The most famous story of unrequited love has to be by author Charles Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities."
The novel explores themes of sacrifice, resurrection, and social justice, particularly through the characters of Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a London lawyer his lookalike. Both fall for Lucie, the beautiful daughter of Dr Alexander Manette, once imprisoned for exposing aristocratic crimes, but she chooses to marry Darney. Darnay is repeatedly threatened by the revolution due to his family's history, and Carton ultimately sacrifices his life for Darnay and Lucie. Sydney Carton rises in moral stature when he sacrifices his life to save Darney. Rather than grudge Lucie for not returning his affections he is noble enough to sacrifice himself on the altar of unrequited love. In the final act, Carton goes willingly to the guillotine. He comforts a young condemned seamstress and utters the novel’s famous final thought: “It is a far, far better thing that I do…”
Maybe such characters are only to be found in fiction though.
Recently in the news (25th June 2025) is a lady engineer working in Deloitte Rene Joshilda who plotted revenge against a colleague who had spurned her advances and married another man. Over the past year, Ahmedabad Police say Joshilda, a robotics engineer and senior consultant with Deloitte in Chennai, sent hoax bomb threats to more than 20 locations across India: stadiums, schools, airports and hospitals, all in the name of her unrequited love. Her targets included the iconic Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. "She was in one-sided love with a Brahmin boy," said a senior official with Ahmedabad Police’s Cyber Crime branch. "When he got married, she started planning revenge. She wanted to ruin him."The emails, sent over months, triggered panic across 11 states: Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Kerala, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Punjab. Each time, police scrambled teams, evacuated buildings and launched search operations. Every alert turned out to be false.
Described by the police as highly educated and meticulous, Joshilda utilised the dark web and encrypted email IDs, even using Pakistani VPN and accounts in the name of the man who never reciprocated her feelings. All this was to mask her identity and implicate him. She even sent an email from him claiming he was responsible for the Air India Plane Crash in Ahmedabad. This is when the authorities woke up to her threats and set up teams to track her down.
Dante's collection of poems and prose, La Vita Nuova, is a chronicle of his love for Beatrice, immortalizing his feelings for her even after her death. It is a testament to the profound and lasting impact of unrequited love.
Beatrice is also a central figure in Dante's epic poem, The Divine Comedy, where she serves as his guide through Paradise. This suggests that even in the face of death and spiritual transcendence, the memory and idealized image of Beatrice continued to inspire him.
The consequences of Dante's unrequited love were multifaceted. While it caused him emotional pain and longing, it also fueled his creative genius, inspiring him to create some of the most enduring works in Italian literature. His love, though not returned in a conventional romantic sense, ultimately became a source of spiritual and artistic inspiration.