The Dam
In interpersonal relationships, there is a phenomenon where two people with unspoken resonance, for whatever reason, never fully express the extent of the love they feel for one another. Resonance is a peculiar thing, because true resonance is paradoxical, it holds the highest form of love yet equally the most unsettling, piercing energy when it unflinchingly reflects back fragmentation and destabilising avoided truths. Because burying is easier, such resonance often remains implicit - thus it is felt, but not entirely lived.
This pent-up need to love, carrying the signature of compulsion, becomes like a dam. Unlived love does not disappear. It builds. The unexpressed affection, longing, and compulsion create pressure. The longer it is suppressed, the more it distorts both the psyche and the choices one makes.
The recurring pattern is that one or both usually escape into less confronting relationships where the full extent of that which could not be gifted is unabashedly released. Yet, it is a form of lying to one's soul when done with a lesser substitute who lacks resonance. A safer vessel enables the evasion of rawness evoked by the original mirror, that is why it never feels enough, that something that cannot be easily named is missing. It is the glamourised dance of cowardice, one that will sooner or later loop back.
Such is the tragedy of truth avoidance. What is most real remains unintegrated.
While a repression of the will never lasts like you say, like Schopenhauer i would argue that negation of the will is possible and necessary. Just because we deny certain resonances to unfold doesn’tmean we are makinga mistake. The negation of will, or libido in this case, is even the cornerstone of a functioning society. When men limit themselves in the women they take, and women also limit themselves in chasing men, we get a society without divorce and the degenerate drama of adultery and promiscuity so many suffer from today.
In a way, unlived love is psychically reserved for that person, thus, no matter what is given or purged onto another, the reservation remains.