The bitterness of impossible and contradicted loves

Who hasn’t had one? One of those impossible loves that you know only exists in you. Idealized and precious, they can be made of porcelain because you know they will never collide with the reality that makes them, pardon the redundancy, real. Less common these days is to live a contradicted love, understood as that reciprocated love of which 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. Furthermore, for it to be impossible it has to 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 them 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, because This happiness would come only when love was reciprocated.

Impossible loves bring with them a constant feeling of discomfort and sadness: we cannot help but feel 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 is intensified when we imagine what it would be like if it were reciprocated.

The bitterness of the dissatisfied

On a parallel side to that of impossible loves, there are what the writer García Márquez called crossed loves in his novel Love in the time of cholera. By this he was referring to the one who feels and hurts, which is reciprocated and is difficult for it to materialize due to circumstances external to the lovers.

In other words, crossed love It is a perfect love that is likely not to develop for different reasons.: incompatibilities, family pressures, friendships that do not want to be ruined, fear of emotional dependence, etc. That is, 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 can’t.” 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 obstacles.

Contrasted loves are characterized above all by helplessness, which turns into suffering. both sides. They will know that “for my good, for your good, for our good, for the circumstances”, their paths have crossed and only with a lot of effort will they be able to come together.

The difference with platonic love

Love, if it is not mutual and can be realized, is bitter., as we have seen. However, what happens with those other loves that do not go beyond idealization? We are talking about platonic loves, which we include here to differentiate them from those discussed above.

These do not fall within the world of the famous Valentine’s Day, because unlike impossible and contradicted loves, they are not entirely real. That is: they remain in the imagination, they do not feel like true love because they do not hurt.

Unlike what we often believe, Platonic love is associated with beauty and not 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 to the impulse that leads us to this.

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