love interest

Many people are involved in relationships in which they do not know how their love interest feels about them. […] They may also fear knowing the truth, which may be that their love interest isn't truly interested enough in them to make a commitment to the relationship.

Some of the greatest and most widely-appreciated literary achievements have been wholly or mainly independent of love-interest or love-inspiration. Religious fervour, zeal for liberty, admiration of abstract virtue, philanthropy, desire to search the heart of man, and contemplation of the beauties and splendours of the outward world,—all these prove to be motives as capable of firing and exalting the imagination as the more directly personal stimulus of love.