Context: An introductory chapter which aims to explore various kinds of unrequited love, and to show that our contemporary experience of the phenomenon differs little, if at all, from its historical forms. The chapter also functions to throw up the kinds of issues that will be dealt with in the book as a whole. Unrequited Love: Then and Now
Kaitlyn believes that everything happens for a reason. She has to, she says. She has experienced too much anguish, and the idea that it occurred just randomly isn't acceptable, not if she wants to keep on with her life. The anguish she is talking about is the fallout from a particularly nasty break-up, and the pain of unrequited love. Six years ago, just divorced, she hadn't been looking to fall in love again. She was doing well, fixing her house up, and definitely not looking to date. But then along came a man she describes as Mr Wonderful, a colleague and widower, who pursued her with an intensity she hadn't experienced before. She warned him of the dangers of getting involved with a co-worker, but he persevered, and in the end she relented. They dated, fell in love, had two blissful years, and talked of marriage. This all came to an abrupt and rather shocking end one February morning in 2002, in a moment scorched in Kaitlyn's memory.
In the time that has passed since all that happened, Kaitlyn feels that she has found some perspective. If she hadn't suffered as she had, she suspects that now she would be less feisty and confident. But the bitterness still lingers. Every time she sees them together, it hurts, and even now she says she wants “to spit in their serene, suntanned and successful faces”. But she doesn't. And for people who experience similar kinds of pain, she has this advice: “Deep in the throes, you've simply got to do whatever distracts you, because distraction is what it's all about when you feel like licking the bathroom floor in the hope that it might kill you.” Kaitlyn's experience, though extreme, is not unusual. The pain of unrequited love – love not reciprocated – is a blight from which people have suffered for millennia. The opening section of Plato's dialogue, Lysis , for example, finds Hippothales suffering a one-sided infatuation with the eponymous Athenian youth. His friend Ctesippus teases him for blushing at the mention of his beloved, and takes him to task for not revealing the young man's name to Socrates. He also lets it slip that the besotted fellow has developed the distressing habit of singing and reciting poetry to his adored one. Socrates, in a roundabout way, advises Hippothales to forget about wooing Lysis, and to pursue instead a long-lasting friendship. But such a course of action, whilst perhaps advisable, is not easily achieved, because love, the noblest frailty of the mind, answers to the demands of rationality only with great difficulty. This, of course, is obvious. Love has been described as a kind of madness for as long as people have been describing things at all. The earliest love poetry, originating in Egypt some 5000 years ago, makes frequent use of images of illness. Thus, one lovelorn ancient poet bemoans that: It is seven whole days since I have seen my love. This is all very well if love is requited, but if it is not - and sometimes even if it is - then its attendant madness, resistant to the interventions of the usual round of sages, priests and physicians, can play itself out in disastrous and bizarre fashions. The case of Lady Caroline Lamb is perhaps the best historical example of this tendency. Caro, as she was known to her contemporaries, was a beautiful, wilful, clever and wayward woman, as is testified to by her various nicknames: Ariel; Young Savage; Sprite; and Cherubina. In 1812, she had been married, more or less happily, to William Lamb, the son of Lord and Lady Melbourne, for seven years. However, on reading Byron's narrative poem Childe Harolde , she promptly fell in love with the great poet, declaring that even “if he was as ugly as Æsop I must know him”. Byron, of course, was about as far from ugly as it is possible to get, which must have pleased Caro. However, she didn't show it on their first meeting, where she snubbed him on the grounds that she had found him being “suffocated” by women “all throwing their heads at him”, later declaring that he was “mad – bad – and dangerous to know”. This was just a ploy, of course, and having piqued his interest, she very soon ensnared him, and they embarked on an intense and brief love affair, which stands now as an exemplar of the follies of a doomed love. At first, Byron was overwhelmed by the woman he called his “evil genius”, writing to her that “I have always thought you the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now, or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.” Their affair was cemented through sexually-charged meetings in the upstairs rooms at Melbourne House, Caro's family home. Fiona MacCarthy, in her biography of Byron, reports that the couple shared a fascination with sexual oddity, playing out an “intricate masquerade of male and female, page and master, creature and possessor”. Not surprisingly, this made for a volatile relationship. Right from the start, Byron found himself almost pathologically jealous of the other men in Caro's life. In one notorious incident, he was driven to a jealous rage by her refusal to concede that she loved him more than she loved her husband. Caro, for her part, bore the sting of jealousy no better, which she demonstrated admirably by biting through the rim of a glass after seeing him leaning over another woman. It was the intensity and unpredictability of the relationship that led Byron to take his first steps back. Caro's behaviour was too extreme even for his nonconformist sensibilities, and it became even more extreme as he started to withdraw. Employing a variety of disguises, she began to stalk him, often turning up in his rooms uninvited. On one occasion, Byron was pursued to his ancestral home at Newstead by a page-boy, almost certainly Lady Caroline in disguise, bringing him her latest letters. On another, she tricked her way into his lodgings dressed as a cabman, refused to leave, and threatened to kill herself in front of the crowd that had assembled. Byron knew that he had to extricate himself from the situation, but that it wasn't going to be easy. He remained at least partly in thrall to Caro, recognising a kindred spirit in