You have this incredible ability to take a subject as well-worn as unrequited love, and make it compelling. You also make me feel like I'm venture into new territory. I really don't have much to say on this topic, but that's exactly the point. You are a testament to the idea that a skilled writer can pull anyone in; the topic is far less important than the way it's presented. You perfectly balance the razor's edge of profundity without the preaching; sentiment without the saccharine; self-esteem without ego.
I'm sure you write for yourself and not to compete, but you are showing the vast majority of Substack how it's done, regardless of any metrics, and whether you intend to or not. Including me. You always deliver, on-time and on-point.
Andrew, thank you, truly, for such a generous comment. It feels like you’ve caught the thread I most hope to weave: that it’s not novelty of topic that breathes life into writing, but the sincerity and precision with which it’s explored. As you so insightfully put it, the real adventure is in the quality of the gaze we bring to it, not necessarily in the subject.
Your words remind me of something Borges once said: that originality doesn’t lie in inventing new stories, but in telling the old ones as if they had never been told before. That’s what I chase — not with competition in mind, but with the stubborn devotion of someone trying to do justice to the raw, often messy business of feeling.
I’m deeply grateful you felt that balancing act, of sentiment without saccharine, self-esteem without ego. It’s a tightrope I walk consciously, believing that emotion is most powerful when it’s offered undiluted, without manipulation.
And if, along the way, it also manages to quietly raise the bar in a noisy space… well, that’s a beautiful kind of collateral damage I can live with.
Thank you again for such a galvanising message. Few can make my day like you do, and fortify my resolve to keep showing up with my whole self on the page.
I don't want to spoil perfection, and yet we're obliged, all of humanity is, as my teachers have taught, the adage of the sages, and words of a Prophet, "Whoever doesn't thank people, doesn't thank God."
How much gratitude? As many times as you are graced with blessings. Perpetual!
The sincere is always in gratitude, it is contentment with one's lot and "contentment is a treasure chest that never vanquishes," in other words, take what you may from it, it remains full.
This fullness is also what your piece delivers, this reconstruction of a hacked up person, feeling like Frankenstein, put together pieces and soulless, finally contrary to Shelly's darkness, and wish to push this hidden occultist innuendo, one finds their soul sparked back up again. Your piece reads like that lightening bolt that doesn't kill, but revives, and electrifies the dormant in us all back to life.
Emerson said,
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
So, I stand and ovate, I pay tribute to you and your beguiling mind and warrior soul, that can't help but produce priceless piece after piece.
Therapy, for those of us who despite ability and wit, are voiceless, whether by choice or force of hand.
Your words are a benediction in themselves, a reminder that true gratitude is not transactional, gratitude is a continual blooming, much like the “treasure chest that never vanquishes” you so beautifully invoked. I’m deeply moved that you received this piece as narrative, and as a kind of electric reanimation — not the Frankensteinian horror of misassembled parts. You made me feel it was the sacred act of calling the soul back into coherence.
You’ve touched something essential, that healing writing (when it manages to happen) is the reader recognising a buried part of themselves through the act of reading, not simply the author transferring feeling to page.
Emerson’s “alienated majesty” describes it perfectly: our forgotten truths returning home, adorned in new armour.
If my work serves as a kind of therapy for the voiceless, then it is only because readers like you complete the circuit — lighting up what was meant to be lit. Thank you for standing with me in that shared conscious choice against silence.
Your comment is my treasure. I receive it with reverence.
True. healing isn’t linear and choosing yourself becomes the real victory. I’ve lived this in my own way, and what struck me most reading your piece is how much it matches the messy, unglamorous reality of it.
When I went through my version of this, I kept thinking that if I could just understand it intellectually, if I could map it, name it, analyze it, the pain would disappear. But it didn’t. What I learned, though, was that clarity grounds grief, doesn’t erase it. It stops you from adding unnecessary shame or self-blame to an already painful experience.
And like you said, there’s a difference between pain and suffering, a nuance I didn’t fully appreciate until I realized how often I was extending my own suffering by clinging to the illusion rather than facing what was. Knowing that has made me far more compassionate with myself now, in ways I couldn’t have been back then.
Thank you for writing this, it’s rare to see both the ache and the wisdom captured together.
You articulated something I deeply believe, that understanding grief intellectually is comforting, but it doesn’t grant us immunity from feeling it. As you said so powerfully, clarity anchors us!!! It doesn’t anaesthetise us. One of the most humbling lessons is becoming aware that pain belongs to the body and heart first, not the mind. We can map the terrain endlessly, but at some point, we must walk it. I’m so moved that you caught the distinction between pain and suffering, the quiet, life-changing fact that we often participate in our own wounding by resisting reality. Your hard-won compassion shines through here, and it reminds me: wisdom is the ability to cradle the pain without losing ourselves.
Thank you for reading so thoughtfully! You always do as a matter of fact.
You’re smart and wise, Tamara. You have the wisdom that comes from actually living what most people only theorize about, because you capture with striking clarity that while understanding grief can steady us, it never exempts us from walking through it, and your ability to distinguish between pain and suffering, and to recognize the quiet power of accepting reality rather than fighting it, reflects a depth of compassion and strength that is hard-earned, deeply human, and wonderful . Thank you for reading and reflecting with such care, it’s never lost on me, and it never will be.
