Unrequited love

Unrequited love is a love which is not reciprocated, one-sided, or more generally unequal, resulting in a yearning for more complete love. This might occur inside a relationship with unequal love, commitment, or effort between partners, or it might occur in a context where little or no relationship exists between the participants (even as in parasocial love for a celebrity). Lovesickness is the resulting mental state.

Unrequited love generally pertains to the romantic, passionate, infatuated, obsessive, or limerent variety of love (also called "being in love"): a state which is conceptualized as a motivation or drive. This state is commonly distinguished from other types of love: companionate love (or attachment) and compassionate love (or agape). Reciprocal love is called "redamancy".

According to the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, the state of being in love is distinguishable from the many other uses of the word "love" (such as caring or concern), for: "Affection and fondness have no 'objective'; they simply exist as feelings in which you are disposed toward actions to which the recipient might or might not respond." The psychiatrist Eric Berne wrote that "Some say one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner."

Unequal (unrequited) love is more common than equal love, according to a study of students. In the ideal scenario, passionate or romantic love would progress with two people meeting, and developing a mutual attraction. This would culminate in a sudden rush of emotion, the escalation of intimacy and commitment, and increasingly more time spent together. However, this does not always happen, and often intense romantic love is one-sided.