the passion and intensity of their personalities. However, he had become weary of her antics, and, fearing for his reputation, he decided to end the affair. To this end, he enlisted the help of Lady Melbourne, who began to monitor and restrict her daughter-in-law's activities. It was the involvement of her family, and the betrayal that it represented, that plunged Caro into the extremes of behaviour that history records now as the mark of her relationship with Byron. Increasingly desperate, and unable to see her beloved poet, Caro wrote countless letters to Byron, on one occasion enclosing a blood-soaked lock of her pubic hair, insisting that he reciprocate. Then, on being ordered by her father-in-law to leave London for Ireland , Caro fled her home, went briefly into hiding, emerging again only after Byron had tracked her down. She followed this up by feigning pregnancy, and insisting that she was in no fit state to travel. In the end, she consented to leave, but only after Byron had lied to her, promising that he would soon join her in Ireland . As it became clear that Byron had no intention of keeping his promise, Caroline was furious, writing to him that she would teach him about the nature of revenge. Her anguish was compounded when she discovered that he had taken up with Lady Oxford, a woman with whom she had previously enjoyed friendly relations. She responded to the news by bombarding the pair with letters, threatening to tell Lord Oxford about his wife's affair. She then ordered a bonfire to be built, placed an effigy of Byron on top of it, and invited local school children to dance around it as it went up in flames. Her fury at this point was matched only by the depths of her despair. Thus, she said of a gift to Byron that it:
Despite the counsel of friends and family that her future happiness would be best served by giving up the poet, she could not let him go. During the early part of 1813, she waged a campaign designed to re-establish at least some kind contact with him. In an attempt to embarrass Byron, she repeatedly wrote to him to ask him to return the gifts that she had bestowed upon him, suspecting that he had already passed them on to his new love. She also engaged in some amateur forgery, faking a letter in Byron's hand, which she presented to his publisher John Murray, persuading him to hand over a miniature portrait of the poet. By this point, Byron was insisting that he no longer loved Caroline. He wrote to Lady Melbourne that “I know not whom I may love but to the latest hour of my life I shall hate that woman.” However, it is likely that he was deluding himself about the true nature of his feelings, since he retained the capacity to be deeply affected by her. Indeed, on the advice of Lady Melbourne, who suspected that he still loved his “little Mania”, he consented to a meeting with Caro, who subsequently reported that Byron had asked her to forgive him, and that he had broken down and cried. With renewed hope, Caro wrote to him: “Only one word, you have raised me from despair to the joy we look for in Heaven. Your seeing me has undone me forever – You are the same, you love me still.” There followed something of a rapprochement between the pair, which saw them exchanging letters. However, this turned out to be merely the prelude to the final tumultuous act of their relationship, which occurred at a waltz party held by Lady Heathcote, which they both attended in July 1813. Precisely what happened that evening is a matter of some conjecture. However, the gist of it is that Caro and Byron had warily circled each other during the early part of the evening, until Byron noticed that she was carrying a knife, and suggested that she meant to use it against him. Caro fled from him, and then, according to Lady Melbourne, “broke a glass & scratched herself”, before wounding herself with a pair of scissors, as a result covering herself with blood. The newspapers and scandal sheets had a field-day, the consequence of which was that Caro was disgraced, and therefore barred from polite society. However, though ruinous to her social standing, the evening was in some ways a success. It certainly marked the end of the more extreme aspects of her infatuation with Byron. Over the next several years, whilst she would periodically reappear in Byron's life, it was never again with the same intensity or commitment. The events of that evening also shamed Byron into maintaining regular contact with her, both by letter and sometimes even face-to-face (albeit secretly). The psychiatrist Frank Tallis says of Caroline Lamb that she is a prime candidate for the position of patron saint of the broken hearted. This is undoubtedly right. She loved Byron with a passion that very nearly resulted in her own destruction. However, whether her love, even in the latter part of their relationship, was genuinely unrequited is more difficult to determine. Certainly, in the early stages of their affair, Byron was besotted with her. But his feelings were always tempered by the knowledge that their love was destructive; and, in particular, by an awareness that her disregard of social convention was likely to get them both into trouble. He also found it far easier than she did to withdraw, and proved himself more than capable of forming attachments with other women. Nevertheless, the suspicion remains that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Byron was never quite able to rid himself of the feelings that he had for Caroline. At a number of key points in their relationship, he chose to maintain contact with her, when, had he been indifferent, it would have made more sense to have broken from her permanently. Whatever one decides about the true nature of their love, it is certainly the case that when we talk of unrequited love, we often have in mind something which looks a bit different from that suffered by Caroline Lamb. Perhaps the classic image of the unrequited lover is the teenager who falls helplessly in love with the person they believe to be their destiny, only to find that this person has barely even registered their existence. Stephan, a sixteen year old schoolboy from Switzerland , describes his experience of what he calls adolescent love, as follows:
