The Original Unrequitted Lover

Relatively many people I know have experienced the real-life tragic event normally termed 'unrequitted love'. I myself have experienced the bitter anger and seemingly unsoothable pain that having unreciprocated romantic love can bring, even more than once. Unrequitted love can seriously wound those who experience it, and even leave a deep, traumatic emotional scar that has to be resolved if future relationships are to work unhindered by the past.

I've been asking for a long time why unrequitted love happens. More personally, I've asked so many times why it's happened to me repeatedly. I think in general there are a few reasons why we can love someone who doesn't feel the same about us. For instance, we can simply love the wrong person or for the wrong reason, or both. The terrible thing about romantic feelings is that they can strike without warning and haunt us day and night. And the worse thing about it? We have absolutely no right for that person to respond favorably to our feelings. It's really a no-win situation that we never asked for and probably would find very hard to resolve without a lot of hard work and some heartbreak.

But there is one individual that has the right to be loved back. And ironically, this individual is also the same one that has suffered more instances of unrequitted love than anyone that has ever lived. This individual, the original unrequitted lover, is God.We should by right love Him, first of all because He loved him. Our love for Him should be natural, just as a child should love her parents. Whilst anyone can claim that he loved someone first, only God can claim to have given the great sacrifice that His selfless love has made Him do (Romans 5:8). The original unrequitted lover is also the original selfless lover, because He is love itself (1 John 4:16).

But such is the selflessness of His love that whilst Love itself has suffered the most cases of unrequitted love, He nevertheless never forces anyone to love Him. Many of us, including myself, have demanded love from others, and that is a selfish thing. But the example of the Father tells us that true love is not something that we can force out of anyone. God has been angered and frustrated His people so many times ever since His love was betrayed. His relationship with the Israelites in the Old Testament is a documented example of this, but He has yet persisted in loving them (and us), for that is what love does (1 Corinthians 3:4). And whilst He has been repeatedly infuriated by their betrayal and punished them for it, He has never made them love Him the way we program robots to do what we want.

But why have I called God the original unrequitted lover, and the one Person who has suffered the most -and worst- cases of such one-side love?

Look around you. God loves each and every one of the people that work, play and live around us enough to send His Son to die for them (John 3:16). Yet statistically, how many of us human beings have actually responded to this great love of His? How many even know of that love? God is like Edmond Rostand's Cyrano, whose love though great is unknown by the very object of that love. He is like a father who is hated by his children despite the great sacrifices he has given in their lives (Matthew 23:37). Only God's beloved ones, his ungrateful children, are too many to count. And I believe it pains Him much more than we can possibly imagine.

I like to think that we who have tasted -or are tasting- the unbearably bitter taste of unrequitted love are privy to how God feels about the world, and about those whom He loves so dearly but do not love Him back. It is a comfort to realize that He personally knows how it feels for us to experience such a love. And we should also realize that this personal knowledge comes with a price; what we desperately feel for a lover, He feels for an entire world.