Hope for the Separated Unrequited Love.
Hope. It’s essential to life. Regardless of the issue at hand or the relationship in the balance, hope is the basic ingredient that keeps us moving forward. Even King Solomon knew that hope made a difference. He wrote “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”
Those of you who have read my blog Unrequited Love and Cocaine would know that despite the fact that unrequited love is connected with tension and anxiety, this state, mixed with hope of reciprocity leads the unrequited lover to feel extreme happiness to the level of euphoria. This reaction is similar to the effect of cocaine. Like cocaine, love increases the levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine in the body. Because dopamine is associated with pleasure and causes the brain to think about pleasurable moments, narcotic drugs like cocaine increase the brain’s levels of dopamine and cause addiction. This scientifically explains why unrequited lovers are addicted to the object of love.
So where does that leave the separated couple or the husband and wife considering separation, leaving one or both in unrequited love? Surely, nobody marries with a plan to separate or divorce. Nobody marries expecting to live with hope deferred. This is why we often find ourselves in unrequited love or sinking relationships, with no understanding of how we reached there. It usually starts with a nice romantic relationship, gradually losing the sheen and turning to something you never wanted it to be. As I have discussed in my blog Hopeless Unrequited Love, by the time you realize something is wrong, it gets so bad, you find it difficult to handle it right and you cannot afford to lose it either, because you are hopelessly in love. There certainly must be some warning signs? What do we miss that could’ve warned us?
All of us have seen plenty when it comes to marriage; a lot of couples that started their journey with hope but ended up in separation, because they lost it along the way. We are empathetic with the pain that brings them to the place where they feel like there’s no hope. Some are condemning of people who are at that point, maybe because they’ve never been there. But most of us know what it feels like, to realise that it’s not going to work out, that we shouldn’t have gotten married, or fallen in love, that we made a big mistake in the first place. And so, I’m very empathetic with unrequited lovers going through a divorce.
All the people who come from that point of desperation to have the marriage they really wanted when they got married – there is hope. I can understand that you have no hope for your marriage. I can see that. I can feel that. But I have hope for your marriage. So, why don’t you go on my hope for a while, and let’s just see what can happen?
It’s a combination of compassion and wisdom that helps the couples in crisis. Understand that when the state of a marriage is critical, it deserves intensive care. It can be difficult for individuals to even articulate the words “I am separated”, and although separation is not death, the experience reflects the psalmist’s description of the valley of the shadow of death! The pain and grief of separation are often similar to the experience of losing a loved one to death, but the shadow of death should not be equated with death itself. Separation may prove to be the rebirth of your marriage or it may be the beginning of the end. Either way, you can count on life to care for both of you along the way.
Rather than asking “do you want to work on your marriage?” ask yourself if you are actually willing to work on your marriage. A willingness to work toward reconciliation is a good place to start — regardless of where you end up.
Do not make Family your core mission in life. Try to strengthen your marriage to be happy. An unhappy person cannot form a happy family. Separation is not inevitable for every struggling couple. Also understand that reconciliation is not always possible after a separation, so don’t lose hope for when endeavoring to move past a divorce and into what life has for you in the days ahead.
Sending peace and light for a beautiful relationship.