Being in Unrequited Love.
The moments of unreturned, unrequited love or lust may be tough. They may even feel vulnerable, gut-wrenchingly sad, lonely, confusing and bare. Yet they are a tough reality of togetherness and separateness. And yet all of us keep falling in and out of unrequited all the time. There is not one person in the world who hasn’t felt unrequited love at some point in life. The unrequited love object puzzles us and allows our brains to dwell on them in order to try to understand them, thereby fueling our attraction.
If you are here, on this page, reading this article, you are most likely an unrequited lover. You are struggling with the lack of certainty, lack of affection and lack of someone to share your love with. While it’s not as fun to be in one way love, it does present the opportunity to heal layers of fear that aren’t activated otherwise. Yes, unrequited lovers live in constant fear of rejection, of social embarrassment and of loneliness.
Much of Hollywood films are predicated on the theme that the story ends when the relationship begins. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way in real life. So, for 90 minutes, we watch characters chasing each other, missing, meeting, then missing again. Our longing grows with their longing, both literally and emotionally, until, at last, they find each other and live happily ever after. As a result of this programming, we start equating love with longing, leading most of us to believe that true love is all about longing for a partner who isn’t fully available. Hollywood has a movie on all of us. From the time we’re old enough to understand love, we see it as a shimmery cloud of fantasy. We long. We chase. And then we think we’re in love.
Sometimes, a subtle and soft voice in your head that tells you – you are not good enough, has rather loud repercussions. You may judge that voice with no compassion, but it will only speak louder. You’d think you can outsmart the voice by ignoring it, but ignoring it only means you didn’t hear it, not that it isn’t still there. It is this voice that is in control, wreaking havoc in your relationship. You must tend to your place of not-enough-ness. When you feel you are enough, (pretty, loving, caring etc.), you will find life is enough (happy, fulfilling etc.). You will find enough love in the relationship, enough contentment without love. Acceptance creates change. When you accept life the way it is, you become capable of acceptance, because you feel complete.
Unreciprocated relationships can occur for several reasons. My extensive research on the subject leads me to believe that every unrequited lover can find someone to love them back, however, there are reasons why some of them remain in one-way love or fall in love with unavailable love objects. Unrequited love falls in the category of romance, unless it turns unrequited after the couple gets into a relationship. Hence, unrequited love requires more sacrifices and less compromises. This probably explains why unrequited lovers sacrifice the natural human instinct to belong, and just pursue someone who doesn’t reciprocate the feeling, or worse, doesn’t even know they exist.
You may have been raised in a home where your parents did not give you the love and affection you needed, or gave it conditionally based on behavior or performance. Thus, you may still be unconsciously trying to win this love by attempting to find success in similar ‘unavailable’ relationships. Unrequited love hurts so much that is becomes unbearable. When your heart is breaking inside with the feeling of rejection, or to see your beloved fall in love with someone else, the pain is almost physical.
It is important to recognise when a stage of life or a relationship is over and let go. Consider it as retiring well in order to live well. Do not make your life a holding action, but a process. It requires leaving what’s over, without denying its validity or its importance in our past lives. We need to understand that, at times, love is not enough after all. Different life, dreams and ambitions lead to difficult relationships, even if you loved each other and thought that love would be enough to make things work despite the differences.