Reading every line was like standing at the edge of a cliff I’ve stood at before, only now I can see it more clearly in the rearview mirror than I ever could looking down. Your emotional intelligence is spectacular and visible here. It feels you are someone who has metabolised grief into wisdom, and not in that tidy, Instagrammable way, but through the bruised, uneven process of actual living.
For me, unrequited love once felt like a kind of spiritual vertigo, knowing you're falling, but still mistaking the dizziness for elevation. I clung not to the person, really, but to what I projected onto her silence. That illusion—the way I could mythologize her smallest gestures into significance—was the hardest to relinquish. Then you mourn your own capacity to believe.
What finally shifted wasn’t some grand epiphany. I felt the fatigue of carrying something that no longer made sense to hold. An emotional entropy. One day I noticed I hadn’t thought of her until mid-afternoon. Another day, I caught myself laughing freely—m and realized I was living again.
There’s a question here I’m still chewing on: how do we discern when we're genuinely healing, versus when we're just managing our wounds with better aesthetics? Does self-love sometimes masquerade as self-protection? Or is that part of the process too?
I’m moved my essay could be the cliff’s edge from which you reflected back with such clarity. That grief, metabolised honestly, never quite becomes “neat.” It leaves behind a textured wisdom, stitched from bruises not stupid hashtags. I love your image of spiritual vertigo, that dizzying confusion between falling and flying. Mythologising silence is its own heartbreak, isn’t it? The mourning of one’s own capacity to believe feels, to me, like the final act of grief: the death of the dreamer, and the rebirth of the witness.
Your question (about the line between true healing and aesthetic self-management) is interesting. Maybe early healing is sometimes self-protection dressed up as empowerment, but like you said, that may be part of the process too. Authentic growth often starts in mimicry before it roots in reality. We fake freedom until, one day, we realise we’ve stopped faking and simply are free. The ideal.
Thank you for deepening the conversation beautifully, Alexander!
Thank you, your reply sat with me in that rare, still place where I can feel your words. I read it twice, slowly. Maybe three times. It’s a gift when someone sees your internal landscape and names it without flattening it.
I’ve lived so much of my life trying to distinguish real healing from beautifully disguised coping. I’ve worn the costume of empowerment before my soul had grown into it, practiced self-worth like it was a foreign language I was desperate to sound fluent in. And I think you’re right, the pretending is a rehearsal. Maybe the heart needs a script until the voice becomes its own.
I feel enormous gratitude that your writing gave me language for feelings I hadn’t fully metabolized. Your metaphor—"the death of the dreamer, and the rebirth of the witness"—gutted me in the best way. That’s exactly it. The ache of losing the illusion of the other + the illusion of who I was with her, or because of her. And then somehow surviving that loss with more authorship, more clarity, maybe even more gentleness.
I’m grateful for your words, your mind, and your little community. You have amazing subscribers.
Recovering from an emotional setback is not simply about taking time to heal and forget.
A lover who discovers that he is a victim of an illusion or has entered into a losing bet is like the driver of a speeding truck loaded with fuel who has to stop due to an emergency.
A sudden stop is devastating, and just as you filled a tank of wheat from a small hole, you must extract the wheat in the same way, grain by grain.
A visceral and vivid image,that truck, that halt, that slow, painstaking grain-by-grain extraction. Yes. I often think people underestimate the silent, internal work of withdrawing. It’s not escape, it’s excavation. Not forgetting, but unweaving. It’s humbling to have to undo the dream thread by thread, especially when the illusion wasn’t built by malice but by longing. You’re right, recovery isn’t about speed or distance; it’s about the intimacy of slowness, the dignity of feeling every grain fall. Thank you for this!
Very well written. Especially the bit about the ache not as a roar but a houseguest outstaying their welcome.
Now Imagine a form of unrequited love that is actually understood and felt by both, but is forbidden due to honor and commitment. A kind of love that is not unidirectional between two people but unidirectional in the sense that they cast it, feel it, but choose not to fulfill it out of integrity. Many of the same pangs exist, not because it is a love sent to the void but because it is a deep intimacy that cannot be explored.
Ahhh, the heartbreak of consensual restraint, perhaps the most exquisitely painful flavour of love. Not the grand operatic unrequited kind, but the quiet ache of a mutual flame that both parties agree, silently and solemnly, not to feed. It’s the love that shows up on time, in full colour, and still gets turned away at the door out of deference to another life already in progress.
You’ve mentioned something rarer than tragic romance: ethical longing. The kind of intimacy where every glance is a novel left unopened, every gesture a door gently closed before the threshold is crossed. It’s eros with a moral compass, desire wearing a tailored suit, standing perfectly still while its heart runs marathons.
And yes, the pangs are all there, perhaps even more vivid, because this isn’t love wasted or misunderstood, but love disciplined. A love that doesn’t crash and burn, but simmers eternally in a room behind a locked door… where both have the key but choose not to turn it.
There should be a word for that. Something between fidelity and fantasy. Maybe reverence….
Marcel Proust described that after mourning a lost relationship he could live again. But sometimes it happened that in a particular street he had not yet learned to be beyond the missing. This "street of Proust" can be any phenomenon. In <https://henkbarendregt.substack.com/p/two-faces-of-emptiness> unfolds a story to find that space.
The “street of Proust”, what a sublime metaphor for that ambush of memory that no logic, no self-help book, no spiritual insight can quite defend against. We think we’ve metabolised the loss, turned the pain into prose or wisdom or art. But then we round a corner (literal or psychic) and there it is. The scent, the light, the unbearable familiarity of what’s no longer ours.
