Moving On in Unrequited Love.
When you have done all you can in unrequited love and your beloved still doesn’t love you back, your family doesn’t understand your love, and your friends think you are wasting your time, you genuinely wonder ‘why don’t they understand?’ There are certain aspects of you screaming at you, to analyse! When everyone is against you, every person who genuinely cares about you, you perhaps need to understand that certain parts of your belief are unreal and are not letting think straight! Sometimes, memories of the time spent with your beloved, the experiences and effects keep returning to the unrequited lover unnervingly and occupy a large part of their mind space. If there is nothing that you find to connect with your beloved, for example in a movie, a situation or a song, you immediately make-up something in your mind to connect your fantasy to real-life romantic fiction. I have written about this in detail in my blog More About Limerence. At times, these thoughts completely occupy an individual’s waking hours leading to addiction-like condition and affecting their creativity and interest in other matters of day-to-day life. This often results into long lasting underachievement in school, family life and work. They continue to imagine a situation from the past and think of it from different angles, until they are able to construct a story that matches their actual desire and give it a desirable ending. The day you stop believing those stories of your imagination and investing in them, your family and friends will stop saying what they are and you will be able to smile from inside as you notice how you were caught up in fascinating and frustrating stories.
I have been talking about separation and its effects on couples, unrequited lovers and on relationships and life in general. Here are some lessons that I have learnt from separations and broken relationships (mine and other’s) –
Graceful Exit
As I have written in my blog Significant Separations and Unrequited Love, it is important to recognise when a stage of life, a job, a relationship is over and let go. It requires leaving what’s over, without denying its validity or its importance in our past lives. Learn to gracefully and gratefully exit from a chapter of life that is over without prolonging and stretching something that has lived its life. This involves a belief that every exit is followed by an entry, a sense of future, a belief that we are moving on, and not moving out. Consider it as retiring well in order to live well. Do not make your life a holding action, but a process. Unless you realise the importance of letting go, you will not learn that we don’t leave the best part of ourselves behind, back in the broken marriage or love affair. We own what we learnt there. The experience is grafted onto our lives. When you exit, you exit with an experience that will make your further relationships better.
Holistic View
Considering how this move is going to affect each person involved is only going to cause more confusion. Know that life is really wise. Even if your mind cannot quite wrap itself around it and see what’s happening. Your partner or beloved, family, kids, everyone is going to be affected by your move, but no one has the ability to feel how you are feeling. So it is only you who can make the right decision about your life.
Be willing to reach out to professionals. They will be able to identify your patterns and the essence of your existence. It is always helpful to get an unbiased view of the situation.
Compassion
Be true to what you feel and be kind to what the other feels. Be willing to compromise or let go of all that is important – assets, relationships, custodies, etc. In the long run, you will see that everything can be recovered with time; yes, even relationships. If you are going to lose a friend, because of your one-way feelings, so be it. Once you have got your feelings under control, you can always try to be friends again. Money, assets, children, everything will fall into place, with time.
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