"We Will Not Be Lovers" by The Waterboys
Unrequited love is about hunger. It's about what we want and can't have, what seduces and tantalizes us but remains out of reach. Years have passed since my own destructive, all-consuming brush with the chaotic force of unrequited love, and yet I still circle it—not because I want the person anymore but because I want to be who I was when I first met him, the version of me that was excited, hopeful, even happy.
I can't say I've ever truly been happy in my life, except for maybe when I was a child and my parents were both alive. Since my teens, I've been in survival mode—my dad's death, financial precarity, trauma, health issues, depression, agoraphobia, isolation, caregiving, my mother's death, and loneliness. I hate listing it all out.
Through it all, I've tried my best to live. I went to college. I worked. I loved my mother deeply and was a caregiver to her in the years before she died. I built a podcast. I found a few close friends. I read books. I watched films. I discovered music. I devoted myself to art. I remained curious, passionate, and tender-hearted.
But I always wanted more. I saw how the women around me were flirted with and noticed. I saw people in college dating. I remained alone, invisible, unnoticed. I tried to convince myself that I was fine with it, but I wasn't. I wanted to be loved, too. I wanted to be desired. I wanted to be delighted in. I wanted to feel beautiful and alive. It never happened.
And I don't know what to do with the fact that it never happened. I can't turn the desire off like a spigot. The reason why the unrequited love was so intense is because it touched a very deep wound. And it wasn't just about desire for a person—it was about desire for an entire life that did not materialize, for the version of me I did not become because of trauma, for the dreams that never came true.
What did I want? What is my unlived life?
I wanted to study literature in England. I wanted to fall in love with someone who fell in love with me. I wanted to write books. I wanted to travel. I wanted to feel good in my body. I wanted a cute little cottage in the countryside. I wanted community and connection. I wanted to matter to other people. I wanted to be of service to others as well. I wanted financial stability. I wanted to further my education, maybe get a masters or PhD, maybe become a teacher or professor. I wanted a creative, passionate life. I wanted to live the life of the mind. Later on, after I started the podcast, I wanted it to grow and lead to opportunities. I wanted to support myself through it and even go to film festivals and do other fun things. I wanted to be someone, and I wanted to be special to someone. I don't think I wanted children, but maybe I'm not ready to admit how much I did want a family of my own.
At almost 37, I am so far from that life. So very, very far.
My desire for that life is what the unrequited love unearthed. Not just my desire—my hunger.
Recently, I was thinking about the famous fig tree scene from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Here is the passage:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
It hit me all at once: Some of us never get the fig tree. Instead of being overwhelmed with options—the lovers, the travels, the professions—we are starved for them. When I went to college, I felt no possibilities for my life. My father was dead. My mind and body were traumatized. Most of the time, I didn't want to be alive, and I certainly didn't feel like the world cared if I lived or died.
College was simply a continuation of high school. Days filled with invisibility, dread, and depression. I didn't know how to save myself. I didn't know how to change my life. No one was there to help me, to encourage me, to guide me. I had no support system.
There were no wrinkled figs at my feet. No endless options. No endless paths for me to take. There was, in Plath's words from another poem, only "blackness and silence." That's all I could see at that age. I didn't know how to live, and I didn't know what to do with the boundless passion and desire in my soul when I lived in a world that would not give me the things I dreamed of.
My problem was never having too many figs to choose from. My problem was believing there were possibilities for my life at all. I didn't have to contend with abundance and excess. I had to cope with deprivation and absence and uncontrollable hunger.
Is the fig tree only for the young and those starting out in life? Or can the fig tree be reclaimed for someone like me in my mid-30s? I can't go back. I can't be the college girl again, looking forward to the beckoning future.
What are the figs now? What is possible for my life? Can love happen? Can I write books? Can I find some happiness, or at least peace? Can some of what I dreamed still be realized? Can the hunger be quelled?
Is that why I met him? So that I would face this desire and this hunger? So that I would face my life? In some ways, I tried to repress my desire. I tried to deny it, send it underground, but desire is generative. Maybe hunger is, too.
What we long for might point the way forward, show us what is missing, show us what we need. It might push us to be more fully ourselves, and to live more deeply.
I don't believe I was meant to love him. I was meant to want to love him. There is a difference. The desire was the point of it all. Waking up was the point.
You can't live without desire. To be without desire is to be dead inside.
And I am not dead inside. Far from it. I am very much alive. I am hungry for the figs. Hungry for life, for love, for art, for pleasure, for beauty, for everything I have been denied.