Is it better to love or be loved?

There’s a famous song, popularised by the movie Moulin Rouge which carries the line “the greatest thing is to love and be loved in return”. Perhaps to a dismissive cynic, that line would be thoroughly scoffed at and swept away under a cloud of criticism of naivety, surely you jest, they say, some people prefer money to love, you poor innocent child. From a romanticist view however, love is everything in the world and more. However this isn’t meant to be a discussion on love being great, but rather when love fails (for it can be said it is not true love unless it is truly reciprocated) in the true sense of the word, when it becomes one sided.

I’d assume that most of the people who read this would be at least be adolescents or older (or else I’d be kind of afraid due to some of the content on this blog), and we’ve all gone through situations where we’ve fallen madly in love with someone who won’t give us the time of the day, or to that effect. More uncommonly is the situation when someone falls in love with us and we are unable to return the sentiment. I personally have been on both sides of the story, and both are unpleasant enough for me to want to dismiss love as being the stuff of pink unicorns and flying spaghetti gods. Unfortunately I haven’t been a hardened enough cynic to close off my mind to the widespread evidence that romantic love does exist. Perhaps one day, but not to-day.

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that one-sided affairs should be romanticised. From the pages of Cyrano de Bergerac to the myth of Echo (sorry my knowledge of contemporary literature has failed me this time), the ones who love with no affirmation are regarded as the heroes, poor tragic heroes. They are the ones who goes to great lengths for their loves or die from sadness. Even today we always tend to pity the ones who cannot stop loving, and curse the ones who cruelly refuse this love. But what does it really feel like to love with no hope of reciprocation? (Oh how the mind is such a twisted tool when overwhelmed with the feeling of love.) We hope against hope that one day the person will come around and love us back; we vow to sacrifice our lives and everything we hold dear just for the happiness of the other; we despair when the person is so out of reach; we are overwhelmed with happiness at the slightest sign of reciprocation. We are fools, truly fools in love, but romanticised figures nonetheless.

And on the less reported side of the affair, there’s the lovee (the target). Often the lovee doesn’t even have the slightest inkling about the lover’s intentions at all, as much as the lover fears he/she is overtly obvious, so such experiences are much less than that of the lover. I personally hated being a lovee. There were no highs, only lows. I felt like a bitch for not being able to return the affection, and indeed I was villainised as such by the people who were friends with this lover. On the other hand I was filled with a paranoid fear that this lover would stalk me and hurt me, though that was quite an extreme case. The worst part being a lovee is that it is often a fight between one’s conscience and one’s heart. We are often compelled to try and force ourselves to return the feeling out of obligation while our hearts are screaming no no no! We are the villains, who unthinkingly hurt the heroes of the story.

The problem for both sides though, is that love is not something controllable, you can’t change the way you feel, it just happens on it’s own. You can’t force someone to love you; you cannot add ingredients and expect it to just pop up. You cannot shower someone with love and expect them to love you back if they don’t. In some cases love can be cultivated slowly, like in arranged marriages, but that it quite a moot point in today’s modern society. You can however, fool yourself to think that you’re in love, but that’s not love is it? You’d just by lying to yourself. Similarly as a lover you can’t change the love you feel. There is no wrong and no right, there is only a mess and sadness.

Bottom line? Love stinks, yeah yeah.