Women and unrequited love

What’s up with women and unrequited love?

Why, if longing to love and be loved, are there so many women that pursue relationships where their affections will not be reciprocated?

Moving beyond the obvious, if terrible, fascination that some women express for their abusers, there are those that pursue relationships with emotionally unavailable men.

Seriously, women love to love men who are emotionally unavailable to them. Men, like the self-tortured kind who is full of conflict, like the rootless adventurer who has no boundaries or destiny, like the “mamma’s boy” who never will leave from under his mother’s skirt, and worst, those who are married.

Why would any woman pledge her heart to men who won’t love them in return?

Really, why would any woman pledge her heart to be with the frustrated artist who craves the fate of an American Idol finalist (but won’t even audition for the show)? Pledge her heart to be with he whom even when present is always absent (thinking not about where he is but where he should be)? Pledge her heart to be with someone that can’t engage in affection greater than the one he feels for his mother? Pledge her hearts to be with a married man?

I mean, really?

Don’t get me wrong, if you gals are all-in with becoming groupies of the “singer song-writer” who’s biggest claim to fame is the pop-ballad mixed-tape he gave you for your birthday; making-out on a hammock with a speedo-wearing fake-tanned stranger; having every date be but an excuse to take his mother out (while being treated as an unworthy blood-sucking leach); or holding hands with a married man while shopping for shoes (with the rent money of a family of six), be my guests.

Casual affairs and adventures apart,

For even I can acknowledge that adventures with these types can turn out to be backstage parties with a lead singer at a concert in Madison Square Garden; under-the-full-moon trysts with a high-wave surfer in Bali; dinners at Scottish-countryside-manor where they are served by an army of courtiers; or a shoe-shopping spree on Fifth Avenue and/or Rodeo Drive; who knows.

One is left to wonder why, and against all evidence to the contrary, do so many women buy into the idea of an impossible love that only they will be able to conquer.

As much as they might believe that love conquers all, at the end of the day she who buys into the romantic idea of an impossible love will be “left to hang.” The thing is that evidence shows that even in the best of cases these women will be getting paid to appear in an E-True-Hollywood-Story episode as the mother of a famous’ rocker’s illegitimate son; paying of the prosthesis and taking care for life of the invalid adventurer who lost his arms and legs to the jaws of a lion on the Serengeti; being left-out from the inheritance from which her in-laws so carefully carved them out from; or, in the “very best” of cases, with the cheating husband who abandoned his family.

Because the result of pledging their hearts on the idea of gaining one that’s not available to them will most certainly be that they will end up being “left to hang,” one is left to wonder what’s up with women (and the emotionally unavailable)?

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Next post: Women and the “third-date rule” (February 1st, 2012)