A theme that pops up fairly regularly in reading poetry is ‘cruel love’.
Come away, come away, death
And in sad cypres let me be laid
Fly away, fly away breath
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
The poet is rejected by the girl, and for this she is declared as cruel.
It’s like- Dude! Move on. Ok, she isn’t attracted to you, it happens. That doesn’t make her cruel any more than it makes you cruel just because you don’t like some girl who might be attracted to you.
But in trying to think about this, maybe it was the age. Prospective lovers were meant to be more carefully chosen, and that meant putting oneself publicly on the line as interested in the young girl. This wasn’t something that could be done flippantly. If a man didn’t succeed, and then just moved on, he would be seen as not all that interested in the first place. So failing to secure the girl’s approval at his advances would have been seen as a fairly large gaff on his part. Perhaps it would have been seen as a failure in judgment, which would call in to question his ability to judge other important questions in life. I don’t know what the stakes were, but I’m trying to reason through the different factors at play and see if I can come up with something better than poets are touchy, artsy-fartsy, overly-sensitive types… which is probably the real answer.
Relationships and their development would probably have been pretty much the same then as it is now, even if courting conventions have changed radically. There is the process of getting to know a person, recognizing things you like about that person, wanting to know more, and then the back and forth of making your own interest known, and reading the other person. We all know that someone can be interested in you, but not be interested romantically. They can enjoy spending time with you, but feel physical attraction. So reading the other person can be tricky.
Learning to read when the other person is genuinely interested hasn’t, in my experience, been all that difficult. But when someone genuinely returns the interest, there is a desire that can be read in their eyes and face.
Maybe until that point, men will be willing to try a little harder, to see if maybe they could just get the girl to see them a little deeper, it would change the girl’s view of them. Perhaps in that day too there were societal pressures for the young woman to guard herself and not be too obvious, which would have clouded the view even more for the man.
IF… cruel love isn’t just the imagination of overly-emotional poets, the dynamics are a lot deeper than what I can plumb right now. I’m just trying to write out some thoughts about this since it has popped up repeatedly.