shared one class in my Jr year of high school, some 8 years prior.

So, I said, I'm sorry, but you need help, and I'm blocking you now.

In the time it took me to mouse over the browser and block his username on IM, he managed to get three gramatically atrocious, all caps lines about how I was forcing suicide on him for abandoning him so cruel -- BLOCK.

Hope he didn't kill himself, and I hope he got some pyschological help. He obviously needed it.

I'm feeling much better now.

 

[Cheapjack]

I think we all have had, at least once in our lives, a case of unrequited love. It is an experience that most of us share. There is always someone, past and present, which we have thought about all the time. We have plotted for hours figuring out ways of seeing them or talking to them. We have made excuses to be around them as much as possible. I know many have also doodled on a notebook matching your names together. You don’t have to admit it but you know who you are. And for some, where are your nightvision goggles, camouflage, and diary? Are they in the trunk of the car? We probably even have a few restraining orders here don’t we. Oh yes, we do. I can sense it. Then there is the inevitable conclusion to this condition: We finally tell this person how much we love them, either out of desperation or intoxication. We also know how this usually ends… come on you, can say it… badly. The laws of averages give unrequited love a very small success rate. And like a burning rocket ship, our love and ourselves come screaming down into the ground leaving a smoldering pile of mental and emotional wreckage to sift through. How could something so innocent end so horribly?

But what about the people who have been on the other side of the coin? We never think about that, do we? Who here has had a person fall in madly in love with them and you didn’t or couldn’t return the favor? Raise your hands. I know we have people. You see we never think about what happens to them. We never see how difficult it is to crush someone and leave their dreams shattered and scattered across the surface of the earth. Once they dash your hopes you are so busy picking up the pieces you never really process what they are going through. It is understandable. You are busy treating emotional wounds. No one blames you.

So here is point of all this: This thread is not for the jilted. This thread is for the jilters. This thread is for the people who were forced to destroy someone who accidentally fell in love with you. So tell us, who were they, why they fell in love and why you had to emotionally beat them senseless over it. And here is the hardest question of all. Could you have, or did you, change your mind about that person over time?

And please remember, there is no blame here so the jilted need to be kind. We are just having a little confessional to cleanse the soul. (I also want to offer an olive branch to the jilted. You may post here but don’t bogart the thread.)

Oh and I intend to confess later. I just want to see where this goes first. Happy posting!

Yes, I have been the subject of unwanted advances, including "love", more than once or twice. And I can tell you that it's usually very goddamn unpleasant.

Once it was a guy who told me he was in love with me a week after we met, and after we had spent just 3-4 hours together (since he was out of town during that previous week). Now excuse me, but I think that's just someone obsessed with the idea of love, who is looking to find an object for his crush. There's no way you can be madly and deeply in love with a person you've only just met and that you don't even know that well yet. Strongly attracted, yes. But love? The moment he told me that he loved me, what could have been pleasant moments getting to know each other became very uncomfortable and awkward. The more I looked at him, the less attractive I found him, with his sad mopey eyes that seemed to try to do their best to make me feel guilty for not squeeing and falling into his arms.* He wouldn't try to be just friends and see how things develop, since he insisted in the most theatrical way that he was totally in love with me, so that was it.

*It's the same thing as with anyone that comes off too strong too early - it usually works as a real turn off, since I am feeling I am being pressured and pushed into something against my will, which I hate... But guys who can't stop telling you they love you even after you tell them you're not interested are in a way even worse than those that keep trying to touch your thighs or who keep following your around with sexual proposals - because you don't even feel able to just tell the former to go to hell, like you would the latter; no, there is emotional manipulation involved, where you are made to feel like you are being a horrible person who is, ah, shattering his dreams, even though you haven't done anything wrong, and even though they have no claim over you just by virtue of what they feel for you. But there's the problem: our culture is full of pathetic love poems and songs and absurd romantic comedies that celebrate the behavior that can most properly be described as stalking. We are being taught that this is romantic, and that this is what men are supposed to behave - to pursue a woman relentlessly and swear to their undying love, no matter how much she rejects them; in romcoms, we are being taught that the object of such love (usually a woman) will, in the end, change her mind about her stalker, pardon, pursuer, usually a man, and fall in love with him. Well, that's crap. If you're not attracted to someone, you're not going to become attracted to them just because they have been stalking you and moping around you.

