Unrequited Love and Fulfilment.

Psychiatrists have suggested that there are two general phases of rejection: Protest and Resignation. During the Protest Phase, unrequited lovers dedicate themselves to winning their partner back.  Restless energy, insomnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, and obsessive thoughts about the beloved plague them.  Many sob; others drink too much, drive too fast, hole up and watch TV, or talk to friends and family incessantly about the evaporating partnership. I took a long time to realise the central importance of belongingness and rejection. Before psychology, my intellectual background was a mix of existentialist philosophy, humanistic, social upbringing. Hence, I had a severely individualist view of life and human behaviour. People like me mostly emphasise individualistic approaches. For example, exploring a single person’s cognitive processes in reaction to social events. For me, this approach changed when I read an article ‘The need to belong’, which made me believe that people are perpetually guided by the need to connect with other individuals. As discussed in my post Psychology of Rejection in Unrequited Love, majority of their impulses, thoughts, emotions and behaviours are directly or indirectly rooted in that drive. Human need to belong is much deeply rooted than any other social animal. This is partially because we are shaped by nature to create and sustain culture. Here, I don’t mean the culture of a country or community. Culture as a highly complex and flexible system of the society, based on role differentiation. We have been made by nature specifically to sustain culture.

All of us have seen plenty when it comes to marriage; a lot of couples that started their journey with hope but ended up in separation, because they lost it along the way. We are empathetic with the pain that brings them to the place where they feel like there’s no hope. Some are condemning of people who are at that point, maybe because they’ve never been there. But most of us know what it feels like, to realise that it’s not going to work out, that we shouldn’t have gotten married, or fallen in love, that we made a big mistake in the first place.

And so, I’m very empathetic with unrequited lovers going through a divorce. Separation may prove to be the rebirth of your marriage or it may be the beginning of the end. Either way, you can count on life to care for both of you along the way. Rather than asking “do you want to work on your marriage?” ask yourself if you are actually willing to work on your marriage. A willingness to work toward reconciliation is a good place to start — regardless of where you end up.

Your world always reflects what you are sending out in the form of energy. When you are happy within, it reflects in your actions. You automatically become more attractive, because now you know that it is important to know a person well before you give your heart to them. This challenge of winning your heart makes you even more desirable to the opposite gender. I have written about this in my blog Falling in Unrequited Love. If you are happy with what is happening in your reality, thank the universe and enjoy! If you are not happy, go back and redefine your dream, work on your beliefs and your thoughts and feelings, and take a different action. When I loved and lost for the first time, it made me feel like I’d never possibly love again, honestly. It just hurt too much. Along the way, when someone proved that the unrequited love was not the only love of my life, I realized – if I felt this strongly about someone who didn’t love me, how much more would I love someone who loved me back? And when I found that person, I discovered a new meaning of love. The fulfillment of your love being reciprocated is much more than the pain you felt in unrequited love. You begin to see how foolish you were to have wasted so much emotion where it wasn’t even required.

All things pass. Not just in unrequited or one-way love; even if you’re happily married, people do die or people move on, things change. You have to be ready to let go and say to yourself logically “this doesn’t look as if it’s going to work” and always come back to the relationship that you have with yourself.