Return to Sender.
I am somehow sure that everyone has been in unrequited love at least once in life. Be it unrequited lovers or researchers. Whether it started out as a love affair and then one person got wary of it, or the feeling was never reciprocated.
Everyone sympathises with the unrequited lover and we often see movies and novels written on the topic. However, surprisingly, nobody ever talks about the other side – the rejecter. Oddly, we tend to completely forget about the other party and ignore the rejecter. In my blog “Supernatural Forces in Unrequited Love” I have written about how couples sometimes part after being together for a long time. One of the partners unexpectedly switches off, and turns cold or unresponsive, leaving the other individual in unrequited love. This makes the abandoned individual lonely because he is still in love and is longing to be loved back. However, it is important to notice that while the lover goes through a lot of pain in unrequited love, the rejecter also feels pain. This pain is often ignored by the lovers and their friends and society because everyone is automatically more sympathetic towards the lover.
Unfortunately, persistence in spite of rejection, irrational and inappropriate behaviour are considered justified in case of unrequited love, which our cultural ideologies would not encourage otherwise. We mostly never worry about how uncomfortable unrequited love is, for the rejecter. Do we not feel guilty after rejecting someone? Does it not hurt us to hurt another human? I have written in my blog “Brain Chemistry in Unrequited Love” how when a love relationship is ended by one of the partners, it can be really hard to handle, especially for the person who wanted the relationship to continue. But is it not difficult for the other person to make the decision to end what was? In fact, as far as I can understand, rejecters understand the situation better than the unrequited lover and are more sensitive towards the circumstances. They have the sense to walk out of an unbalanced relationship, or never let the relationship start, because they know this is not where they want to be. While all this time, all that the unrequited lover does is to cry over rejection and gain sympathy of friends and family.
The object of love is mostly led to express rejection so subtly, in order to not hurt the lover that the lover filters out rejection from it and highlights the positive words in his mind. If you have read my blog “Unrequited Love and Cocaine”, you would know, despite the fact that unrequited love is connected with tension and anxiety, this state, mixed with hope of reciprocity leads the unrequited lover to feel extreme happiness to the level of euphoria. In this situation, it is all the more difficult for the rejecter to make the truth sink into the lover’s mind.
Researchers have found that the unrequited lovers are seldom aware of what the object of love is going through. They vaguely sense that there feeling is unwelcome, but they are so preoccupied with the catastrophe of their doomed passion that they are incapable of sparing sympathy or compassion towards anyone else; even towards the love object.
Admittedly, it is not easy to pick up the pieces of your broken heart and move on. Isn’t this what we have learnt from the first fairy tale of our life? That true love never goes in vain and that they lived happily ever after? The truth is that a heart once broken is not the end of the world. There is not just one love possible in a lifetime. Couples profoundly in love also survive distance. We live through the loss of our beloved partner, and individuals in an arranged marriage also grow to loving each other more than the lovers who claim to have fallen in love at first sight. All of this happens. Life moves on; and there’s a common denominator among those who are successful at understanding this mantra.
The successful ones find human connection in other family and social relationships and make the most of them. On the other hand, the unsuccessful ones move to reading my next post!
Moved on after a heartbreak? Do share your experience in the comments section and I will include it in my next post.