Unrequited Love and Choices.
Fairy tales in real life may not look like fairy tales as presented by Mr Disney. Prince Charming may have a crooked nose, and your princess may have pigeon toes. What am I trying to say? Being so fussy that you miss genuine relationship opportunities is a silly thing to do. Expecting people to be perfect, then getting mad when their behaviour doesn’t exactly accord with your imagination of how they should be, is unfair and wrong and leads to unrequited love or broken relationships. As discussed in my blog Unrequited Love and Imagination, just think for a moment how wonderful it’s going to feel when you no longer have to be obsessed about that person. How you’ll be able to choose whether to think about them or not. And when you do, you are able to feel calm and detached, putting it down to part of life’s rich tapestry of experience.
Don’t try to change your partner. There is an old Sufi tale in which some villagers find an eagle, a bird they had never seen before. Because it was unfamiliar, they didn’t feel it was a real bird at all. So they cut its beak, trimmed back its feathers, and clipped off its talons, at last deciding that now it looked like a proper bird. Of course, it could no longer fly.
Treating your partner or beloved like a project that you need to work on, like something to ‘improve’, is disrespectful and can make the person feel like you don’t appreciate them for who they are or even know them at all. Not like all unrequited lovers try to change their partners, but people in a relationship, trying to get someone to wear more trendy clothes, go out for work, act how you think they should, begs the question- what did you see in this person to begin with? Remember the story of the villagers and the eagle. Dating someone new should be fun, exciting, and enjoyable. If you can monitor and influence your own behaviour during this ‘getting to know’ phase, you have more hope of getting to know whether you and they really will work together without needing to blame anyone if it doesn’t work out.
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 realise 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?
Knowing what may be wrong can help us all understand more how to find what is right. Most people have experienced unrequited love at some point in their lives. Those strong feelings that you feel for someone, you want them, you need them, you cannot live without them, but unfortunately, they do not feel the same way. Understand that you are in unrequited love. Whether it is a high school crush, admiration for a co-worker, or new feelings for a close friend, unrequited love often dies because most of us realize that we will likely not get the results we want, so we move on. Only, sometimes we don’t. Or, we have a hard time moving on. Do things that engage your logical, planning, strategic brain. As discussed in my blog Strategizing Against Unrequited Love, we live for our choices. They define who we are. We are also free to choose to make a decision. This could be a decision to continue following unrequited love, or to realise the truth and move on. This decision can change your life. Like all other decisions in life, this too can turn out to be for the better (which is mostly the case), or for the worse. No matter what, you will learn from the experience. You need to first acknowledge the problem, in order to understand how it is affecting you. This is the only way to identify the problem, so you can exercise our choice and decide how to deal with it and make the necessary changes. When people are depressed, they have less activity in the prefrontal lobes of the left side of their brain, so purposefully doing logical activities which can be way more interesting than that guy’s task, can help stabilize mood and help you feel much more detached and objective about stuff that was bothering you. You need perspective to deal with unrequited love.
Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.