Looking Beyond Unrequited Love.
Unrequited love hits harder if we stop meeting our basic emotional needs for companionship, creativity, and emotional intimacy, which can be got from good friends. Keeping your wider life going, and growing also lessen and stop the pain of unrequited love. I have discussed this in detail in my blog The Pain of Unrequited Love. The thoughts stemming from the feelings of unrequited love are all or nothing-“Without this person, my life is meaningless! Unless I have them, I don’t want anyone!” Putting all of one’s eggs in one basket is always a dangerous strategy. When we’re in love, we just want to be in love. The chores, mundanities, and obligations of life become unwanted distractions clawing for our attention, which we’d rather reserve for the love of our life. This becomes dangerous if we begin to actually neglect other friendships and human contact, just because they are not the person we are in love with.
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!
Glimpse the future in all its possible forms. Once a king who felt victim to the ebbs and flows of his mind gathered his wisest advisors and set them a task: “Produce for me an artefact that whenever I am low will make me feel better and whenever I am too high and mighty will steady my state and bring me balance.” The advisors duly reported back to him a few days later and the wisest presented the king with a golden ring. The king put the ring on and noticed that when he looked carefully, he could see the inscribed legend, “This too shall pass”. In future, whenever the king felt overwhelmed by anything at all, he would read these words and reflect on them.
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.
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.
In my next blog, I am going to write about other ways to help lessen and even stop the pain of unrequited love. Please leave your comments about this blog. Any suggestions for my future blogs are also welcome!