Your poem walks beautifully through this paradox: emptiness not as a void to escape, but as a terrain to be befriended. Proust would approve, I think, he knew the ache was also the portal.
The street remains, sometimes, because the love was real. And sometimes, because we were.
What a haunting choice, Chausson’s “Poème de l’amour et de la mer” evokes mourning, and it embalms it in velvet and salt. The passage you quoted feels like autumn weeping in French. The leaves not as metaphor but as mourners themselves, and the moonlight as both witness and accomplice. That line — ce mot fatal écrit dans ses grands yeux: l’oubli — is the kind of wound that literature was invented to touch but never heal. Oblivion as the final lover.
And you’re right, this is art made of absence. A symphony written in the key of ache. What I find so striking is that it doesn’t try to console. It doesn’t attempt to transcend the loss; it reveres it. Like a requiem that refuses resurrection.
Your preference for Ravel’s “Kaddish” is telling, though. While Chausson drapes us in silken despair, Ravel lifts the veil, grief here is prayer, not paralysis. It’s as if in Ravel, the mourning folds into dignity, into a quiet form of résistance. Not the oubli Chausson fears, but the memory that insists on staying. One piece surrenders to ghostliness, the other clings to grace.
Maybe that’s the real heartbreak? Some love stories dissolve like fog, others fossilise. And we don’t get to choose which one ours becomes.
Merci for this exquisite addition, your ear is as sharp as your insight.
Chausson's music makes us melancholic, beautifully so, but still weak. Ravel and composers like Bach and Stravinsky are also sensitive, but make us strong.
I like both types of music.
Now your point "... dissolves in fog or fossilises." When something happens we cannot choose. But we can have an attitude in life that favours one or the other. When we learn that pain is not to be avoided, that is impossible, it can be lived in the Bach/Ravel/Stravinsky way.
At first we cover-up. Perhaps frequently with potent coping. Then less often. Then the wound is almost healed. At last we feel confident we are healed. Possibly yet another cover-up.
But there is a realm of being. Not here nor there. Not in the past, future or even the present. Vast and unchanging. The groundless space of consciousness. It is the end of suffering.
What you’ve written pulses with that strange, slippery truth we only glimpse after agony, that healing may just be a more elegant illusion. A subtler costume over the wound. We swap gauze for philosophy, distraction for depth, and call it peace but sometimes it’s just grief in drag.
And yet, this “realm of being” you speak of, the unlocatable nowhereness, it’s real. Not because it’s always accessible, but because we touch it in those rare, disorienting silences when the story drops away. When we’re not the wounded, not the healer, not even the one remembering. Just AWARE.
i left another comment in the thread to your piece on curated contempt to say something about how i had stopped writing completely because of heartbreak. i erased that part though, i thought it irrelevant. and then you write this here! coincidence?
i have to read it again, carefully. i think i disagree. but where and how i do i have to think about. it's certainly interesting and, as always, very well done. it should soothe. but there's something that doesn' t apply to my particular version of ache. or maybe i'm just in denial and don't want it to speak to me, yet. i'll give it some more time and then come back to you.
you know, i think i am hopelessly romantic. in the sense of the word derived from French, le roman. the medieval concept of the courteous love that became the cradle to all european literature and the underlying script for societal norms around our culture of loving. It entails the inevitable notion of non-reciprocity or at least some form of the impossibility of real fulfillment. it is it's essence.
"There Are Only Two Tragedies. One Is Not Getting What One Wants, and the Other Is Getting It" is Oscar Wilde saying that desire, love and longing are in themselves the things we absolutely need to do in order to live meaningfully, richly.
Guinevere, king Arthur's wife and Lancelot's lover, is the embodiment of this concept, she is the perfect lover but not for either of her lovers, nor is her love ever perfectly fulfilled, but she lives love to it's fullest, most lively ideal. she becomes love herself and so is the perfect counterpart to the passive, depressed, strangely stylized, silent, boring Arthur.
I rather feel enriched by love, even if unanswered. I keep it inside myself and feed it rather than rip it out and with it my beating heart. i rather cradle a broken heart in my chest than none at all. And let this love, like a tiny scaly animal grow for its own existence, nourish, feed it with my dreams, tell it my desires, and let it's beauty give me hope in our times of scarcity and bleakness.
This is so beautifully said, and I agree, to a point. There is immense nobility, even magic, in loving for the sake of love itself. (I am the same). You’re absolutely right that the medieval tradition of fin’amor (courtly love) carved out a sacred space for longing as a spiritual practice, where unfulfilled desire was not a failure, but a furnace for poetry, imagination, and even transcendence. To love without needing to possess is one of the most exquisite, and most difficult, human feats. That is why I fell in love with literature very early and decided to turn it into a profession.
And yet.
For some, the ideal of sustaining oneself on unreciprocated love is not a nourishment but a slow destruction. Especially in a culture that glorifies suffering as depth and heartbreak as proof of authenticity, many remain ensnared in dynamics that slowly deform their sense of self-worth. One need only think of Werther, Goethe’s tragic hero, whose unreturned passion didn’t elevate him, sadly it obliterated him. Or Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations”, frozen forever in her decaying bridal gown, her love calcified into vengeance and madness.
Not every aching heart turns its wound into art or transcendence. Some wither under the weight of it, some confuse longing with identity, pain with proof, and end up offering their entire psyche as a shrine to someone who never even lights a candle in return.
