I crossed the world to tell a girl I loved her and she turned me down. How do I move on?

With advice from Petrarch and the WHOLE OF GODDAMN literature

Petrarchan sonnets: proof that literature’s eternal theme is unrequited love

I travelled to Asia to tell a girl I was in love with her, it was the only goal in my life for over a year, she said she didn’t feel the same way and didn’t think she ever would, now I don’t have any purpose and don’t know how I move on?!

Hello, heartbroken traveller. If you are a regular reader of Fictional Therapy, you’ll know I often start by offering sympathy to whoever’s written in. But I’m not going to do that here, because I don’t feel sorry for you. Nope. I feel proud of you. If anything, I feel jealous - of your bravery, of your romantic spirit, of the slightly crazy but ultimately beautiful way you were able to put your heart on the line.

But the style of your letter suggests to me you don’t see yourself the way I do; that you don’t understand that what you did deserves to be celebrated. Your message is so rushed - just a single, rattled-out sentence, a vertiginous rollercoaster of prose, as if what you did is too painful or awkward to dwell on for more than a moment. And that does make me feel sorry for you.

Because come on. Have you ever read a single book? In case you haven’t, let me fill you in: they’re not written about people who stayed at home and played it safe. They are written about people like you (or by people like you). History is written by the winners, sure, but literature is written by the losers: by the broken-hearted, the bitter, the betrayed; by all those who loved ‘not wisely but too well’, in the words of Othello. Ironically, these are the people we remember as heroes in the end.

I am not trying to say you have to process your feelings through writing, although it probably wouldn’t hurt. Instead I want you to internalise a truth which literature has always known: that deep emotional engagement with life is the only thing worth memorialising. In fact, it seems reductive to compare your situation to specific works of literature, because unrequited love is pretty much The Eternal Theme of Art - but the 14th century poet Petrarch comes to mind. Petrarch’s sonnet series about his agonising love for the unattainable Laura did not just capture the agony of yearning - it popularised a poetic form now named after the poet himself, the Petrarchan sonnet (one with an octave and a sestet). That’s what grand rejection can do - it can coin a whole genre. I like Sonnet 162, in which Petrarch’s narrator is jealous of the natural world, which is not plagued as he is with bodily desire for Laura - it reminds me of my own desire to be outside of my body in moments of extreme distress:

O gentle countryside, O pure stream,

that bathes her lovely face and her clear eyes,

you take your nature from her living light:

how I envy you those true and graceful acts!

Petrarch’s sonnets are full of oxymoronic expressions of love which have come to feel hackneyed: it’s all ‘sweet pain’, ‘bitter joy’, ‘charming agony’ and so on. But much as these paradoxes seem cliché after centuries of overuse, they also speak to something true: love and pain are inextricably linked, and the ability to feel both is what makes life meaningful.

I said that literature was written by the broken-hearted. To be more specific, literature is written by those brave or weird enough to bear their pain to the world; to hold it up to the light so others feel less alone - as you have already done by writing to me. Again, I am not saying you need to transmute your suffering into a grand work of art in order to be free, although it is beginning to look like a more and more viable option. But I do think taking ownership of your narrative is important. If you have not done this already, I would encourage you to talk openly about this chapter in your life with friends, family, or even strangers at the pub. At the end of the day, it’s just a thing that happened, and I think it’s cool. I can also confirm that it makes you 75% sexier in the eyes of anyone who’s ever read a romance novel, which is quite a lot of people. It’s the ultimate green flag: you care! You’re willing to say you care! I think taking the sting out of this story through conversation, perhaps even learning to see it as something laudable or at least net-neutral, will help you to move on.

And if you need further convincing, when I said I was jealous of you, I meant it. Once when I was quite little, I paid a pound to get my fortune read by a machine in a petrol station, and it spat out a bit of paper that read: your head often rules your heart (how is that even a fortune?). I was so horrified by this that I made my mum give me another pound, and promptly received the same message again. Instead of questioning the credibility of the machine, I was doubly affronted. Being a romantic was already integral to my identity; I had read enough books to know that heroines led with their hearts. But as I’ve grown older I’ve sometimes worried the machine was right – that my romantic sensibility is a mask which hides a secret streak of cynicism, or worse, pragmatism. I honestly don’t think I’d have done what you did. I think your life might be richer than mine because of it.

After writing most of this response last night, I went to the pub and had a dark night of the soul about the idea I might be a realist. The friend I was with gave me a kinder reading: that I have historically had a tendency to romanticise other aspects of my life - independence, friendship, travel, art - over romantic love. It is this part of me - call it the realistic part, call it my interest in a diversified romantic investment portfolio - that wants to tell you it was risky to make winning this girl your only goal in life for a year. But then, you know that already; we all know it. What’s life without a little risk? Nobody died. I’m assuming you don’t literally mean you ignored all your friends and quit your job while you were pining after her. No, I think I’m leaning into my getting-on-a-plane-for-love era. We’re all old enough to know that being turned down has literally nothing to do with your viability as a partner (if Matty Healy can ghost Taylor Swift, anything can happen). We’re all old enough not to equate romantic success with negating, paltry little tallies of broken up with versus breaker-upper. The most successful lovers are the people who love, who open themselves to possible heartache, who remain open despite it all.

Your disappointment right now must be agonising, and I know how terrible that rudderless, directionless feeling is too. But your purpose in life was never to go out with this girl. Your purpose was always to live in the way that you do, as a big, open-hearted, romantic soul; the kind of person who takes big swings, and sometimes hits, and sometimes misses. Imagine looking back at your life and realising you never even walked out onto the playing field. That would be a fate worse than heartbreak.

If you enjoyed this article, please give it a like or a share - it helps me connect with more readers! And a shout out this week to my fellow agony aunt Heather Havrilesky, who also wrote a gorgeous piece recently about embracing romanticism: read it here.