Is Unrequited Love as good as it gets?

I, for one, sure as hell hope not.

Unrequited: –adjective

1. not returned or reciprocated: unrequited love.
2. not avenged or retaliated: an unrequited wrong.
3. not repaid or satisfied. (*particularly poignant and effective in movies)

But the best way to explain unrequited love is to offer you a bit of dialogue from one of my favorite flicks - City Slickers:

Curly: I just turned around and rode away.

Mitch: Why?

Curly: I figured it wasn't going to get any better than that.

Mitch: Yeah, but you could have been, you know, with her.

Curly: I've been with lots of women.

Mitch: Yeah, but, you know, she could have been the love of your life.

Curly: She is.

-----

Well, that just sucks.

So the question becomes, why are audiences so drawn to love that can never be? Why doesn't SOMEBODY walk out of the theatre in protest when Romeo doesn't get to live out his life with Juliet?

WHY isn't SOMEONE besides ME, choked that Shakespeare could be such a heartless bastard and write the ending that he did?

And why are we OKAY with it?

Not only are we okay with it, we embrace it.

Unrequited love stories are often touted as the greatest love stories of all time.

We weep with bitter disappointment, yet secretly approve of Rick's anguish for Ilsa in Casablanca and applaud his sacrifice for true love and commend her loyalty to someone else.

How come nobody threw popcorn at the screen, outraged that two people who so obviously belonged together will never be?

Why do we pine at unrequited love, approve of its pain and feel satisfaction at the tragic ending of a story that by all logic, should have been 'just beginning'?

I'll tell you why.

Because it's easier.

If boy meets girl, falls in love with her and never gets her, then nothing can go wrong down the road the way it MIGHT if they actually decided that what they had was worth a shot - you know, in the post-honeymoon period.

No siree. Their love is preserved forever in its sacrifical perfection and doesn't have to go through the nuances, the ups and downs, and the challenges of a long-term commitment...

...like extended family drama...

...or crazy Aunt Bessie who embarasses everyone at Xmas dinner by refusing to use her cutlery...

...or growing kids experimenting with drugs...

...or day-to-day routines like too much laundry, cooking supper, driving kids to soccer 7 days a week, poor grades in school, illnesses of every kind, and every other test that might stress 'true love' to the nines, whose elasticity suddenly might - JUST MIGHT - have a breaking point.

Then it wouldn't be true love anymore, would it?

True Love exists in perfection, just the way Plato imagined it would in what he called The World of the Forms.

Plato believed that all ideas on earth (everything from abstract concepts such as truth, honor, beauty and love, - to the original design of a chair), originated somewhere 'above us' in an ethereal world of perfection.

All ideas and concepts are pure in this realm and become somehow distorted by misunderstanding or misuse in ours.

And it's only the elevated/philosophical/spiritual man, who truly understands that our goal in life is to forever try and attain these ideals. And though we might come close, we can never really get there because we are, by nature, imperfect.

Except in death. Where we go back from whence we came.

Make sense?

So if you never try, you can never screw up. If you die, you can never screw up.

You get to keep the ideal of LOVE where it should be - in the World of the Forms - pure, untainted, unchallenged and... on some level, unattainable, except in theory - like in the movies.

But you'll never be disappointed.

So is unrequited love as good as it gets?

Only if you live in the World of the Forms it is.

And I don't know anybody who owns a condo there...