Very often, I wish to suggest, the object of allegedly unrequited love is a fiction, or rather, a fictionalized version of a person. … The real person, by contrast, is not a good match. That’s precisely why he or she is rejecting us. So the object of our unrequited love — the fictional person — is not rejecting us since that person is an excellent match. And the real person who rejects us is not the person we love. … What I have been arguing here is that in the case of so-called unrequited love, some of those qualities — and from here, the object of our love — are inventions. The love is real, but not the object of love.
Know Thyself 