In fact, I am the subject of one such "love" right now. I haven't done anything to encourage the guy except talk to him and spend time with him, but for some guys this seems to mean that you have to be interested in them romantically. They don't seem to understand that someone might just be looking for friends, people to talk to. "No" means "maybe", and "maybe" means "yes"? Well, nope. In the beginning, our conversations were pleasant, we were just talking about Star Trek and other subjects. When he started sending me love poems in e-mails, calling me 'darling' etc. and acting like he was my boyfriend, and he seemed unable to catch any of the many signals I was sending that I wasn't interested in him that way, I had to tell him straightforwardly that I am not attracted to him. He said he didn't believe me Then he asked me why I am not attracted to him, to tell him exactly what I dislike about him Then he said I was 'toying with him' for my 'satisfaction', and nonsense like that. Some people seem incapable of understanding that you might just not be attracted to them - no, there has to be something wrong with you, and you can expect long tirades about how you need to change and become more open to people and more in touch in your emotions and less inhibited and so on... oh, and it's got to be that feminist course you attended, what did they teach you there? You have to spell it out for them, and it still doesn't work. Well, I told him to go to hell, slammed the phone removed him from my Facebook friends, but then he later started begging me to forgive him and said he wanted to just be friends. It was OK for a while, he was again sending me messages every day, calling me several times a day, including once at night to ask me why I am not asleep (he noticed I was online on MSN messenger) , now in the friendly way that makes it harder even just to tell him to leave you alone, until he goes too far as with that night call, when I asked him if he was crazy and shouted at him and told him to leave him alone. He occasionally even used terms of endearment, calling me honey and darling a couple of times, which really irritates me, and when I was on holidays in Italy he was still sending me messages every day and asked me to tell him when I'm coming back so he could meet me at the station, which I naturally declined.

I've called him a stalker, told him to leave me alone, that he should understand boundaries, and then he just looks at me with mopey eyes and acts like there is something wrong with me and why I am being like this. Today I really had enough and I hope this will be the end.

And the truth of the matter is, he is the one who gains by us spending time together, not me, because he obviously enjoys being close to me, talking to me on the phone or the messenger, etc., while I derive no enjoyment from it. When you're with someone you're not attracted to - and I don't find his personality nor his physique attractive at all, and the way he talks to me is something I just find annoying - and they can't stop pursuing you with their attention, it just becomes unbearable. Almost every moment spent with them is unpleasant and awkward, and you just find yourself wishing you could be on your own, or with your friends, or with a possibility of meeting someone you could actually be interested in. Maybe I have also been affected by the culture that teaches us that we're such horrible people if we don't allow ourselves to be forced against our will into relationships with people, only because they use corny words and sad glances instead of violence or power... because if I weren't, I wouldn't ever be uncomfortable about telling such people to just go away.

/rant

You shouldn't feel forced into anything against your will, devileyes. Corny words and sad glances are more sort of blackmail, I guess, or bribery. And, of course, you should just regard it with tolerance and amusement and firmness. And you shouldn't at all spend time with people you don't like. Tell them you don't like them.

I'm a bit disturbed about your ideas on the use of power and violence to gain sex, if you're a woman?

 

[DevilEyes]

You shouldn't feel forced into anything against your will, devileyes.

And I don't ever allow myself to be forced into anything. It is not in my character.

I'm a bit disturbed about your ideas on the use of power and violence to gain sex, if you're a woman?

I don't understand what you mean there.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

DevilEyes, just tell him you don't want to see him anymore! If he refuses, threaten to call the police--and if that doesn't care him off, do it. Get a restraining order if you have to. You clearly don't like spending time with him, you told him to get lost, and he's not getting the message. Quite honestly, you aren't being firm enough with him in getting him to back off.

Don't hesitate to call the cops if he keeps harassing you. You don't have to put up with that.

 

[Cheapjack]

You shouldn't feel forced into anything against your will, devileyes.

And I don't ever allow myself to be forced into anything. It is not in my character.

I'm a bit disturbed about your ideas on the use of power and violence to gain sex, if you're a woman?

I don't understand what you mean there.

You use a few double negatives, but you seem to be saying that power and violence are preferable to emotional blackmail???????

Anyway, you've told him to get lost, so that's final.

 

[DevilEyes]

You shouldn't feel forced into anything against your will, devileyes.

And I don't ever allow myself to be forced into anything. It is not in my character.

I'm a bit disturbed about your ideas on the use of power and violence to gain sex, if you're a woman?

I don't understand what you mean there.

You use a few double negatives, but you seem to be saying that power and violence are preferable to emotional blackmail???????

Double negatives? As in "I don't understand nothing of what you are saying" or "I don't never allow myself to be patronized or forced into something against my will" or "I don't need no patronizing"? Um, sorry, but no, I am pretty sure I have never used those in English, since I know English grammar very well. I think you may need to check the meaning of the term "double negative".

Oh gosh, you are one of those people who take everything literally, don't you? I think I was perfectly clear: violence and physical/verbal aggressiveness I can more easily deal with, because it's out there in the open, I immediately know that this person is an unambiguous asshole and can tell them to fuck off and not think twice about it, period. But when someone starts off as a friend/acquaintance you think you can have a pleasant conversation with, and then start smothering you with unwanted attention and signs of feelings that you can't reciprocate, you aren't sure what the right thing to do it and it can take a lot of time until you realize that they've become unbearable, and before you manage to shake them off.

 

[Cheapjack]

DevilEyes,

I see what you are getting at. You are right to be peeved. When I have had this done to me by women, I find that rearing back in distaste, with icy rejection, works, at least for a man? Not that I have had many women do this to me, only six foot tall giantesses, with hands like pincers. You should tell him to get lost again or rip the p*** out of him. That wilts desire! Failing that, the police.

You can get some places where abuse is part of the culture, almost, and inadequate men rule the roost. They can sometimes step in and stop a relationship that is going to be non-abusive and appear to be so protective. The irony of that cuts deep.