So yes, love unfulfilled can be a muse, a myth, a soul-deep enrichment (you feel it, I feel it). But it can also be a drug. And like all potent substances, it depends on the dosage, the constitution, and the container. The same ember that lights one person’s inner world can burn another’s house down.
I think the secret is knowing when you hold a sacred flame, and when you clutch fire.
P.S. …. And I’m glad I’m not the only one idealising love, and being a hopeless romantic (but shhh, don’t tell anyone!)
So, here I am again, true to my word. Serendipity drew my eye to this essay. I am just months out from a ghosting at the end of a relationship that created for me a withdrawal that is to all intents and purposes described by your very essay. Firstly I can acknowledge that I know that you know. You would not have been able to scribe such a deeply architectural piece with having had such an experience. That said, not everyone ( myself included) could parse out such a delicate yet robust map of such a harrowing time. I 'felt' this. Every word. I am in there right now. Easing myself towards this knowing. "You are no longer the rejected. You are the escaped. The survivor. The sovereign. The rebuilder of your own inner architecture." Thank you. I draw real comfort from this writing. I am shattered by the experience of recognising how I idealised her and in truth, others before. How I created a goddess 'out there' that was equal in size to the hole inside me that birthed such seeking. Turned out that this time she she was Kali incarnate. A final destruction. My inner architecture razed to the ground so that now the only way left is to rise. Slowly slowly catches the monkey. One step in front of the other. In September of this year I will begin a series of weekend retreats with men to explore that inner architecture more deeply and continue the rebuild. This essay has given me feathers. No penguin this time. More Eagle. And high flight. Bless you for your words.
Thank you, Paul, for meeting my words with such full-hearted presence, and for answering them with the weight and clarity of your own truth!
There is courage in the way you name what most try to escape, not the ghosting, but the idealisation, that silent architecture of longing we build in the absence of what we most crave. To see the goddess we created turn out to be Kali is no small reckoning. But as you’ve so beautifully recognised, Kali doesn’t come to punish. She comes to liberate. Through the fire, not around it. Through the ruin, not despite it.
And what you’re doing, turning the shards into scaffolding for others, is precisely what I meant by the sovereign. A man who doesn’t run from the wreckage but walks it like sacred ground. You are already that man.
September will be a threshold. What you’re initiating is rare… few men choose to sit in a circle with their ghosts, their fathers, their heartbreaks, their inherited silences. And fewer still offer others the courage to do the same. May your weekends become bonfires for the broken and wings for the willing.
You’re right, I wrote this because I’ve been there. Once, in a spiral that only deep love, and deep loss, can carve. But I’ve come back with clearer eyes and a more finely tuned internal compass. And if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: when the goddess turns her face away, it is not rejection. It is initiation.
So take those eagle feathers. Wear them as declaration, not decoration. You are no longer waiting to be chosen. You are choosing yourself, and in doing so, you offer the world something far rarer than romantic love, and that is the presence of a man who has walked through illusion and come out radiant.
Cry in cashmere is my favorite! This nonreciprocal love is a preparation for self-love. It teaches us that the love we may receive is proportional to the love we may give ourselves. So within, so without. This inner journey or inner consuming in fire is essential for the birth of newness centered in self-love. We love to the extent we love ourselves, primarily as women representing the womb and cradle of love. Love love this reading. Thanks
Yes, “cry in cashmere” indeed because of the softest unraveling of something once imagined eternal. And yes, nonreciprocal love as a crucible for self-love is a brutal but alchemical truth. It melts our illusions with surgical heat.
I’d add this, perhaps it’s not just about how much love we give ourselves, but the quality of that self-love. Not performative affirmations, but the kind forged in lonely hours, in silence, in choosing not to text him back because you finally trust your own worth more than his fleeting attention. For women especially, conditioned to be caretakers of everyone else’s emotions, learning to cradle our own is radical. Self-love is not a retreat!
Thank you for seeing the fire, and not turning away.
You have this incredible ability to take a subject as well-worn as unrequited love, and make it compelling. You also make me feel like I'm venture into new territory. I really don't have much to say on this topic, but that's exactly the point. You are a testament to the idea that a skilled writer can pull anyone in; the topic is far less important than the way it's presented. You perfectly balance the razor's edge of profundity without the preaching; sentiment without the saccharine; self-esteem without ego.
I'm sure you write for yourself and not to compete, but you are showing the vast majority of Substack how it's done, regardless of any metrics, and whether you intend to or not. Including me. You always deliver, on-time and on-point.
Well done, Tamara.
Andrew, thank you, truly, for such a generous comment. It feels like you’ve caught the thread I most hope to weave: that it’s not novelty of topic that breathes life into writing, but the sincerity and precision with which it’s explored. As you so insightfully put it, the real adventure is in the quality of the gaze we bring to it, not necessarily in the subject.
Your words remind me of something Borges once said: that originality doesn’t lie in inventing new stories, but in telling the old ones as if they had never been told before. That’s what I chase — not with competition in mind, but with the stubborn devotion of someone trying to do justice to the raw, often messy business of feeling.
I’m deeply grateful you felt that balancing act, of sentiment without saccharine, self-esteem without ego. It’s a tightrope I walk consciously, believing that emotion is most powerful when it’s offered undiluted, without manipulation.
And if, along the way, it also manages to quietly raise the bar in a noisy space… well, that’s a beautiful kind of collateral damage I can live with.
