Unrequited love, also called unrequited love or one-way love, is a very painful emotional state, experienced by men and women of all ages, and widely studied in recent years by psychology and neuroscience.
It occurs when a person directs his or her loving attentions to someone for some reason does not return the feeling at all. The victim of unrequited love can experience very intense levels of disappointment, frustration and suffering of love, and can be trapped in this deep negative state for months, or sometimes even years, without the situation changing for the good.
How to overcome unrequited love? How to behave? What to do to move forward? In this article we will thoroughly analyze the matter trying to provide concrete and effective answers to the main doubts you surely have if you are currently experiencing unrequited love.
Unrequited love: the 4 types
There are various types of unrequited love. Let's briefly see the 4 main ones.
1. The classic crush
Especially during adolescence, but sometimes even in later adulthood, it can happen to try a strong feeling against a person who does not even calculate us, or barely knows us. It can be the prettiest girl in the class, a popular boy in the school we go to, or even a famous person who it completely ignores our existence.
We become convinced that that person could make us extremely happy, we idealize them, and we think about them all day fantasizing about how wonderful it would be to be together or even just kiss them once.
2. Fall in love with a busy person
Equally frequent is the case in which you fall in love with a person already committed, which sometimes we chase uselessly for years, animated by the hope that sooner or later they will decide to leave their current partner for us. In the meantime we are content to be lovers, friends, doormats or admirers.
Friendzone
Then the painful case of friendship. We love a person deeply, but she tells us that he doesn't want to ruin our friendship, he loves us but sees us only as friends, he doesn't feel like making a story… In short, he has long taken us into the classic “friendzone“. Situation in which nobody would really like to be.
4. Unrequited love in a relationship
Finally there is the case in which you are in a relationship with a person who she does not have the same feeling for us as we do for her. It can be a simple dating without commitment, or a real stable relationship. In any case we love our partner, but he / she seems to experience it much more lightly, and tells us or makes us understand that he does not really love us.
Unrequited love: psychology
Why does unrequited love hurt so much?
The loved one is our drug, and not getting the desired attention from them makes us experience a state of confusion and severe psycho-physical pain.
All this has been verified through careful laboratory tests, which have also shown another surprising fact: being rejected generates emotionality in us; further increases in us the feeling and obsession we feel towards a certain person.
Let me explain: due to a strange functioning mechanism of our brain, when a person does not want to be with us and does not love us, our love towards him increases more and more, until we are literally mad. If the other person had immediately shown interest in us, probably our feeling towards them would have been lower, and we certainly would not have been so obsessed with the desire to be together.
Our brain therefore in a certain sense deceives us: it pushes us to obsess ourselves and to chase those who reject us; it leads us to idealize someone we sometimes don't even know well; it makes us put on the pedestal a person who has not even put himself on the line and has not invested anything in the relationship with us.
We are convinced that the loved one is perfect, but in reality this It's not absolutely true!
We must learn to recognize the psychological dynamics that take place in our brain, and to stop undergoing them passively.
Unrequited love and self-esteem
A constant that we can find in almost all people who suffer frequently from unrequited love is a lack of self-esteem, or a lack of experience in relationships.
When you're not confident enough in yourself and your worth, or when you're particularly inexperienced, it's easy put another person on the pedestal, chasing her, staying emotionally attached to her even when you are not reciprocated.
On the other hand, one-way love it takes us into a vicious circle: the more we chase a person who doesn't want us, the more we feel attracted to him, and the more our already weak self-esteem suffers. Without realizing it, we end up begging for attention and behaving like doormats.
Can unrequited love become reciprocated?
I would like to be able to tell you that unrequited love can change, and become reciprocated, but the truth is that this is an infrequent event, which should not be hoped for, and it's certainly not something that happens suddenly almost by a miracle.
By continuing to do the same things you have done so far, you will continue to achieve the same results you have always achieved, which is not being loved by the person you love, and living this way. one disappointment after another.
If you really want to change your life, start getting better results, and build fulfilling and no longer one-way relationships, the only option you have is to totally change strategy!
Who knows, maybe the same person who doesn't reciprocate your feelings right now, seeing you so renewed, will begin to feel a strong attraction towards you and will fall in love with the new version of you ?
Unrequited love: how to behave?
So what to do in case of unrequited love? How to behave?
Already Ovid, a Roman poet who lived more than 2000 years ago, in his “Remedia Amoris” provides some tricks on what to do to overcome unrequited love and forget the loved one. Among the various tips we can find that of traveling, practicing bucolic activities and avoiding alcoholic drinks and romantic readings.
The ancient Romans already posed the problem, and the same is true for every other historical period that man has lived through. Below I will give you my personal advice, based on common sense, personal growth and contemporary psychology.
1. Accept the rejection. Rejection makes you desperate, but you can't leave the game. You are resisting, and that is why you suffer. What you need to do instead is accept the rejection, and embrace the pain you are feeling. It will be difficult at first, but then it will represent an exceptional opportunity for growth.
2. Start working on your self-esteem. The most important person in your life is you, and for this you must learn to appreciate, respect, love yourself, and be comfortable with yourself. Once you have built up a healthy self-esteem, and you have learned to be happy even alone, people will immediately start to be more attracted to you, and to fall in love with you.
3. Cut off contact with the person you love. If you keep looking for her, calling her, meeting her and begging her to be with you, your situation will never change. Instead, by applying no contact, slowly your obsession will subside, and you will gradually be able to come out of this painful situation.
4. Turn your attention to yourself, about your life, your goals, your friendships and your passions. As you begin to build a full and interesting life, you will feel less and less the need to chase someone who doesn't love you.
5. Channel your feelings towards something creative. As we have already said, rejection generates a strong emotionality in us, but this does not necessarily have to be something negative. In highly emotional states, it is easier to make significant changes in our life, unleash our creativity, and even bring out unexpressed parts of our personality. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy animated by pain for the unrequited love he felt for Beatrice. What could you do? Maybe compose a song, start painting, or write the new Divine Comedy!
6. Learn to direct love to those who deserve it. Try to see love as a force that belongs to you, and that you can direct towards whoever you want. If until now for some reason you have directed it towards the wrong people, who have not reciprocated you or who have trampled on your dignity, it is time to start piloting it towards those who deserve you and make you feel good about yourself.
