Since You Asked: How To Cope With Unrequited Love - Experiences of a Black Queer Woman
I’ve learned since I was a little girl to fear unrequited love. I can’t even count the number of plays, operas, movies, books, I’ve consumed whose sole objective was to give me that same message. Over and over. There is nothing worse than wanting someone who doesn’t want you back. There is nothing more shameful and all-consuming. Avoid that path at all costs, and don’t give anyone any reason not to love you back.
The first crush I had was in Kindergarten. One day during nap time he kissed me, and I remember the feeling of immense power coursing through my veins. I felt a satisfaction so strong that I wanted to walk straight out of the classroom--full of all the important knowledge I had just acquired and no room left for teaching. Goodbye, Mrs. Brown!
The next week during nap time I saw the same boy kissing my friend that I carpooled to school with. I saw red. This was the largest injustice to have ever been enacted against me and from a girl I barely even liked! Without hesitation, I went up to Mrs. Brown and told her all about the disgusting debauchery the two rascals had been up to. She laughed it off and warned me to focus on my studies rather than the drama of my classmates.
He was my first unrequited fascination. And we never kissed again.
I think that was where the seed of my romantic inner life became so vibrant and the reality of those boys became equally as grainy. Within the ingrained fear of rejection that came with learning to avoid unrequited affection, I found a way to remove that possibility from my love affairs. There was no need to wait for reciprocation if I could live off of the fantasy of loving in itself. The possibilities were endless when I could build that person to be whatever I wanted them to be in my mind with no heartbreak involved. Or so I thought.
At twenty-one years old, I’ve slightly evolved past my tendency to over-romanticize. In its place is anger--at myself for ever giving so many boys so much credit. But as Audre Lorde once wrote: “In the recognition of loving lies an answer to despair”. I try to remind myself that it isn’t productive to have animosity towards my past self because my humanity comes from the ways in which I have learned to love. I am older now so I have new and better ways of protecting myself from harm that I didn’t before, but that doesn’t mean I need to regret the love that I have the capacity to hold and share.
Recently, I read Audre Lorde’s memoir self titled a “biomythography”, Zami, A New Spelling of My Name. There was a lot of warmth in it for me mostly because I haven’t read many coming of age memoirs by Black queer women; I felt so much community in what was mirrored back to my own experience. I saw myself in the sensitivity, romance, and thoughtfulness that she wrote about. I found relief in her asking the same questions of herself as I do, and her wanting to love as I am. Her attempts and successes in discovering and inventing her own definitions of love in 1950’s New York moved me both to tears and disbelief.
It took me nineteen years to even consider that all the people I have met who were able to love as deeply and unabashedly as me, have almost always been women. Lorde made that same discovery in her mostly white, tiny lesbian community in the 1950’s--and with no blueprint!
Of course, here the anger can come back in a bit.
I feel like someone tricked me into thinking that my lack of fulfillment in giving love to men was due to lack of trying.
The truth is there was a very different, just as real reality just out of reach. A reality where radical love does not come from effort but comes from symbiosis. A partnership where both people are renewed by the love they are giving and taking.
I have always had so much love to give out and it often felt like I was giving it out for free. In return, yes, I had the gratification of giving, and for a while my little girl fantasies could always support the parts of my heart that were not being returned to me. And of course the blueprints that I had for those fantasies were between boys and girls and so those quickly became the learned images that I dreamt myself into.
I wasn’t reading books with romantic love between women or listening to queer music, and any movies I saw with female romantic leads were hyper-sexualized. As an imaginative young person, I lived my life with a constant soundtrack, a cast of actors, and dialogue written in. The absence of love between women in those forms created an immediate gap into what I could write myself into. The big trick was that those stories that I wrote for myself never had a sensitive Black girl with big hair and a loud singing voice as their stock image.
Instead of wondering why every leading woman and man looked nothing like me, I focused on how I could make the beautiful act of love happen for myself by simply extending it to anyone who I thought could blossom underneath it. The act of giving it should be enough for my Romeo to appear at my balcony. But the truth is most boys had no idea what to do with my heart in their hands. I’m not trying to paint myself as a saint because I have attempted to force my heart onto many people who didn’t ask for it. I just think there is so much freedom to be found in acknowledging the ways that I fed myself images of love without factoring myself into them at all.
I can’t put all of that blame on prepubescent boys, but there is a part of me that still can’t understand why they wouldn’t just buy into the idealized reality that I had created. Maybe that’s the little part of me that hasn’t evolved past it.
I think the older I get and the more art I create and am a part of, the more I realize that my exploration of love and what it means to me is at the heart of everything I make. The parts of myself that will give love to anyone, but won’t ask for any for myself. The parts of myself that can find something beautiful and cinematic in every relationship. The parts of myself that still imagine myself in relationships with men after continually finding ascension in my love of women.
Those parts need to be nurtured and fed and questioned and held to the light because they don’t deserve my rage all the time nor should that rage shed onto others all the time. The parts of me that have found radical love and are able to allow me to be held couldn’t have been found without experiencing the opposite of that.
I’m learning that unrequited love isn’t so bad and those who are deserving of it will return with as much might as I give to them.
Written by Mya Ison
