Free Unrequited by Lisa A. Phillips Page A

aren’t getting those benefits, yet we persist in loving. “It’s a paradox in that we’re being motivated toward something that’s not likely to be successful,” Arthur Aron said. “You maintain a desire for something you don’t expect to get. It’s painful, and the more you try, the more painful it is.”
    What unrequited love does give us is a goal to pursue. The Arons found that the more unrequited lovers thought they had a chance of winning over their beloved, the more their love increased. Andthe more they valued the goal of having a relationship with the beloved, the more attached they felt. Both Janey and Sonya grappled with this potent calculus.
    How is it possible to give value to a person who doesn’t love you back? When I asked Sonya why her feelings had lasted, she said she couldn’t quite shake her initial yearning to take care of Ryan, even after he rejected her. “There was a part of me that wanted to help him have better relationships,” she said. “The caretaking impulse is a pretty big part of my life. I come from a family of social workers, and we have a long history of helping people. It was the way I was raised.”
    Behind Sonya’s yearning, then, lay a larger reason. She needed to caretake. This need played out in her attachment to the idea of having a relationship with Ryan. Professors William Cupach andBrian Spitzberg call this dynamic “goal linking.” They describe the goal of having a relationship with the beloved (particularly when he does not want you back) a “lower-order goal,” in itself not nearly as important as the higher-order goals it gets linked to, such as caretaking, happiness, easing loneliness, self-worth, the dream of a future with a loving partner. Lower-order goals can help us reach the higher goals, but thelower goals are supposed to be flexible and substitutable.
    Goal linking psychologically binds the lower goal to the higher one. The beloved comes to represent something beyond himself and what’s really happening. Sonya may have associated Ryan with her need for caretaking, but she couldn’t take care of someone who didn’t let her be close to him. The goal-linking theory helps explain why the script of unrequited love holds so much sway over the unwanted woman, even when it’s getting her nowhere. Giving up on the beloved can feel like giving up on her most fundamental desires and dreams. It’s the bestowal process on steroids. I remember all too well the way my world narrowed in the months I was obsessed with B. I saw in him my last chance for marriage and family. Looking back, I see how ridiculous it was to feel, at thirty, so dire about my future.
    The concept of goal linking can help us see beyond that all-consuming matter of what the beloved is doing to us—how unfair, screwed up, and wrong his behavior is. “Rejection can be useful if a person can reflect on it,” said Jacqueline Wright, an Atlanta-based Jungian analyst. “For example, what expectations did we have about the relationship? What unrealistic beliefs did we have about ourselves and the other person? This kind of reflection takes courage because of our tendency to take the easy way and blame a failure on the other person.”
    Even if we can’t stop our longing, we can consider using theurge to persevere in another way: to better understand ourselves. What does the beloved mean to us? What ideas, needs, or dreams have we cast upon him? Then we might begin to understand what it is we’re chasing.
    MARIA GOT MARRIED in her early twenties to a man she never deeply loved. She explains it this way: She grew up in a traditional Catholic household. Her mother always told her to wait for a man to choose her. “Let them come to you,” she used to say. When she was single, Maria spent her evenings hanging out in bars in the small New Jersey city where she worked. Around the time she turned twenty-three, she got tired of the scene. She decided it was time to get married and have children.