Strategizing Against 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.
As I have discussed in my blog Looking Beyond 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’. Getting out of the pit is the next step. When we’re in love, even if it’s with our own imaginative version of a person, it’s easy to wallow in romantic fiction, poems about undying love. But overdoing this can cause you further problems. If you’re really suffering because of your unrequited passions, then this is akin to rubbing salt into a lacerated leg wound repeatedly. It’s gonna hurt.
At the risk of presenting myself as completely insane, I once asked an unrequited lover who was finding night times impossible to deal with, being obsessed about a woman he worked 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.
When you love someone who doesn’t seem to care for you, or at least not as much, it can be easy to agonize over why they don’t like/love you the way you do them. Understand how wrong you were in falling in love with someone who will never love you back; more importantly, someone who doesn’t even care! Remind yourself of the bigger picture – there is no happy ending in this relationship. As discussed in my blog Guiding Out, unrequited love is definitely the ultimate form of rejection. But in the process of dealing with it and getting over it, you actually learn to deal with rejection in the future.
When you are madly in love, you want to change yourself to be everything that you think your beloved wants to see in a partner. But with time, you get into a habit of doing it for yourself. You become aware of your shortcomings and start improving to become a much better version of yourself. Once you have rediscovered yourself, you emerge as a more confident individual. You start going out with friends and having a good time, initially just to take your mind off what has happened, and later, because you discover that it makes you happy. So it is not just stalking your love on Facebook or eating ice cream to overcome depression anymore. You realize that small things in life can often make a lot of difference. The fact is, you may be the best looking, wittiest, brightest, most fun person in the world, and they still may not like you the way you like them. Trying to get something from someone who doesn’t have it to give is a little like King Cnut commanding the waves to stop their tidal flow to shore. If they don’t love you, it’s not because you’ve done anything wrong. Some people aren’t very good at loving.
Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.