Unrequited Love in Friendship.
It is not easy to be a best friend to the person you love. It causes tremendous amount of pain not to be able to fulfil you desire for a soulmate partnership with your beloved on an intimate level. It is normal for unrequited lovers to be confused about their best friend’s feelings and keep expecting their feelings to be reciprocated. But if s/he chooses to maintain friendship rather than to become intimate, they have the right to make that choice. In this case, which is often the case with unrequited lovers, you are faced with the choice of whether you love them enough to honor their choice.
Neediness is repulsive while confidence is attractive. If you are being clingy, needy, or expressing desperate energy, it can be very unattractive, to the point of being a turn off. This leads to a correlation between lack of confidence and unrequited love. Because confidence is attractive, a person lacking confidence often faces rejection in love. Working on your confidence and feeling and acting independent with or without a partner can boost your image and make you more attractive to a potential partner. Let yourself shine, express confidence by embodying it, that energy becomes extremely attractive and your beloved may find the idea of a relationship more appealing.
While this is just an advise to a better personality, I have always said that you should never change yourself for anyone. As discussed in my blog Learn from Unrequited Love, love is one of the greatest teachers and mysteries of life, but we become almost obsessed with cracking the code of love when the object of our love doesn’t love us back. Lovers start believing that there is something that is missing in them, which, if changed, can cause the beloved to fall in love with them. They start finding ways to carve out of the marble of their being, someone that the beloved will find irresistible. The more you change yourself, the more you will turn into a shadow of your own. You may work towards self-improvement, but you cannot force to become someone that you are not, and you have no power over the outcome. You can only reclaim your power and confidence for yourself, to make your life better by becoming more attractive to positive things in general, but this does not assure that you will be loved back by the object of your love.
Some experts claim that your first love sets the foundation for future relationships. If that first love was a parent who was unable to meet your emotional or physical needs, or was absent and disconnected, then you will continue to be attracted to unavailable people, even in adulthood. Having experienced unavailable parents may lead to a pattern of pursuing unavailable lovers. Knowing what may be wrong can help us all understand more how to find what is right. Most people have experienced unrequited love at some point in their lives. Those strong feelings that you feel for someone, you want them, you need them, you cannot live without them, but unfortunately, they do not feel the same way. Understand that you are in unrequited love. Whether it is a high school crush, admiration for a co-worker, or new feelings for a close friend, unrequited love often dies because most of us realize that we will likely not get the results we want, so we move on. Only, sometimes we don’t.
You cannot override another person’s boundaries, so you have the choice of whether to continue to love them as a friend, or to let go of the friendship altogether. This raises the important question that I am discussing here- should you be (just) friends with someone you’re madly in love with? While I want my love partner to be my best friend, I, personally, would not be able to be just friends with someone I love. I feel I would not be able to do justice to that friendship, in the sense that I would not be happy to see him find a soulmate in someone else, I would not be happy to see him married to someone else, etc.
However, that is my personal view. Whether you can handle being a friend to your beloved depends on how you can overcome your own desire and allow it to transcend into divine love as opposed to personal love. And if you are able to do that, you have attained a different level of spirituality in unrequited love!