When Unrequited Love Feels Suffocating.
If you are here, on this page, reading this article, you are most likely an unrequited lover. You are struggling with the lack of certainty, lack of affection and lack of someone to share your love with. While it’s not as fun to be in one way love, it does present the opportunity to heal layers of fear that aren’t activated otherwise. Yes, unrequited lovers live in constant fear of rejection, of social embarrassment and of loneliness. Now, while it’s difficult not to feel love and attraction for your partner, learning the laws of love and the love actions associated with these laws will help you not let lack of attraction become the deal-breaker in a relationship. Knowing the laws helps you open your heart and let love grow.
Sometimes, a subtle and soft voice in your head that tells you – you are not good enough, has rather loud repercussions. You may judge that voice with no compassion, but it will only speak louder. You’d think you can outsmart the voice by ignoring it, but ignoring it only means you didn’t hear it, not that it isn’t still there. It is this voice that is in control, wreaking havoc in your relationship. You must tend to your place of not-enough-ness. When you feel you are enough, (pretty, loving, caring etc.), you will find life is enough (happy, fulfilling etc.). You will find enough love in the relationship, enough contentment without love. Acceptance creates change. When you accept life the way it is, you become capable of acceptance, because you feel complete.
Sometimes, after experiencing unrequited love, or after going through a broken relationship, we subconsciously do things to close our heart to love. Understand these actions and work on opening your heart back up. Lovingly, with compassion and gentleness, remind yourself that the only limitation to experiencing your version of a big love story is how your small, fear-based, wounded mind wants to control everything just so you don’t hurt yourself again. Ironically, this only suffocates your spirit, starves your heart of love, kills your relationship, and makes you hurt even more.
A lot of us spend a lot if our lives longing and searching – what, I don’t know. So many of our ostensible “goals,” so many of the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide. They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person; these are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are psychological qualities: love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose; something we can feel is worthy of our devotion, noble and precious. Then we try to reduce all this to something physical — a house, a car, a better job, or a human being, but it doesn’t work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the Sacred. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.
Our culture misdirects the basic and essential human longing for the sacred onto people and things, primarily love relationships. So, when you find yourself with someone who’s fully available and there’s no longing, or if you fall in love with someone, only to find the feelings fade or disappear one day, or if those intense feelings of passion were never there to begin with, you typically start assuming that you’re with the wrong person and that you don’t really love them or love them “enough.”
One of the most difficult things about unrequited love is to come to terms with the fact that your love is never going to find its destination in your beloved. The most important point to understand here is that this does not mean there is something wrong with you. Think about a star or a celebrity who you know was in love with someone who never loved them back. They are intelligent, rich, smart and all that you think is required for someone to fall in love with you. But they were not loved back. Why? Because it was just not meant to be for them, just like this was not for you. Love cannot be quantified. Understand the normal, healthy trajectory of love and concepts like projection. When you let go of chasing the feelings, you can grow the feelings of love and attraction that you were seeking.