When something is withheld for years, the not-having can come to feel like proof that it is what your heart was meant for. Frustration and passivity get mistaken for longing. Years of waiting for a forbidden partner can turn out to rest on that illusion.
A person who waits instead of choosing is not neutral. They are pushed and pulled by other people's opinions, outside pressure, and rules they have taken in as their own. They drift through life like a sleepwalker, and the waiting itself becomes the shape of their life.
Someone who has only ever been the loved one, and never loved anyone wholeheartedly, may never grow up emotionally. The ability to love passionately can wither before it is ever used. Such a person may then blame their coolness on being too educated or rational: 'knowledge chills your blood.'
Winning the thing you waited for will not fix an emptiness that came from inside you. A long-deferred union can arrive feeling weary and listless, 'neither full nor filling.' The same unhappiness simply moves into the new life.
Quiet, everyday devotion is easy to lean on and fail to value because it never asks for attention. Its worth often becomes clear only when the more dramatic choice has let you down. By then, the chance to honor it properly may be gone.