This has been bothering me all day.

[magibrain]

AO3 has 114 works tagged "mutually unrequited". They're not all by the same author, so I assume the tag has to have some generally-understood meaning. Can anyone explain to me what that meaning is?

Comments

[frith_in_thorns]

Sounds like a misunderstanding of "mutual pining" to me...

[ivorygates]

"mutually unrequited" => the two characters do not give a hydroelectric dam for each other and may never have actually met.

[veleda_k]

It makes me think of a line from one of the Discworld books about two people who would have had a romance for the ages had they not been born hundreds of years apart and on separate continents. (Paraphrase.)