The Bitterness Of Impossible And Frustrated Loves
Who has not had one? One of those impossible loves that you know only exists in you. Idealized and precious, which can be made of porcelain because you know that they will never collide with the reality that makes them, worth the redundancy, real. Less frequent nowadays is to live a contrary love, understood as that reciprocated love that reality, in very different ways, does not allow its enjoyment.
These two types of love are confused and in fact in our language we use them interchangeably, although they are not equivalent. In fact, both types of love are subject to different characteristics that have to do with emotions and circumstances that go beyond the feeling of love itself, as we will see.
The bitterness of impossible loves
The first of the types of love that hurts is that of impossible loves: that love that one person feels for another and that is not reciprocated. In addition, for it to be impossible, it must be characterized by never being able to be reciprocated: “I can’t feel the same.”
It is often said in these cases that the person with whom we fall in love is the only one capable of making us feel two emotional extremes: we will see her as the one who can give us all the happiness we think we need and, at the same time, the one who takes it away from us. said happiness would come only when love was reciprocated.
Impossible loves bring with them a constant feeling of discomfort and sadness : we cannot help feeling what we feel for someone and yet we cannot express it as we would like. In this sense, the bitterness of experiencing this kind of love intensifies when we imagine what it would be like if it were reciprocal.
The bitterness of the disgruntled
On a side parallel to that of impossible loves, we find what the writer García Márquez called contradictory loves in his novel Love in the Times of Cholera . By this he was referring to the one who feels and hurts, who is reciprocated and is difficult to materialize due to circumstances external to those in love.
In other words, cross love is a perfect love that is unlikely to develop for different reasons : incompatibilities, family pressures, friendships that do not want to spoil, fear of emotional dependence, etc. That is to say, it is a tragic love, in the manner of Romeo and Juliet.
It has been said that this love is the worst of all, because those who love each other will feel frustration: “I want, we want and we cannot”. They both know that the other person is the one who understands and complements them, who loves them for who they are. In the same way, the two protagonists of this love do not know how to overcome the obstacles.
Contradictory loves are characterized above all by impotence, which turns into suffering on both sides. They will know that “for my sake, for your sake, for our sake, because of the circumstances,” their paths have crossed and only with much effort will they be able to come together.
The difference with platonic love
If love is not mutual and can be realized, it is bitter, as we have seen. However, what about those other loves that do not go beyond idealization? We are talking about platonic loves, which we include here to differentiate them from those above.
They do not enter into the world of the famous Valentine’s Day either, because unlike impossible and upset loves they are not entirely real. That is: they remain in the imagination, they do not feel like true loves because they do not hurt.
Unlike what we many times believe, platonic love is associated with beauty and not with unrequited love. In fact, for Plato love is associated with the impulse that leads us to know the essence of beauty and that we can find in another person, but not with the impulse that leads us to this.