Probably, the kind of experience that Stephan describes here is near universal. Indeed, if it were not, then the whole popular music industry would likely collapse in a heap. If one were able to offer advice to Stephan, one would say something like that what he is experiencing is a kind of love, that it is indeed genuinely painful, but that his feelings for Jenny won't endure, and that when he gets older he'll look back at this period in his life with a certain degree of amusement. This is sage advice. But had it been offered to Dante Alighieri, the great Florentine poet, towards the end of the thirteenth century, it would have turned out to be completely wrong. The object of Dante's love was Beatrice Portinare, the daughter of an influential local politician. This is how Dante describes his first meeting with her:
These words are perhaps not so surprising; we are all familiar with sentiments of this kind as an expression of love at first sight. Except Dante was only nine years old when he first met Beatrice (who herself was only eight); and his feelings endured throughout the whole of his life, even though he barely ever spoke to her. We know about Dante's love for Beatrice primarily because it was the subject of the masterpiece of his youth, Vita Nuova . He tells us there that after his first meeting with her, he was irrevocably changed, that his soul was ruled by love. However, though he frequently sought her out, he did not speak to her for another nine years. He recounts the circumstances of their first words with a reverence that is typical of all of his writing about her:
The consequence of this salutation was that Dante went half-crazy with love. He talks of giving up the whole of himself to thoughts of his lady; and mentions that his body quickly became weak and reduced. He began to live for the salutations that Beatrice would offer, and then was destroyed when she later snubbed him:
It is a curious experience reading Vita Nuova , because one is quickly led to the thought that really not much has changed over the last eight hundred years or so where matters of the heart are concerned. Thus, for example, Dante reports that shortly after he had been snubbed by Beatrice, he was surprised by her appearance at a wedding party. He then describes a scene that would not be out of place in a Hollywood tragicomedy: he promptly suffered what looks like a thirteenth century panic attack and, as a result, ended up being mocked by his lady and her friends. However, it is Dante's response to these setbacks that marks his love out as extraordinary. He resolved simply to exalt Beatrice through the medium of his poetry. He was, in this way, able to achieve a kind of equilibrium, albeit one dominated by his feelings for her. Tragically, this way of going forward was shattered by Beatrice's sudden death. It seemed to Dante, in its immediate aftermath, that this was something from which he could not recover. His poetry at this time is suffused with references to death's welcoming embrace. But again, his love proved to be resilient. In the face of the bitterest misfortune, he was able to find a resolution that would allow it to endure. He tells us of this in the very last pages of Vita Nuova , where he writes that he can love Beatrice as she continues to exist in the heavenly realm; that he can send his heart soaring up to her, to gaze upon her as she gazes upon God. Thus, he resolves that if his life continues for a few more years, he will “write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman.” There is something deeply touching about Dante's love for Beatrice, perhaps because it comes to us as an echo from a world more chivalrous, less cynical, than our own. Properly considered, it is an example of courtly love, a highly ritualised form of love, common in the middle ages, which aimed at protecting the virtue of the various protagonists (more often than not, members of the nobility). However, though touching, it is also profoundly absurd. It is easy to forget this in the face of Dante's ability as a poet. After all, as an expression of grief, it is hard to imagine more affecting lines than these: When I recall that nevermore, alas!, But the fact remains that to spend one's life in thrall to a woman to whom one has barely ever spoken is the stuff of madness. It is this point that encapsulates the fascination of the pure kind of unrequited love. How is it possible for love to emerge out of nothing in this startling fashion? The contrast with the case of Caroline Lamb is instructive. The interest of her tryst with Byron is not that she fell in love with him, but rather that she became obsessed in the face of his withdrawal of love. The interest of Dante's love is just that he experienced it so profoundly and enduringly. It is possible that we're inoculated against perceiving the strangeness of this kind of thing. Consider, for example, the modern novelette Virginia by Jens Christian Grøndahl. It tells the story of a woman whose life is shaped by a chance encounter she has with a downed pilot when a teenager in the Second World War. She is never able to forget the pilot — she shares her first kiss with him — and as a result her life takes a trajectory that it would not otherwise have done. The important point here is that the story works. Partly this is because Grøndahl handles his theme with subtlety. But it is also because it has prima facie plausibility. We don't find it extraordinary that a young woman, on the basis of a fleeting encounter, might fall helplessly in love with a dashing young pilot, and that the experience might come to shape the course of her life. Similarly, perhaps, we are not incredulous that somebody like Dante might spend his life celebrating a person who is more ghost or imaginative construct than flesh and blood. Yet the phenomenon of unrequited love, in its various forms, does warrant further examination. Its ubiquity is indicative of its relation to aspects of ourselves that are integral to our humanity. How is it that we are able to love another human being passionately – perhaps even to die for them – in the absence of any knowledge of them? How does love endure, sometimes to the point of obsession, in the face of its rejection? Why does unrequited love lead some people to destruction, and others to transcendence? How are we able to go on in the face of feelings of extraordinary power that have no means of expression? The answers to these and other questions like them, tell us something about what it is to be human; what it is to be a species able to experience the thrill, excitement, passion, joy, pain and anguish of love. |