Psychological Disturbances in Unrequited Love.
Most unrequited lovers think about the painful experience from the past as part and parcel of early life experience. They generally tend to look back on their experiences relatively positively and even with fond memories, warmth and some residual love. A few of them, however, find it impossible to cope with the loneliness, grief and desolation which are invariable components of unrequited love. As I have written in my blog Addicted to Grief, although emotional pain is different from physical pain, a break-up or rejection literally crushes your heart in a way that you feel it breaking inside your chest like it was physically happening. Then again you are angry at yourself for being in that situation and resort to destructive means, like smoking, drinking and in extreme cases, even attempt to commit suicide. Some unrequited lovers see just one, tragically final way of escaping the ordeal – suicide. Depression is a mood disturbance characterized by feelings of sadness, despair, and discouragement resulting from some personal loss or tragedy. It can become an abnormal emotional state and lead to exaggerated feelings of sadness, despair, and discouragement out of proportion with reality. There are four major depressive symptoms; emotional, cognitive, motivational and somatic. A depressed individual is affected by these symptoms, dependently or independently of each other. In fact, when one set begins to affect the individual another starts reinforcing the depressive effect. Eventually, the emotional and cognitive clusters affect the motivational symptoms causing paralysis of sanity and/or psychomotor retardation.
As I have mentioned in my blog Falling Upward in Unrequited Love, on the whole, rejecters have a more uniformly negative and emotionally unpleasant experience than the unrequited lovers, in spite of not having suffered any moments as intensely bad as the acute pain felt by broken-hearted lovers. Unrequited love happens unknowingly, in all forms and types. The rejected lover, perhaps ironically, retains more good feelings about the beloved than the rejecter does, both during the episode and afterward.
The psychology of suicide becomes an integral part of the study of unrequited love, and oftentimes the information developed about the person, coupled with the contents of any notes and historical evidences, provides the researchers with a basis to believe that unrequited love could clearly be the event which ultimately becomes the reason for loss of a precious life.
Researchers say that suicide happens when we lose what we need the most. While we all need to love and to be loved in return, an unrequited lover feels that he has lost everything that made his life worthwhile. Sometimes, when one person is gone, the whole world seems depopulated. Love that is offered but not reciprocated, sometimes ends in a tidal wave of frustration, when sheer intensity of love is not enough to conquer their beloved’s heart. A lover’s life suddenly becomes so barren that its emptiness becomes unbearable and leads the lover to end his life. Some lovers bear such love for another person that they feel like nothing is left in life after having faced rejection too painful to be endured. They reach a pitch of despair exemplified by Narcissus in Metamorphoses “I have no quarrel with death, for in death I shall forget my pain.”
It has been said that problematic relationships are the cause of most suicides and suicide attempts in both adolescents and adults. Adolescents and young adults often attempt to commit suicide over unrequited love. A nineteen-year-old girl once said that she’d jump off Beachy Head if her boyfriend ever left her—he did and she did!
Samaritans claim that unrequited love is the cause of 74 percent of adult and adolescent suicide attempts. Surprisingly, an increasing number of them are made by men. Looks like loving hard carries the risk of falling hard for the gender. They say that a sobering link between love sickness and depression is suicide. Rejected lovers with a diagnosis of depression are at high risk; however, those individuals who are already depressed and then face a break up seem to be particularly vulnerable.
Suicide statistics for young men and women suggest that those ancient physicians who considered love sickness a potentially fatal illness were right. In my next blog I am going to write in detail about young men and women attempting to commit suicide in unrequited love. Please share your opinion in the comments section and I will try to add it in my future blogs.