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  • For intense periods of our lives, we suffer the agony of unrequited love. Our sorrow is

  • accompanied by a certainty that if only the elusive being would return our smiles, come

  • for dinner or marry us, we would know bliss. Epochal happiness seems tantalisingly close,

  • wholly real and yet maddeningly out of reach. At such moments, we are often counselled to

  • try to forget the beloved. We shouldgiven their lack of interesttry to think of

  • something or someone else. Yet this kindness is deeply misguided. The cure for love does

  • not lie in ceasing to think of the fugitive lover, but in learning to think more intensely

  • and constructively about who they might really be. From close up, every human who has ever

  • lived proves deeply challenging. We are allat close quarterstrying propositions.

  • We are short-tempered, vain, deceitful, crass, sentimental, woolly, cold, over-emotional

  • and chaotic. What prevents us from holding this in mind in relation to certain people

  • is simply a lack of knowledge. We assumeon the basis of a few charming outside details

  • that the target of our passion may miraculously have escaped the fundamentals of the human

  • condition. They haven't. We just haven't got to know them properly. This is what makes

  • unrequited love so intense, so long-lasting and so vicious. By preventing us from properly

  • growing close to them, the beloved also prevents us from tiring of them in the cathartic and

  • liberating manner that is the gift of requited love. It isn't their charms that are keeping

  • us magnetised; it is our lack of knowledge of their flaws. The cure for unrequited love

  • is, in structure, therefore very simple. We must get to know them better. The more we

  • discovered of them, the less they would ever look like the solution to all our problems.

  • We would discover the endless small ways in which they were irksome; we'd get to know

  • how stubborn; how critical; how cold and how hurt by things that strike us as meaningless

  • they could be. That is, if we got to know them better, we'd realise how much they

  • had in common with everyone else. Passion can never withstand too much exposure to the

  • full reality of another person. The unbounded admiration on which it is founded is destroyed

  • by the knowledge which a properly shared life inevitably brings. The cruelty of unrequited

  • love isn't really that we haven't been loved back, rather it's that our hopes have

  • been aroused by someone who can never disappoint us, someone who we will have to keep believing

  • in because we lack the knowledge that would set us free. We must, in the absence of a

  • direct cure, undertake an imaginative one. We must accept, without quite knowing the

  • details, that they would, of course, eventually prove decisively irritating. Everyone does.

  • We have to believe this not because we know it exactly of them, but because they arein

  • the endhuman and we know this dark but deeply cheering fact about everyone who has

  • ever lived.

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For intense periods of our lives, we suffer the agony of unrequited love. Our sorrow is

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