The Hollywood Factor in Unattainable Love.
When in unattainable love, we start dreaming about and expecting to go through the same conflicting emotions that we watch in movies and hope that our lives will become as transcendental as in the cinema. This is sometimes referred to as the “Hollywood factor” in that you have created the perfect person of your dreams and believe that you are saving all your love for this fantasy. However, since this ‘perfect person’ does not exist, you project this ideal onto the object of your affection and see them as who you want them to be. In this way, an unattainable love object is safer and easier because getting to know someone for who they really are may shatter your fantasy and destroy your dreams.
Empowerment of self is based on free will, but unattainable love robs your freedom and makes you a ‘victim’ to someone else’s choices. In essence, it dis-empowers you! Most of us have experienced unattainable love to some degree, be it with a celebrity, a star or sometimes even an imaginary character. But sometimes it can become a pattern that indicates a much bigger or more basic issue. Ask yourself- “why am I always attracted to ‘unavailable’ people?”, “why do I find myself a ‘victim’ of one way love over and over?”, “what is stopping me from engaging in a balanced, healthy, reciprocal relationship?” If you have asked these questions, or others like these to yourself, then maybe it is time for some self-exploration and eventually self-empowerment, so you can change your perception and actions. Healthier possibilities are waiting for you just around the corner.
Unattainable love can be an extremely destructive force in your life, if you allow it to be. The more time one-way lovers get to themselves, the more their imagination soars. When their thoughts linger around “possible rejection”, they start focussing more on despair; these fabricated stories sometimes also have a tragic end and leave the limerent unhappy, low on self-confidence and sometimes even suicidal. In extreme cases, unattainable love can reduce a person to a shadow of his true self. Remember that you may never know why it is the way it is, and that’s okay too, because you don’t need to know what is going on with them. Your challenge actually rests entirely within yourself.
As discussed in my post Unrequited Love – Patterns, if you have been doing this, or you suspect you have, at least become conscious of it and reflect that it’s a self-defeating strategy. Of course, it is possible that the other person simply does not share your feelings and there isn’t any deeper reason or explanation. These things just happen. But, if you find that you have become obsessed to the point of dysfunction or that unattainable love is a recurring pattern in your life, you may want to look at this list and consider the possibility of its relevance to your life.
Animals generally learn about their world with the use of their five senses. Humans learn about the world from each other. Social connection is the blood and breath of human life, and rejection strikes at its very core. Hence, it was found that if humans can restrain their selfish impulses so as to follow rules and cooperate, even after being rejected in unrequited love, they can gain the immense rewards of belonging and lead a normal life. Self-regulation in unattainable love helps solve the primary purpose of enabling them to restrain themselves, to gain social acceptance. Moving on in life requires both effort and sacrifice, but these are normally compensated by the benefits of belonging to your social group like you did before this entire episode. That is the essential social contract.
Deliberately going for someone with ‘dysfunctional features’ that match characteristics of someone with whom you had a past destructive relationship and then later wondering where it all went wrong, is a common mistake that a lot of unrequited lovers make. Repeatedly going for Mr/Ms Wrong puts you in the market for relationship mistakes. This one can be neatly combined with being too desperate to get into a relationship. If I repeatedly scrape my face on tarmac and then wonder why it hurts, I may need to think about it. But hold on; anyone can mistakenly fall for a ‘psycho’. Early on, they may be all charm and attentiveness, and you may be conveniently averting your eyes from early telltale signs – such as 24-hour surveillance on your house. So you can’t always blame yourself for getting mixed up with the psycho, but feel free to blame yourself for staying with a psycho once the signs become obvious.