Love Gone Bad: Problematic Aspects of Love

Love is associated with a variety of positive events. For example, the experience of loving another person may allow us to feel intimacy, contentment, and satisfaction; to experience passion, joy, and excitement; and to provide and receive emotional and social support. All of these experiences, in turn, can enhance and promote our psychological and even our physical well-being. But there is another side to love as well—a dangerous, destructive, and problematic side that is associated with dysfunction, negative emotion, and other less-than-enjoyable outcomes. This chapter examines the “dark” side of love.

Unrequited Passionate Love

Folk wisdom (actually, Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson) tells us that “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” And perhaps this is sound advice. After all, love is usually associated with a wonderful and rewarding mix of positive outcomes, events, and feelings. However, passionate love—particularly when it is unrequited or not reciprocated by the beloved—has the potential to be just as strongly associated with negative outcomes.

In one of the first studies to attempt to explore the dynamics of unrequited love, Roy Baumeister, Sara Wotman, and Arlene Stillwell (1993) asked 71 people who had been in this situation to write autobiographical accounts of their experiences as would-be suitors and rejectors. The results indicated that unrequited lovers experienced a panoply of both positive and negative emotions. Many (44%) would-be suitors reported that their unreciprocated passion caused them pain, suffering, and disappointment; jealousy and anger (which were usually directed at the loved one's chosen partner); and a sense of frustration. Similarly, 22% experienced worries and fears about rejection. In addition to these unpleasant experiences, however, the lovelorn suitors also reported many pleasant emotional outcomes; in fact, positive feelings far outweighed negative ones in the accounts they gave of their experience. For example, happiness, excitement, the blissful anticipation of seeing the beloved, sheer elation at the state of being in love, and other positive emotions were reported by the majority (98%) of would-be suitors. More than half (53%) also looked back upon their unrequited love experiences with some degree of positive feeling. In explaining this finding, the researchers noted the following:

When the researchers examined the experiences reported by the rejectors, however, they found little evidence of positive outcomes. Specifically, although roughly one-fourth of the rejectors reported feeling flattered by the attention of their potential lovers, the majority also [Page 163]viewed these unwanted advances as annoying (51%), felt uncomfortable about delivering rejection messages (61%), and experienced a host of negative emotions, including anger, frustration, and resentment (70%). In addition, their recollections of the entire experience were far less suffused with warmth, with only 33% indicating any positive affect in retrospect. The researchers

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