The Pain of Unrequited Love.
The great philosopher Charlie Brown had very beautifully said “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.” And that’s very germane. Unrequited love can feel overwhelming and spoil many of life’s enjoyments; making all contact, other than with the beloved, seem pointless.
As discussed in my blog Pedigree of Unrequited Love, with all emotional distress, there are things you can do to lessen and even stop the pain. Accept that they are just not into you. This might help you in moving on quicker than you’d thought possible. There’s a massive amount to be said for resilience and determination, but as with anything, context is vital. There is also much to commend flexibility and the capacity to exercise the knowledge of when to ‘cut your losses’. Love is romantic; those moments of utter connection and transcendental sympathy with another person, almost as if nature wants us to experience a merging of two into one as a kind of universal blueprint and preparation for a more spiritual fulfilment.
Everything has to have practical basis. Think about it – how much time, including fantasy time, have you spent on your beloved? “If only I could make them see. Just a little longer, if we could just be together”. Enough already. It may sound harsh, but sometimes knowing when to give up is the first step to real success.
Do you know who you really are in love with? Don’t get me wrong; the unattainable may have its attractions, and not having to confront reality is one of them. However, that ‘unattainable’ may be anything, just anything in real life. Maybe you’ve hardly ever met that unattainable in the flesh, but it suits you to believe that he or she is exactly what you want. That beneath the exterior that he or she portrays, he’s really a loving and lovable person just in need of some unconditional love.
We all do this to some extent – create an image in our mind of whom we fall for as distinct from the real person. That’s fine in some ways, but not if the fantasy and the person are in reality very different. As discussed in my blog Learn from Unrequited Love, from a spiritual perspective you might have a ‘past life’ connection with your beloved, which makes them feel incredibly familiar and your heart unknowingly goes out to them. This involuntary clinging onto a past life blocks the growth of your soul in this life. You need to claim your power back, snap out of the spell and rescue yourself. In order to make this happen, you need to first realise that you are trapped into a state of negative enchantment. Only then will you be able to do whatever it takes to come out of it. This is the only way to free yourself and go on and attract real love. Once you have rescued yourself, you will be astonished at looking back to your own behaviour in the past. You will then see the object of your love as an ordinary person and not a God.
Coming back to my question – do you know who you really are in love with? Are you in love with a fantasy – a concoction? Do you love this other person or your own creative projection? Many people who fall in love deeply, quickly, feel as if they ‘know’ the person for whom they’ve fallen. If the person they’ve fallen for is mainly a concoction of their own imagination, then it’s not surprising they feel an instant connection. When unrequited love feels overwhelming, dwell on this idea: that you may not love the real them at all because you don’t know them.
Keeping your wider life going, and growing also helps lessen and stop the pain of unrequited love. The thoughts stemming from the feelings of unrequited love are all or nothing: “Without this person, my life is meaningless! Unless I have them, I don’t want anyone!” Putting all of one’s eggs in one basket is always a dangerous strategy. When we’re in love, we just want to be in love. The chores, mundanities, and obligations of life become unwanted distractions clawing for our attention, which we’d rather reserve for the love of our life. This becomes dangerous if we begin to actually neglect other friendships and human contact, just because they are not the person we are in love with.
In my next blog, I am going to write about other ways to help lessen and even stop the pain of unrequited love. Please leave your comments about this blog. Any suggestions for my future blogs are also welcome!