Boredom in Unrequited Love.

Unrequited love stems from infatuation, and ‘discovery’ is a major part of infatuation. In other words, as long as your object of love is a stranger, you continue to be in love with the image that your heart has formed of the person. As you learn about the object of your affection, the insights propel you to the next stage – affection. If you love the person more for who s/he really is, you enter attachment.

However, at times, at times, the person turns out to be a raving, provoking lunatic. If this happens, detachment would be the wise choice. All pain, no gain. In case you are in love with your best friend, a fight with them can intensify the feeling, making you work harder to put things right. A strong desire to intimate with another person physically and emotionally, when unreturned, becomes unrequited love. As I have discussed in my blog Falling In and Falling Out, fulfilment in life involves romantic relationships as a crucial element for many people. In the absence of a romantic relationship, most people tend to become desolate and lonely. An individual’s narcissist needs start anticipating an ideal romance after finding a partner. However, as the relationship grows, a more mature and realistic relationship will evolve from a healthy partnership. This will be strengthened by friendship, inter-dependence, loyalty and companionship kind of superego related values and not from unreturned, one-way love. Even if you are clear in your mind that you want just this one person for your life to be happy, I bet that nowhere in your list of intentions do you want your partner to not love you as much as you love them. Yet, this is all that you are getting by being in unrequited love. Aspire to create an exclusive, loving, joyful and fun-filled relationship for yourself.

There are certain other factors that affect your bliss time in a relationship, for example dissimilar interests and goals, irritation, sexual dysfunction, fear of loss of personal freedom and identity, antipathy for each other’s friends and family, surfacing of past relationship disappointments, inability to argue productively. Etc. This is just a short list of reasons that come to my mind at the moment. There are many other bubble-puncturing issues. The factor at the top of this list, hen a couple starts falling apart is ‘boredom’. I have always emphasised on the importance of continually having adventures, doing new things together. You don’t necessarily have to do grand or expensive things. You can lengthen the duration of romantic love or, even better, have a burst of that old feeling within the attachment stage by just trying to keep introducing fresh experiences into the relationship.

Some couples have loads of good, solid ideas for new things to do together. A dance or music class, an unplanned trip, etc. It becomes monotonous to do the same things you usually do, in the same place, every single night. That brings me to the next point – to distinguish lust from infatuation. If you lust for someone, you are not necessarily in love with them. For many couples, it starts with lust and then moves into infatuation.

It is not impossible to fall in love without sex. But mostly, when you are dating someone, everything they do suddenly becomes sexually attractive. Falling in love triggers your sex drive. As discussed before in my post Unrequited Love and Cocaine, this is because of the high levels of dopamine in your brain, and you want it constantly, because it is addictive. That may be what you’re most afraid of losing, why you want to arrest the infatuation stage
If you really want this love to last forever instead of turning to unrequited, unreturned love, try new things to keep the spark. Prolong infatuation by making improvements in your physical appearance. Perhaps ratcheting up the limerence potential by losing weight, or a new hair-do, combined with new novel adventures, could do the trick.

While some attempts to seduce your partner might fail, enjoy the successful ones to avoid being bored in the relationship or find it unfulfilling after the first six months of dopamine kick. Boredom leads to frustration and rage building up in couples and eventually they distance themselves from the partner. Sometimes it gets to a stage when you desperately want to indulge in sexual encounters with your partner but your body becomes physically and emotionally incapable of forming a fulfilling association. Avoid that.