Engaging Yourself in Unrequited Love.
Most of us have been in love with our favourite toy as a kid. It was perhaps the main focus of our lives at that time, and we would insist on taking it everywhere, like we were meant to be together…always. That’s how it felt at the time, anyway. The point? It feels like it’s always going to feel this way; but it won’t always feel this way. There comes a time when we don’t look at our favourite toy from childhood for years. Back then, we would have scorned the idea that one day we’d ‘move on’ from our love. And, dare I say, it can be the same for people we’ve loved.
At the risk of presenting myself as completely insane, I once asked an unrequited lover, obsessed about a woman he worked with. He was finding night times impossible to deal with to “research the top twenty service stations catering for UK motorways north of London as rated by customers”. I asked him to compile me a report on it. Romantic or what! My rapport with this man was such that I convinced him to do it – and because he was a perfectionist, once he’d agreed, he couldn’t not do it. The next day, he came in and told me that after this onerous but logical task, he’d slept soundly, hadn’t much thought about this woman, and felt like he turned a corner. I’m not suggesting you do this task, but I am illustrating a point.
Do things that engage your logical, planning, strategic brain. As discussed in my blog Choose Well, 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.
Get into the habit of self-hypnotically projecting your mind into the future – to a time when you can look back to the present and wonder what all the fuss was about. This is a great way to actually start to naturally feel better – above and beyond all the ‘good sensible advice’. In all honesty, unrequited love actually has nothing to do with the other person at all. It is your mind that makes them special, like no one else. It turns them to an idol, an object of worship. Because of the very nature of unrequited love, the object of your love never becomes a part of your real life, hence you never bring them down from the pedestal and know who they truly are. We continue to live in a constant state of denial and keep weaving the powerful myths about how perfect everything would be if they were with you.
Get outside, exercise, go and see non-romantic movies, call up old friends you haven’t seen in a while. Keep doing all the stuff you’d normally do, even if you don’t feel like it, as these activities will buffer your peace of mind and help you move beyond your forlorn focus. I know it hurts, acknowledge the situation nevertheless. Love yourself enough to not throw yourself at someone who doesn’t even understand your feeling, let alone reciprocating. As I have written in my blog Guiding Out, unrequited love has sucked confidence and happiness out of your life, take small steps towards gaining back normalcy. It is also important to have faith that there is going to be another love for you, and soon!
In my next blog, I am going to write more about this subject. Please leave your comments about this blog. Any suggestions for my future blogs are also welcome!