Unrequited Love Insanity.
Finding someone who can give you what you need is another way of making the pain of unrequited love less difficult to bear. Loving whilst being loved in return; that great emotional symmetry is what really fulfils your emotional needs. As discussed in my blog Cutting Cords in Unrequited Love, at the point when your feelings in a relationship are not shared, the outcome can be excruciating for both of you, particularly for the person who is more dedicated to the relationship. My extensive research on the subject leads me to believe that every unrequited lover is capable of finding someone to love them back, however, there are reasons why some of them remain in one-way love or fall in love with unavailable love objects and the existence of ethereal cords is one of them. Some people get into the destructive pattern of only really falling for people who are ‘unavailable’ in some way, perhaps because they are with someone else or emotionally unable to commit to a relationship. Unconsciously making unavailability a prerequisite for falling in love is like insisting on going swimming only in dry deserts – it’s never going to really work. 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.
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.
Just think for a moment how wonderful it’s going to feel when you no longer have to be obsessed about that person. How you’ll be able to choose whether to think about them or not. And when you do, you are able to feel calm and detached, putting it down to part of life’s rich tapestry of experience. In instances of obsession, the unrequited lover tries to control or maintain a strategic distance from the thoughts and images of the beloved and looks for possible distractors to maintain balance, though this relief is short-lived. However, the term “love obsession” generally includes both addiction and obsession. Just imagine how good it’s going to be when you find someone who knows how to love you as you love them!
Real love should make you happy and contented, not miserable and anxious. Unrequited love can never be anything but painful. For harmony in a relationship, the force of attraction needs to be balanced.
Sending light for a happy relationship. Please share your experiences and I will add them to my future blogs.