Word for missing someone you’ve never known or met
I’ve felt this way for a long time, as well as many of you. I’ve thought of a few, like longing, yearning, maybe even desire. But I decided to search and find an answer.
Apparently, there isn’t a word with this exact definition.
Saudade (Portuguese): a somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness; longing for something that might never return.
Remember that time in elementary school when you raised a group of butterflies and set them free into the wild, secretly hoping that one of them might flutter back to you and refuse to leave? Remember how you felt when it didn’t happen? How about the time you tuned into one of your many TV shows the week after they killed off your favorite character? Imagine how you felt then, knowing that, until the writers run out of plotlines and resort to character resurrections, your fictional hero/heroine will no longer be included in the show’s script. That is saudade. It is the same reason why, no matter how much you hated high school, you are still flooded with a sense of nostalgia whenever you flip through a yearbook. You don’t want that time back. You want that emotion back.
Tocka (Russian): great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause; ache of soul, a longing with nothing to long for.
Tocka is the center-point of every 2-dollar paperback novel you find in the “beach book” section of a convenience store. By which I mean, it is the feeling of missing something or someone that you never had in the first place (and later finding a man or woman or cat that fills that void). It is often referred to as the “Carly Rae Jepsen Syndrome” in reference to her lyric “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.” To put it simply, if this were an episode of Friends, Phoebe would be cleansing your aura.
However…
There is a special and rather beautiful concept in Welsh: “hiraeth.” It is has such a broad depth and range of particularly feelings that it can not be translated exactly to the English language.
Rather it is a Welsh concept of longing for home. It means a lot more than solely “missing something” or “missing home.”
Hiraeth (Welsh): A particular type of longing for the homeland or the romanticized past.
Meaning the yearning or longing for home. This missing is a yearning, longing to be with someone, to see them, of course you can long and yearn to see someone you have never met, someone you have a sense of, someone whose absence is felt even though you have never known their presence. Feelings often are not logical and we may be drawn to someone for some mysterious reason and if it’s reciprocated, it can become a strong emotional bond.
So there you go. Hiraeth. :)
