What I am about to relate to you is spectacularly, fatally, embarrassing.
During one of the paralyzing, ephemeral, "end of times" infatuations that bejeweled the crown of my adolescence, I had the unique pleasure of being good friends with the object of my obsessive, honey-glazed, "A Whole New World"- informed affections.
Actually, I guess that's not unique. Special Agent Clarice Starling once observed that "We covet what we see everyday," and she probably got it from the bible, or some shit.
Nor was it a pleasure. There be few things on this here earth shittier than having something you want dearly dance just out of reach, day after day.
What was unique, I imagine, was that this girl was completely forthcoming to me about her affections for some other motherfucker. She would tell me about how badly she wanted to, "Put it in him," and those four syllables would ball themselves together and come flying at the scrote of my teenaged, melodramatic heart, dropping it to its knees, leaving it on the verge of achy breaky.
One day, heading to the same place, I saw her on the street. She asked me if I wanted to see a movie with her that night. Of course, I knew immediately that this was a friendly, "Wanna see a movie?" invitation, but that didn't stop my Richard Curtis, Hanks-Ryan, "Always Be My Baby" addled mind from dreaming up the most lurid fantasies of which my fairly expansive imagination was capable. And so, for the next two or three minutes I was allowed to live in a mental Disneyland of sorts, where seeing this stark, depressing, Gus Van Sant movie was a romantic touchstone for a whole fucking cornucopia of future bliss.
This was of course, until we arrived at our destination to find the other motherfucker standing in the middle of the room.
And so, before she promptly danced over to him and invited him to come along, officially dashing my magic carpet ride dreams, I saw the truth: This had been the plan all along. She was not bold enough to simply ask him to a movie, I would only be there to maintain the illusion of harmless friendship. Only until, however, they were both comfortable enough with the large dark auditorium and the feverish chemistry of their young bodies. Then I would be silently put upon to leave.
Well goddamn. Fuck me.
I stood there, mouth open, watching her fulfill my prediction.
Then something happened.
I silently straightened up, excused myself from the room, and went into the bathroom. There I calmly walked into a stall, lifted the seat, and commenced to vomiting in the toilet.
A friend of mine knows a girl who has never, not once, had her affections for a boy fail to be returned. I met her once, and to me she didn't seem remarkable; but somehow, through 20 years of life, she has had the impossible misfortune of always having her unrequited love... requited. Huh.
Misfortune because unrequited love is truly some awful, soul-rending, fucked up shit. Wait. Misfortune because unrequited love is the sirloin steak in the butcher shop of human emotions. Damn.
MISFORTUNE because when I was fantasizing about how watching Michael Pitt portray a suicidal 90s rock star would somehow propel this girl and I into some kind of adoring haze; and then minutes later, when euphoria turned into misery, turned into despair, turned into nausea, turned into stupefying paroxysms of "what the fuck," that was blistering, rushing, freezing, burning life.
That was Mt. Everest at street level, leaving everyone to walk around with frostbitten hands, scrambling to hold on to ice picks in the middle of a midwestern July. That was not a pony, but a unicorn for Christmas, every Christmas, until you got old enough to want clothes and money. That was emotional fucking terrorism, if such a thing exists.
The intensity of just being alive that serious unrequited love produces is really a rare privilege, and maybe I say this as someone who, with emotional maturity seems to have lost the ability to develop unrealistic affection, but I honestly feel bad for anyone who's never felt as shitty and as simultaneously brilliant as unrequited love makes you feel.
This being said, I feel like there are very few good unrequited love songs. There are a ton of good love songs about feeling amazing, and there is a plethora of love songs about feeling absolutely awful, but it's difficult to straddle the line of ambivalent hope and misery, in the same song. Here are some of the few that get the job done.
I used to smile uncontrollably when I heard this song, it's so good. How Warwick goes to meekly confessing her dreams during the verses, and belting out the formulaic, but effective "forever" promises during the chorus, so effectively mirrors the topsy-turvy landscape of window-gazing at someone all day.
You know this song, and I know you know this song. But it's so perfect: When he sings, "that behind that little smile I wore/How I wished that you were mine," I dare you not to feel the ache. Ugh.
Just a simple song from earlier in Mariah's career, with simple production to match. Mariah's pretty sultry throughout, and you don't realize until the end that she's imagining all of this shit with some guy who she's not even with. Chilling.
This bare, stark, damn near a cappella track is characterized by the same kind of thin-voiced trepidation-fraught confession that lives inside of your Pretty in Pink heart.
This is a really great song. The frenzied strings that come in at the end where Bjork keeps screaming, "I dare you," thoroughly belie the internal maelstrom caused by wanting with every nerve of your body. Hopefully it will ruin you like it does me.
Sometimes, when I would drive around with my Mom and my Godmother, a song would come on the radio, and they would say something like, "Damn, that's some hurt. You hear that? That's some hurt." I didn't hear it then, but I certainly hear it in this song.
Oh Fiona. So harshly realistic. Even where her own heart is concerned. Admitting squarely that she's "a mess that he don't wanna clean up." Oooh girl. Tell it. Tell it!
This is face-melting hope. Hope that makes you wish it was snowing outside, so Jones could be walking around in the lamp lit winter streets, singing this song to the falling white world. Pitch perfect.
This song is really quite sad, but it lets you revel in the bleak joy of wanting something that doesn't want you; a joy that's admittedly, hard to find most of the time.
This is a wrecking ball. I know a lot of people don't like My Bloody Valentine's work, because the more palatable, pop elements of their music get drowned out by distortion. I feel that way too, even though this song is no different. The difference for me, is that that approach is just so fitting for the subject matter. Kevin Shields sings standard pop fluff like "I don't know/how you could not love me now," while guitars threaten to drown him out entirely. It's as if, the lyrics and the melody are just barely managing to keep the distortion in check, to stop the song from falling apart. If you listen to this song the right way, that is; in the dark, laying down, with the volume way up, it will gut you. Just like a really terrible crush.
