What has been your experience with unrequited love?

[Chazmatazz269]

Everyone experiences unrequited love from time to time. We all have our crushes, but few recognize when someone else is clearly pining for them; especially men, i’m certain. For women, it’s often the “creepy” guy that they detect crushing on them. Women are often overly subtle in their approach, if they do anything at all about their unrequited affections.
Have you had crushes? Have you recognized when someone else had a crush on you? What came of it? What has been your experience with unrequited love?

[Purpleronnie]

Personally, I think genuine romantic love develops between two people through a shared relationship rather than existing solely in one person’s mind. Describing feelings for someone who has no romantic interest in you as “love” feels like a category error to me.

I’ve certainly experienced what I’d call infatuation, particularly in my early teens when emotions were intense and idealised. But “unrequited love” has always struck me as a rather old-fashioned, almost literary concept. I struggle to reconcile the idea of truly loving someone with whom I’ve never had a romantic relationship or mutual emotional connection.

[Chazmatazz269]

So you think as soon as one person files for divorce, the love just ends because it’s no longer mutual?
Similarly, parents with emotionally detached children can’t love their kids?
Love is not always a two way street. Love is really a series of chemical reactions followed by a series of commitments, and it can absolutely be one sided.
I understand what you are trying to say, but i don’t think that you followed your own logic to its obvious conclusions.

[Purpleronnie]

I think you’ve responded to an argument I didn’t make. I’m not saying love instantly disappears when it stops being mutual, nor that someone can’t continue loving a person who no longer returns that love.

A divorced person can still love their former spouse because there was a real shared relationship and emotional history. Likewise, a parent can love an emotionally distant child because that bond was formed through years of attachment and care.

My point was specifically about “loving” someone where there has never been a mutual romantic connection or relationship at all. In that situation, I’d argue the feelings are real, but they’re better described as attraction, infatuation, longing, or idealisation than as romantic love.

So the distinction isn’t that love must always be returned to exist. It’s that romantic love typically develops through a shared relationship, whereas one person’s feelings alone are a different category of experience.

[exitseven]

There was a girl in my homeroom in high school that I had a huge crush on. I thought she was the hottest girl in school. She was not a cheerleader or one of the bad kids. I really didn't know who she hung out with. I tried to talk to her a few times in my senior year and she totally blew me off. I assumed she was dating college guys. After I graduated a ran into a guy that lived next door to her. I asked him about her and if she was going out with somebody. He told me she always just stayed home.

[SueShe]

Because I am not interested in being in a relationship, I am totally oblivious to those subtle signs that anyone is crushing on me because I have no experience myself in that field of human relations.

I knew from a very young age that I did not have what it takes to be relationship material since it never interested me to have to do the "things" that those in a relationship normally do. To me, it was (and still is) disgusting at best.

To sum up: I have no experience. The only thing I am good at is spotting creeps that only want the one thing from women.