The Bitterness Of Impossible And Dissatisfied Love
Who would not have experienced either of these kinds of love in their lives? The kind of impossible love that you know exists only for you. An idealized, precious, something that could just as well have been made of porcelain, for you know it will never hit the wall of reality. A reality that, despite being unnecessary, makes it right.
Today, experiencing dissatisfied love is a rarer experience. This refers to mutual love that reality does not allow you to experience for a variety of different reasons.
These two different types of love are easily mixed together. In fact, they are often used in our language as a single expression, even though they do not actually mean the same thing. Both types of love have their own characteristics related to emotions. They are dealing with circumstances that go beyond love, as we will soon see.
The bitterness of impossible love
The first love that hurts is impossible love. This is the love a person feels for someone else, but one-sidedly. For it to be impossible, it must have a trait that never makes it reciprocal. “I don’t feel the same way about you.”
In these cases, it is often said that the person we are in love with is the only one who can make us feel the two extremes of emotion. We see him as one who can give us all the happiness we think we need. But at the same time, he is the person who takes it away. For such happiness can only come when love is mutual.
Impossible love brings with it a constant feeling of discomfort and sadness. We can’t avoid feeling that feeling for this other person, and yet, we can’t express it as we would like. In this sense, the bitterness of experiencing such love becomes more intense as we imagine what our love would be like if it were mutual.
The bitterness of dissatisfied love
Another type of impossible love is what author Gabriel Garcia Marquez called dissatisfied love. He uses this term in his short story Love in the Time of Cholera. By this he was referring to a love that you feel and that hurts you, which is mutual but which cannot materialize due to external circumstances.
In other words, dissatisfied love is a perfect love whose progression is unlikely for various reasons: incompatibility, family pressures, friendships they don’t want to hurt, fear of spiritual dependence… It is, in other words, tragic love, comparable to the love of Romeo and Juliet.
It has been said that this kind of love is the worst of all, for two people who love each other feel frustrated. “I want to, we want to, but we can’t.” They both know that the other person understands and complements them, that they love each other because of what they really are. At the same time, the two protagonists in this love do not know how to overcome obstacles.
Dissatisfied love is characterized above all by the impotence that turns into suffering for both parties. They know that “for your own good, for my own good, and for our own good, because of the circumstances,” their paths have intersected and they can only join together through a terrible amount of work.
The difference between platonic love
If love is not reciprocal, or it simply cannot develop, it becomes bitter, as we have now seen. What about those loves that never go beyond idealization? We refer to the platonic loves we attach here to distinguish them from the above.
These, too, cannot enter through the doors of the famous Cupid. Along with impossible and dissatisfied loves, they are not ideal at all. They do not go beyond the imagination. They are not known as true loves because they do not hurt.
Contrary to what we most often think, Platonic love is about beauty and not one-sided love. In fact, for Plato, love was associated with an impulse that leads us to feel the essence of beauty that we can find in another person. But this impulse does not necessarily lead us to this person.
