All relationships are asymmetrical. However there are some asymmetries that fray the material of the connection and maim each folks concerned — none extra so than these of a deep friendship the place one individual feels the tug of romantic love and the opposite doesn’t, can not. The problem, then, is find out how to protect the sanctity of friendship from being crushed beneath the burden of unequal expectations.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772–July 25, 1834) addressed this haunting paradox of friendship and romance in his marginalia whereas anguishing over a decade-deep chaste infatuation together with his buddy William Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson, all of the whereas modifying his literary journal, The Buddy, which he devoted to Sara.
Within the margins of the 1669 traditional Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne — himself a person of intense and anguished propensity for romantic friendship — the 38-year-old Coleridge writes:
Friendship satisfies the highest components of our nature; however a [beloved], who’s able to friendship, satisfies all.
He contemplates why friendship alone will at all times really feel much less satisfying than a love that features friendship however reigns supreme over all different relations:
We might love many individuals, all very dearly; however we can not love many individuals, all equally dearly. There can be variations, there can be gradations — our nature imperiously asks a summit, a resting-place — it’s with the affections in Love, as with the Purpose in Faith — we can not diffuse & equalize — we should have a SUPREME — a One the best. All languages specific this sentiment.
However such supremacy, Coleridge observes, is just actual when buoyed by mutuality — by the sheer legal guidelines of logic, by the sheer legal guidelines of physics and their force-counterforce equivalence, there may be no such “summit” on one facet solely, or else it’s merely an echo of selfishness or delusion. Pulsating beneath this truth is the need of accepting that, in some elementary sense, all unrequited love will not be actual love however fantasia — and solely by letting go of that fantastical longing can symmetry be restored to the lopsided relationship.
Coleridge writes:
So that an individual ought to proceed to like one other, higher than all others, it appears essential that this sense needs to be reciprocal. For if or not it’s not so, Sympathy is damaged off within the very highest level. A. (we are going to say, by means of illustration) loves B. above all others, in the very best & fullest sense of the phrase, love; however B. loves C. above all others. Both due to this fact A. doesn’t sympathize with B. on this most vital feeling; & then his Love should essentially be incomplete, & accompanied with a craving after one thing that will not be, & but is likely to be; or he does sympathize with B. in loving C. above all others — & then, after all, he loves C. higher than B. Now it’s selfishness, a minimum of it appears so to me, to want that your Buddy ought to love you higher than all others — however to not want {that a} Spouse ought to.
Coleridge considers the best way a balanced love — be it friendship or romance — helps us combine ourselves, uniting the thoughts and the guts right into a single force-field of being:
The good enterprise of actual unostentatious Advantage is — to not eradicate any real intuition or urge for food of human nature; however — to ascertain a harmony and unity betwixt all components of our nature, to offer a Feeling & a Ardour to our purer Mind, and to intellectualize our emotions & passions.
Complement with Van Gogh on heartbreak and unrequited love as fuel for creativity and the philosopher-poet David Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, then revisit Coleridge on the interplay of terror and transcendence in nature and human nature.