Thank you again for such a galvanising message. Few can make my day like you do, and fortify my resolve to keep showing up with my whole self on the page.
I almost don't want to write anything.....
I don't want to spoil perfection, and yet we're obliged, all of humanity is, as my teachers have taught, the adage of the sages, and words of a Prophet, "Whoever doesn't thank people, doesn't thank God."
How much gratitude? As many times as you are graced with blessings. Perpetual!
The sincere is always in gratitude, it is contentment with one's lot and "contentment is a treasure chest that never vanquishes," in other words, take what you may from it, it remains full.
This fullness is also what your piece delivers, this reconstruction of a hacked up person, feeling like Frankenstein, put together pieces and soulless, finally contrary to Shelly's darkness, and wish to push this hidden occultist innuendo, one finds their soul sparked back up again. Your piece reads like that lightening bolt that doesn't kill, but revives, and electrifies the dormant in us all back to life.
Emerson said,
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
So, I stand and ovate, I pay tribute to you and your beguiling mind and warrior soul, that can't help but produce priceless piece after piece.
Therapy, for those of us who despite ability and wit, are voiceless, whether by choice or force of hand.
Thank you. 🤲
Your words are a benediction in themselves, a reminder that true gratitude is not transactional, gratitude is a continual blooming, much like the “treasure chest that never vanquishes” you so beautifully invoked. I’m deeply moved that you received this piece as narrative, and as a kind of electric reanimation — not the Frankensteinian horror of misassembled parts. You made me feel it was the sacred act of calling the soul back into coherence.
You’ve touched something essential, that healing writing (when it manages to happen) is the reader recognising a buried part of themselves through the act of reading, not simply the author transferring feeling to page.
Emerson’s “alienated majesty” describes it perfectly: our forgotten truths returning home, adorned in new armour.
If my work serves as a kind of therapy for the voiceless, then it is only because readers like you complete the circuit — lighting up what was meant to be lit. Thank you for standing with me in that shared conscious choice against silence.
Your comment is my treasure. I receive it with reverence.
True. healing isn’t linear and choosing yourself becomes the real victory. I’ve lived this in my own way, and what struck me most reading your piece is how much it matches the messy, unglamorous reality of it.
When I went through my version of this, I kept thinking that if I could just understand it intellectually, if I could map it, name it, analyze it, the pain would disappear. But it didn’t. What I learned, though, was that clarity grounds grief, doesn’t erase it. It stops you from adding unnecessary shame or self-blame to an already painful experience.
And like you said, there’s a difference between pain and suffering, a nuance I didn’t fully appreciate until I realized how often I was extending my own suffering by clinging to the illusion rather than facing what was. Knowing that has made me far more compassionate with myself now, in ways I couldn’t have been back then.
Thank you for writing this, it’s rare to see both the ache and the wisdom captured together.
You articulated something I deeply believe, that understanding grief intellectually is comforting, but it doesn’t grant us immunity from feeling it. As you said so powerfully, clarity anchors us!!! It doesn’t anaesthetise us. One of the most humbling lessons is becoming aware that pain belongs to the body and heart first, not the mind. We can map the terrain endlessly, but at some point, we must walk it. I’m so moved that you caught the distinction between pain and suffering, the quiet, life-changing fact that we often participate in our own wounding by resisting reality. Your hard-won compassion shines through here, and it reminds me: wisdom is the ability to cradle the pain without losing ourselves.
Thank you for reading so thoughtfully! You always do as a matter of fact.
You’re smart and wise, Tamara. You have the wisdom that comes from actually living what most people only theorize about, because you capture with striking clarity that while understanding grief can steady us, it never exempts us from walking through it, and your ability to distinguish between pain and suffering, and to recognize the quiet power of accepting reality rather than fighting it, reflects a depth of compassion and strength that is hard-earned, deeply human, and wonderful . Thank you for reading and reflecting with such care, it’s never lost on me, and it never will be.
You remain my role model.
One of the highest compliments possible, thank you, Céline!
Reading every line was like standing at the edge of a cliff I’ve stood at before, only now I can see it more clearly in the rearview mirror than I ever could looking down. Your emotional intelligence is spectacular and visible here. It feels you are someone who has metabolised grief into wisdom, and not in that tidy, Instagrammable way, but through the bruised, uneven process of actual living.
For me, unrequited love once felt like a kind of spiritual vertigo, knowing you're falling, but still mistaking the dizziness for elevation. I clung not to the person, really, but to what I projected onto her silence. That illusion—the way I could mythologize her smallest gestures into significance—was the hardest to relinquish. Then you mourn your own capacity to believe.
What finally shifted wasn’t some grand epiphany. I felt the fatigue of carrying something that no longer made sense to hold. An emotional entropy. One day I noticed I hadn’t thought of her until mid-afternoon. Another day, I caught myself laughing freely—m and realized I was living again.
There’s a question here I’m still chewing on: how do we discern when we're genuinely healing, versus when we're just managing our wounds with better aesthetics? Does self-love sometimes masquerade as self-protection? Or is that part of the process too?
I’m moved my essay could be the cliff’s edge from which you reflected back with such clarity. That grief, metabolised honestly, never quite becomes “neat.” It leaves behind a textured wisdom, stitched from bruises not stupid hashtags. I love your image of spiritual vertigo, that dizzying confusion between falling and flying. Mythologising silence is its own heartbreak, isn’t it? The mourning of one’s own capacity to believe feels, to me, like the final act of grief: the death of the dreamer, and the rebirth of the witness.
