Unrequited Lovers Falling Upward.
In my previous blog Falling Upwards in Unrequited Love, I have written about how, on the whole, rejecters have a more uniformly negative and emotionally unpleasant experience than the unrequited lovers, in spite of not having suffered any moments as intensely bad as the acute pain felt by broken-hearted lovers. Unrequited love happens unknowingly, in all forms and types. Falling upwards in love involves one person falling in love with another generally held, even by the lover, to be completely out of their league.
For unrequited lovers, the event at least brings a mix of good and bad feelings, and these combined emotions are roughly balanced in their accounts. However, for the rejecters, the negative emotions far outweigh the good ones. Rejecters are most likely to wish the entire episode had never happened. This does not, in any way, reduce the intensity of the suffering of a broken-hearted person though.
When asked about the severity of their suffering in unrequited love, the lovers reported more intense suffering than rejecters. While rejecters mild doses of negative affect, lovers suffer more extreme forms of emotional distress. Though rejecters don’t necessarily have uniformly unpleasant experiences, even if romantic attention from a lover was seen as unattractive or undesirable, most declared themselves flattered by such confessions, at least initially. As a result, rejecters have been reported to get more positive boosts to self-esteem than the rejected lovers.
It is obviously a powerful boost to your ego to have someone fall in love with you. Unsolicited love is presumably the greatest compliment. It signifies that winning without trying to win. To attract love without effort implies that you are extremely desirable. The romantic interest of someone provides a welcome confirmation of one’s attractiveness. It is indeed an ego boost to have such an effect on another person. A number of people confessed to the flattering impact of the actions of their lover, like sending flowers and gifts, being available at any time, without complaints and paying compliments.
The ego boost, however, is tempered by the fact that the rejecter does not intend to become romantically involved, and later, in the process to extricate oneself from unwanted attentions, the esteem recedes to a minor consideration. In short, a broader range of negative feelings have been noted in rejecters, but the rejected suffer more intensely. In practically every case, what is absolutely certain is that few individuals come away from such an experience unchanged and unscathed.
Considering this, if unrequited love is as prevalent as all the evidence suggests, it is the cause of scarcely conceivable amount of heartache the world over. Researchers claim that almost everyone has some experience of unrequited love on one side or another by their early twenties. Most of us will experience the emotional agony of unrequited love at some point in our lives. Adolescence or early adulthood are most likely to be that phase because at that time people are experimenting with their emotions sex drives. This keeps them preoccupied with forming romantic attachments. This, however, is not a rule. Like anything else, unrequited love can strike at any stage of life.
By definition, unrequited love is based on a dream. A dream of a future that does not happen. It exists only in the lover’s imagination of another world that is better than one’s actual world. Based on the fantasies and imagination, the unrequited lover is mostly sure that the object of their love is also in love with them. However, when they return to their senses and see the actual world and its happenings, it sows seeds of self-doubt, from what they had imagined as well as from what is actually happening. This leaves them heart-broken and constantly nervous in the presence of the beloved and even in other matters of life that demand confidence and emotional strength. What actually destroys the lovers is the extended period of confusion about their place in their beloved’s life. I have written in detail in my blog More About Limerence. Though absence makes the heart grow fonder, uncertainty makes them uncomfortable, which usually is a result of doubt about the other person’s feelings.
An integral part of unrequited love is a dreamy sense of possibilities. For the lover, it was the romance that didn’t happen. For the rejecter, generally, it meant a friendship that was ruined in desire to make it more than it was.