Selfless Unrequited Love.
Serotonin-enhancing antidepressants blunt the emotions in unrequited lovers undergoing therapy, including the elation of romance, and suppress obsessive thinking, which is a critical component of romance. When you inhibit this brain system, you can inhibit the unrequited lover’s well-being and possibly their genetic future. As discussed in my blog Evolution and Unrequited Love, antidepressants also inhibit orgasm, clitoral stimulation, penile erection, in general, the body’s entertainment system. As the study goes, from an anthropological perspective, a woman who can’t get an orgasm may fail to distinguish Mr Right from Mr Wrong.
Gay and Lesbian Sex
While conducting research on unrequited love with reference to gay and lesbian sex, scholars found that 9% of women and 10% of men reported homosexual behavior, desire, or identity. One-third of those who had same sex partners in the past year did not consider themselves homosexual. 50% of gay men and 75% of lesbians have had intercourse with the opposite sex. 67% of gay male couples have sex at least three times a week in the first two years of marriage compared to 61% of sexual couples and 33% lesbian couples. Various authorities estimate that gay men have had somewhat less than 50 sexual partners while the figure was less than 10 for lesbians. Another study indicates that men have six long-term sexual partners while women have two.
Scholars stress that gay and lesbian sexual practices are essentially the same as for heterosexuals, with the same body parts in play and the goals of achieving a high degree of intimacy and sexual release or orgasm. Gay males had anal intercourse in one-third of their encounters. Oral sex and mutual masturbation made up the other two-thirds. Lesbians engaged in kissing, petting, mutual genital contact, oral-genital contact, body contact, and object-genital insertion. New scientific research shows that a key messenger molecule is responsible for female sexual receptivity – at least in rats and mice.
These details are relevant to this subject to understand that for many of us, sexual orgasm, accomplished within a love relationship, is one of the all-time highs. Hence, when an individual is deprived of it in unrequited love, whether s/he is a heterosexual or a homosexual, starts showing signs of deficiency. Sex, like love, can be accompanied by a sense of merger and transcendence and only a mutual relationship can bring the sense of fulfilment to an individual.
Your one-way love is never fulfilled. The relationship never begins and you keep holding on to the hope, in spite of knowing that your beloved is not going to reciprocate the feeling you value so much. Your beloved has such control over you, instead of learning from the situation and making the right decisions at the right time, you stagnate yourself in an unfulfilling affair. It sets up an inclination towards self-mutilation. A good relationship is where both partners feel the support of being pushed to achieve their best, yet being loved for what they are. Both the partners need to feel important in the relationship. Praise and encouragement are the essence of a relationship, but an unrequited lover tends to settle with the absence of all of these and continue to follow the love object blindly.
Find the side of you, within you, that’s your guide, your higher self. It will tell you this is not how it wants to see you, alone. It knows this love is never going to be reciprocated and keeps reminding you how emotionally weak and vulnerable it is making you. When your love has gotten hold of your life, when there is a lot of crying, screaming, there’s denial of facts and emotions. When you know you have cried every day for months, this guide within you will know that you are in denial, you don’t want to accept the facts. It’s the same when you’re a drug addict, like I said in my blog Obsession or Addiction?, unrequited love is actually a form of addiction. You will be lost in longing and you mistake it for love. It becomes habitual and lurks behind everything, taints every moment of joy and happiness that could be yours only if you were brave enough to get over it. You must get over that denial, accept the facts and process the emotions.