Your question (about the line between true healing and aesthetic self-management) is interesting. Maybe early healing is sometimes self-protection dressed up as empowerment, but like you said, that may be part of the process too. Authentic growth often starts in mimicry before it roots in reality. We fake freedom until, one day, we realise we’ve stopped faking and simply are free. The ideal.
Thank you for deepening the conversation beautifully, Alexander!
Thank you, your reply sat with me in that rare, still place where I can feel your words. I read it twice, slowly. Maybe three times. It’s a gift when someone sees your internal landscape and names it without flattening it.
I’ve lived so much of my life trying to distinguish real healing from beautifully disguised coping. I’ve worn the costume of empowerment before my soul had grown into it, practiced self-worth like it was a foreign language I was desperate to sound fluent in. And I think you’re right, the pretending is a rehearsal. Maybe the heart needs a script until the voice becomes its own.
I feel enormous gratitude that your writing gave me language for feelings I hadn’t fully metabolized. Your metaphor—"the death of the dreamer, and the rebirth of the witness"—gutted me in the best way. That’s exactly it. The ache of losing the illusion of the other + the illusion of who I was with her, or because of her. And then somehow surviving that loss with more authorship, more clarity, maybe even more gentleness.
I’m grateful for your words, your mind, and your little community. You have amazing subscribers.
Tamara, your magic and wisdom are infinite. Nothing to add. Only ruminate and draw conclusions…
I’ll come back.
Looking forward to it!
THIS! To be read over and over again! Thank you, Tamara.
Thank you! Many will find themselves in my words….
Recovering from an emotional setback is not simply about taking time to heal and forget.
A lover who discovers that he is a victim of an illusion or has entered into a losing bet is like the driver of a speeding truck loaded with fuel who has to stop due to an emergency.
A sudden stop is devastating, and just as you filled a tank of wheat from a small hole, you must extract the wheat in the same way, grain by grain.
A visceral and vivid image,that truck, that halt, that slow, painstaking grain-by-grain extraction. Yes. I often think people underestimate the silent, internal work of withdrawing. It’s not escape, it’s excavation. Not forgetting, but unweaving. It’s humbling to have to undo the dream thread by thread, especially when the illusion wasn’t built by malice but by longing. You’re right, recovery isn’t about speed or distance; it’s about the intimacy of slowness, the dignity of feeling every grain fall. Thank you for this!
wooooooooow. Just wow!
Thank you!
Very well written. Especially the bit about the ache not as a roar but a houseguest outstaying their welcome.
Now Imagine a form of unrequited love that is actually understood and felt by both, but is forbidden due to honor and commitment. A kind of love that is not unidirectional between two people but unidirectional in the sense that they cast it, feel it, but choose not to fulfill it out of integrity. Many of the same pangs exist, not because it is a love sent to the void but because it is a deep intimacy that cannot be explored.
Ahhh, the heartbreak of consensual restraint, perhaps the most exquisitely painful flavour of love. Not the grand operatic unrequited kind, but the quiet ache of a mutual flame that both parties agree, silently and solemnly, not to feed. It’s the love that shows up on time, in full colour, and still gets turned away at the door out of deference to another life already in progress.
You’ve mentioned something rarer than tragic romance: ethical longing. The kind of intimacy where every glance is a novel left unopened, every gesture a door gently closed before the threshold is crossed. It’s eros with a moral compass, desire wearing a tailored suit, standing perfectly still while its heart runs marathons.
And yes, the pangs are all there, perhaps even more vivid, because this isn’t love wasted or misunderstood, but love disciplined. A love that doesn’t crash and burn, but simmers eternally in a room behind a locked door… where both have the key but choose not to turn it.
There should be a word for that. Something between fidelity and fantasy. Maybe reverence….
Thank you, Arik!
Yes exactly. It’s kind of like a sacred companionship if it goes long enough.
Marcel Proust described that after mourning a lost relationship he could live again. But sometimes it happened that in a particular street he had not yet learned to be beyond the missing. This "street of Proust" can be any phenomenon. In <https://henkbarendregt.substack.com/p/two-faces-of-emptiness> unfolds a story to find that space.
The “street of Proust”, what a sublime metaphor for that ambush of memory that no logic, no self-help book, no spiritual insight can quite defend against. We think we’ve metabolised the loss, turned the pain into prose or wisdom or art. But then we round a corner (literal or psychic) and there it is. The scent, the light, the unbearable familiarity of what’s no longer ours.
Your poem walks beautifully through this paradox: emptiness not as a void to escape, but as a terrain to be befriended. Proust would approve, I think, he knew the ache was also the portal.
The street remains, sometimes, because the love was real. And sometimes, because we were.
Here is another example of turning into art the lack felt during a lover's mourning.
Le vent roulait les feuilles mortes; mes pensées
Roulaient comme les feuilles mortes, dans la nuit.
Jamais si doucement au ciel noir n'avaient lui
Les milles roses d'or d'où tombent les rosées.
Une danse effrayante, et les feuilles froissées,
Et qui rendaient un son métalique, valsaient,
Semblaient gémir sous les étoiles, et disaient
L'inexprimable horreur des amours trépassées.
Les grands hêtres d'argent que la lune baisait
Étaient des spectres: moi, tout mon sang se glaçait
En voyant mon aimée étrangement sourir.
