Understating Unrequited Love.
Unrequited love hurts. I know – that’s an understatement. You open your most vulnerable self to another person and, more often than not, you expect you feeling to be reciprocated by the object of your love. But it’s turns out to be wrong. So to all lovelorn lovers in unrequited love out there, courage! You are not alone. It happens to almost everyone. You will soon recover from the damage it has caused to your heart and soul and find the ‘actual’ love of your life (or be found by him) when it’s your turn!
Rejection is incredibly painful. But there are emotions we need to feel before we learn lessons we need to learn – falling in love with the wrong person is one of them. The first step is to know that you are hurt and you need to be taken care of. Take care of yourself just like you would if you were physically hurt, but in a different way. Don’t stress about the past or the future. Remember to live one day at a time. As long as ‘today’ is taken care of, ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ will automatically fall into place. Pull yourself together, yes it is not going to be easy, do it still, and move on.
Think about how it happened. Everything. How did you start falling for a person who you (probably) knew will not reciprocate your feeling? And if you did not know that you will be rejected, how did you misjudge the situation. What did you miss? See if you can find a pattern in your behaviour. Any kind of pattern – do you tend to fall in love with someone who doesn’t love you back? Do you like to be seen as a selfless lover, always giving and never demanding? Do you subconsciously set unachievable targets in matters of the heart?
As discussed in my post Facts About Rejection In Unrequited Love, we remember the social embarrassment caused by rejection in unrequited love, longer than we remember the pain of a physical injury. Think about an incident when you experienced excruciating physical pain and your brain will say “oh! That was painful!”, but at the end of the day, that thought will not leave you sleepless and physically hurt. Now remember a moment of rejection (really, don’t—simply trust me), and you will be overwhelmed with the same emotions you had at the time, and your brain will react much as it did at that time too. Our brain absorbs and holds the memory of rejection, because we are social beings with the need to live in groups.
There are many theories and counter-theories on this subject, as love forms an important part of our lives and is a much talked about subject. Psychiatrist Eric Berne in his book Sex in Human Loving says that “Some say that one-sided love is better than none, but like half a loaf of bread, it is likely to grow hard and moldy sooner.” This indicates that single-sided love does not last long and is soon forgotten when the lover finds some other source of love or something else to occupy his mind and fill his time. However, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, believed that “indispensable…to the lover is his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference”. This theory completely counters Eric Berne’s theory about unrequited love and suggests that a lover might move on in life or accept rejection, but can never forget the loved one.
When I loved and lost for the first time, it made me feel like I’d never possibly love again, honestly. It just hurt too much. Along the way, when someone proved that the unrequited love was not the only love of my life, I realized – if I felt this strongly about someone who didn’t love me, how much more would I love someone who loved me back? And when I found that person, I discovered a new meaning of love. The fulfillment of your love being reciprocated is much more than the pain you felt in unrequited love. You begin to see how foolish you were to have wasted so much emotion where it wasn’t even required.
I hope my blog helps you in understanding unrequited love better. Please leave your comments to share more experiences and i will add them in my future blogs!