While volunteering at a preschool in Baltimore, conflict between children wanting the same thing was a constant issue. One resolution that I would try and use was to give the child without the toy a different one.

Instantly, the child with the original toy would become jealous, begging for the newer and somehow more exciting toy that I had just given his classmate.

So why is it that, even as little kids, we are always pining for the things that we do not have (or in some cases, cannot have)?

While I cannot give you a direct answer, I can offer some pieces of this puzzle.

According to Psychology Today, the brain’s reward center knows after only one or two experiences with random events to determine whether or not it likes something.

Dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure, surges whenever these events (or things or people) come into our lives once more.

Of course, I cannot talk about desire without bridging into the world of love. From your celebrity crush to “the one that got away,” almost all of us have felt the burn of unattainable love.

Research from Emory University’s George Berns (ironic name, I know), cited in Psychology Today, states that participants were randomly given water or juice. Disregarding participants’ previous preferences of juice or water, brain scans showed that their strongest reactions were when they did not expect to receive anything.

So, the take away from the Berns article can be that the spontaneity of reward is what makes that reward so great.

This aligns with what I have learned in my Psychology of Personality course; that when we are rewarded randomly, our reinforcement is much stronger than if we were rewarded on a regular basis.

If you were complimented on your eyes, you would feel good about yourself, right?

Well, what if you continually got complimented on them?

Hour after hour, you hear the same compliment.

Because of this, the effect wears off, and you no longer find your eyes to be particularly praise-worthy, whereas if you were only complimented every few weeks or so, it would be that much more special to you.

So, is it then not the object of our affection but the unpredictability of the interaction that we love?

That could be one way to look at it.

Another take on this is an interview from NPR in which Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University, says that our attraction to somebody is not only based on their physical attractiveness, such as even body proportions or a nice face but on the person we believe they are on the inside.

Think of the MTV show, "Catfish." The premise of this hit docu-series is the fact that people fall in love over texts and online messages, and often times, when they meet their lover, they are greatly disappointed to find someone who looks completely different.

This disappointment is not solely because the “catfish” looks different in-person, but also because the catfish “victim” had a person image in his or her mind about the personality of the person who they believed they were talking to.

They connected a certain looking person to a certain personality, and their image has been shattered.

Could it be emotional gratification that we pursue? The constant need to know that our expectations are being met could be another reason we pursue those who do not pursue us in return.

No matter how much we try to reason out why we feel the way we do or why others don't feel the same way, there is no easy way to sugarcoat the pain. As it was once said in the movie "He's Just Not That Into You," "I deserve somebody who gives a shit." And so do you.