Comme des fronts de morts nos fronts avaient pâli,
Et, muet, me penchant vers elle, je pus lire
Ce mot fatal écrit dans ses grands yeux: l'oubli.
// Again with wonderful music, but this time chilling.
Composer Ernest Chausson, Poème de l'amour et de la mer.
Part II starts at 15:51 and the above text starts at 19:30 on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjLxpZQ3qAg&ab_channel=Pacific231
//
Personally I prefer music like Kaddish of Ravel. And other strengthening pieces.
Henk
What a haunting choice, Chausson’s “Poème de l’amour et de la mer” evokes mourning, and it embalms it in velvet and salt. The passage you quoted feels like autumn weeping in French. The leaves not as metaphor but as mourners themselves, and the moonlight as both witness and accomplice. That line — ce mot fatal écrit dans ses grands yeux: l’oubli — is the kind of wound that literature was invented to touch but never heal. Oblivion as the final lover.
And you’re right, this is art made of absence. A symphony written in the key of ache. What I find so striking is that it doesn’t try to console. It doesn’t attempt to transcend the loss; it reveres it. Like a requiem that refuses resurrection.
Your preference for Ravel’s “Kaddish” is telling, though. While Chausson drapes us in silken despair, Ravel lifts the veil, grief here is prayer, not paralysis. It’s as if in Ravel, the mourning folds into dignity, into a quiet form of résistance. Not the oubli Chausson fears, but the memory that insists on staying. One piece surrenders to ghostliness, the other clings to grace.
Maybe that’s the real heartbreak? Some love stories dissolve like fog, others fossilise. And we don’t get to choose which one ours becomes.
Merci for this exquisite addition, your ear is as sharp as your insight.
Have you heard the music that accompanies that poem, sung in a awe-inspiring way?
Yes, of course.
Chausson's music makes us melancholic, beautifully so, but still weak. Ravel and composers like Bach and Stravinsky are also sensitive, but make us strong.
I like both types of music.
Now your point "... dissolves in fog or fossilises." When something happens we cannot choose. But we can have an attitude in life that favours one or the other. When we learn that pain is not to be avoided, that is impossible, it can be lived in the Bach/Ravel/Stravinsky way.
Important: not to cling to it by identifying.
Henk
Bull's eye.
Again!
Thank you, Jeremy!
At first we cover-up. Perhaps frequently with potent coping. Then less often. Then the wound is almost healed. At last we feel confident we are healed. Possibly yet another cover-up.
But there is a realm of being. Not here nor there. Not in the past, future or even the present. Vast and unchanging. The groundless space of consciousness. It is the end of suffering.
What you’ve written pulses with that strange, slippery truth we only glimpse after agony, that healing may just be a more elegant illusion. A subtler costume over the wound. We swap gauze for philosophy, distraction for depth, and call it peace but sometimes it’s just grief in drag.
And yet, this “realm of being” you speak of, the unlocatable nowhereness, it’s real. Not because it’s always accessible, but because we touch it in those rare, disorienting silences when the story drops away. When we’re not the wounded, not the healer, not even the one remembering. Just AWARE.
Thank you for this, Henk, it’s thoughtful!
Finding that space more often:
https://henkbarendregt.substack.com/p/two-faces-of-emptiness
i left another comment in the thread to your piece on curated contempt to say something about how i had stopped writing completely because of heartbreak. i erased that part though, i thought it irrelevant. and then you write this here! coincidence?
i have to read it again, carefully. i think i disagree. but where and how i do i have to think about. it's certainly interesting and, as always, very well done. it should soothe. but there's something that doesn' t apply to my particular version of ache. or maybe i'm just in denial and don't want it to speak to me, yet. i'll give it some more time and then come back to you.
Sure, Ivy, don’t rush your thoughts, let them settle. And then dialogue makes us both evolve.
you know, i think i am hopelessly romantic. in the sense of the word derived from French, le roman. the medieval concept of the courteous love that became the cradle to all european literature and the underlying script for societal norms around our culture of loving. It entails the inevitable notion of non-reciprocity or at least some form of the impossibility of real fulfillment. it is it's essence.
"There Are Only Two Tragedies. One Is Not Getting What One Wants, and the Other Is Getting It" is Oscar Wilde saying that desire, love and longing are in themselves the things we absolutely need to do in order to live meaningfully, richly.
Guinevere, king Arthur's wife and Lancelot's lover, is the embodiment of this concept, she is the perfect lover but not for either of her lovers, nor is her love ever perfectly fulfilled, but she lives love to it's fullest, most lively ideal. she becomes love herself and so is the perfect counterpart to the passive, depressed, strangely stylized, silent, boring Arthur.
I rather feel enriched by love, even if unanswered. I keep it inside myself and feed it rather than rip it out and with it my beating heart. i rather cradle a broken heart in my chest than none at all. And let this love, like a tiny scaly animal grow for its own existence, nourish, feed it with my dreams, tell it my desires, and let it's beauty give me hope in our times of scarcity and bleakness.
This is so beautifully said, and I agree, to a point. There is immense nobility, even magic, in loving for the sake of love itself. (I am the same). You’re absolutely right that the medieval tradition of fin’amor (courtly love) carved out a sacred space for longing as a spiritual practice, where unfulfilled desire was not a failure, but a furnace for poetry, imagination, and even transcendence. To love without needing to possess is one of the most exquisite, and most difficult, human feats. That is why I fell in love with literature very early and decided to turn it into a profession.
