Tamara's comment, see below, reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a very attractive friend of mine, who said that she'd recently been "burned" a couple of times in her relationships. I asked, with geniune astonishment, "What does that mean for someone like you?" She explained that "being burned" was when she cared for someone more than he cared for her. "Usually," she said ingenuously, "it's the other way around."

Which reminds me, in turn, of one of my favorite pop choruses: "However I look it's clear to see / I love you more than you love me." It took me years to realize that this lyric was meant to be ironic. (It's from Electronic's "Getting Away With It," and it's about Morrissey.)

The short of it is that I have experienced unrequited love, but in retrospect, it was less about a person than about an ideal that existed only in my imagination. Ultimately, it was always unfair to the object(s) of my affection, because it really had nothing to do with who they really were, and more with how my insides felt at a particular chord change in a song that they'd never heard.

In the long run, Tamara, your approach seems like the sane and healthy one. The only positive thing about unrequited love is that it sometimes purges you and forces you to become a better person, and occasionally results in poetry, pop music, and ill-considered mix tapes. This, at least, is the story I used to tell myself, late, late at night.