And yet.
For some, the ideal of sustaining oneself on unreciprocated love is not a nourishment but a slow destruction. Especially in a culture that glorifies suffering as depth and heartbreak as proof of authenticity, many remain ensnared in dynamics that slowly deform their sense of self-worth. One need only think of Werther, Goethe’s tragic hero, whose unreturned passion didn’t elevate him, sadly it obliterated him. Or Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations”, frozen forever in her decaying bridal gown, her love calcified into vengeance and madness.
Not every aching heart turns its wound into art or transcendence. Some wither under the weight of it, some confuse longing with identity, pain with proof, and end up offering their entire psyche as a shrine to someone who never even lights a candle in return.
So yes, love unfulfilled can be a muse, a myth, a soul-deep enrichment (you feel it, I feel it). But it can also be a drug. And like all potent substances, it depends on the dosage, the constitution, and the container. The same ember that lights one person’s inner world can burn another’s house down.
I think the secret is knowing when you hold a sacred flame, and when you clutch fire.
P.S. …. And I’m glad I’m not the only one idealising love, and being a hopeless romantic (but shhh, don’t tell anyone!)
"the secret is knowing when you hold a sacred flame, and when you clutch fire." .. sigh
"She lives alone with no one
Who can see she's unhappy
She knows what she lost
Still she is waiting for more
"She could be living in hell
And not know someone loves her
What can she do
What is she waiting for ?
"The day turns to night
He just can't find the right words to tell her
Twisting and turning and looking for
Something to say
"If you would let me hold you
I wouldn't walk away
That's what he wants
That's what he wants to say
"What can she lose ?
What is she waiting for ?
"He knows when she cries
And he saw through the lies that she told him
She's dreaming and planning
Of how she could ask him to stay
"If you would let me love you
I wouldn't be the same
Please can we try
Please can we try again ?"
- Marianne Faithfull, "She".
Thank you for this, Ian! It can at the right moment. And it is priceless.
So, here I am again, true to my word. Serendipity drew my eye to this essay. I am just months out from a ghosting at the end of a relationship that created for me a withdrawal that is to all intents and purposes described by your very essay. Firstly I can acknowledge that I know that you know. You would not have been able to scribe such a deeply architectural piece with having had such an experience. That said, not everyone ( myself included) could parse out such a delicate yet robust map of such a harrowing time. I 'felt' this. Every word. I am in there right now. Easing myself towards this knowing. "You are no longer the rejected. You are the escaped. The survivor. The sovereign. The rebuilder of your own inner architecture." Thank you. I draw real comfort from this writing. I am shattered by the experience of recognising how I idealised her and in truth, others before. How I created a goddess 'out there' that was equal in size to the hole inside me that birthed such seeking. Turned out that this time she she was Kali incarnate. A final destruction. My inner architecture razed to the ground so that now the only way left is to rise. Slowly slowly catches the monkey. One step in front of the other. In September of this year I will begin a series of weekend retreats with men to explore that inner architecture more deeply and continue the rebuild. This essay has given me feathers. No penguin this time. More Eagle. And high flight. Bless you for your words.
Thank you, Paul, for meeting my words with such full-hearted presence, and for answering them with the weight and clarity of your own truth!
There is courage in the way you name what most try to escape, not the ghosting, but the idealisation, that silent architecture of longing we build in the absence of what we most crave. To see the goddess we created turn out to be Kali is no small reckoning. But as you’ve so beautifully recognised, Kali doesn’t come to punish. She comes to liberate. Through the fire, not around it. Through the ruin, not despite it.
And what you’re doing, turning the shards into scaffolding for others, is precisely what I meant by the sovereign. A man who doesn’t run from the wreckage but walks it like sacred ground. You are already that man.
September will be a threshold. What you’re initiating is rare… few men choose to sit in a circle with their ghosts, their fathers, their heartbreaks, their inherited silences. And fewer still offer others the courage to do the same. May your weekends become bonfires for the broken and wings for the willing.
You’re right, I wrote this because I’ve been there. Once, in a spiral that only deep love, and deep loss, can carve. But I’ve come back with clearer eyes and a more finely tuned internal compass. And if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: when the goddess turns her face away, it is not rejection. It is initiation.
So take those eagle feathers. Wear them as declaration, not decoration. You are no longer waiting to be chosen. You are choosing yourself, and in doing so, you offer the world something far rarer than romantic love, and that is the presence of a man who has walked through illusion and come out radiant.
Fly high!
Cry in cashmere is my favorite! This nonreciprocal love is a preparation for self-love. It teaches us that the love we may receive is proportional to the love we may give ourselves. So within, so without. This inner journey or inner consuming in fire is essential for the birth of newness centered in self-love. We love to the extent we love ourselves, primarily as women representing the womb and cradle of love. Love love this reading. Thanks
Yes, “cry in cashmere” indeed because of the softest unraveling of something once imagined eternal. And yes, nonreciprocal love as a crucible for self-love is a brutal but alchemical truth. It melts our illusions with surgical heat.
I’d add this, perhaps it’s not just about how much love we give ourselves, but the quality of that self-love. Not performative affirmations, but the kind forged in lonely hours, in silence, in choosing not to text him back because you finally trust your own worth more than his fleeting attention. For women especially, conditioned to be caretakers of everyone else’s emotions, learning to cradle our own is radical. Self-love is not a retreat!
Thank you for seeing the fire, and not turning away.