When I was 20 years old, I believed in love at first sight, unearthly love, love for life and, of course, in unrequited love.
In my school youth, I had a lot of just such, unrequited love. My friend Natasha and I chose some guy and fell in love with him, followed our eyes in the school corridors, giggled stupidly if we managed to collide, talked for hours about how amazing and interesting he was. As you understand, we didn’t know the guy himself, at best we knew the name, and the guy didn’t know us, except sometimes he was surprised what kind of fools were following him, staring at him, smiling, sighing and whispering. What kind of reciprocity can we talk about here? But we didn’t need more, the feeling of falling in love with an illusory object overwhelmed the girl’s hearts, and the illusory nature protected them – I think that we were simply not ready for real feelings in a relationship with a real person.
Later, at 20-25, when we already comprehend the experience of different relationships, and live different feelings in it, we continue to keep the fantasy of a great love that will happen one day and will be real and for life, as a kind of protection from pain. Indeed, in real relationships and in real feelings, there is a lot of pain. Even if everything is mutual, we are different, we face this difference and get hurt about it. And if there is no reciprocity, then pain becomes the only thing that exists.
But someone “hangs” in this non-reciprocity, makes a cult of “my great unrequited love” out of it and cannot move on. All these “I love him more than life, but he has a wife, children, he cannot divorce, so I stand on the sidelines and content myself with short meetings once a month”, “he left me, but I love him and will wait for him to return”, “he doesn’t notice me at close range, but he is exactly who I need, so I will do everything so that he understands this” just such stuck in suffering. Why is this happening? For someone, the trauma of rejection works: one who grew up with a cold, rejecting mother has learned to understand love in this way – cold-hot and the more “cold”, the more it seems that you need to endure a little and everything will be fine and warm. Someone is just an infant who does not want to take responsibility for a real relationship and hides from her behind fantasies. Those who use the mechanism of fusion as a leader in life, they do not distinguish at all where I am, where I am not. They immediately throw their feelings on another person, and then it doesn’t matter how this other behaves in reality in relation to them. Such women are prone to any affair, one-night stand, to appoint the love of their life and experience a real storm of feelings, even drama, when a man disappeared and forgot to think about them. The pain is real, the feelings are real, only the paradox is that they have no real basis for relations.
Now, in my 40s, I think that healthy love cannot be non-reciprocal, simply because it does not arise as a flash. Passion, sympathy can flare up, a cocktail of chemistry and physics can push into an embrace, euphoria, falling in love can arise on it, but will it grow into love? Love is a movement towards each other, it is born from relationships. You can move, you can want to, but if your partner is standing or he has left the relationship for a long time, what will be born when the other end of the distance is empty or quiet? You stand, wait, think, and then turn around and move on, looking for something that will move in unison with you. Simply because it hurts a healthy person to stand alone in silence for a long time. We want love to be joyful, pleasant, warm, and not cold, lonely, painful.
A healthy person cannot want pain, so for me now any meetings with non-reciprocal love are about unhealthy. Especially those where there was not much reality, and a person suffers, suffers, believes and waits. You don’t need to suffer, you need to go to a psychologist and figure out why you love those who don’t love you so much.
There are situations when love was mutual, there was a family, relationships, and then suddenly one fell out of love and leaves. What should the other do – he still loves, only mutual love has become non-reciprocal? Also go to a psychologist and with his support to experience the loss. First, experience the loss, and then look for a resource that will help you move on. How much to worry? In some sources, I read that the experience of a breakup is equal to about half the duration of a relationship, in others, a period of 2 months to six months is given. I think that everything is individual.
In any case, I also do not believe in one love for life. It can be one and for life only if it is mutual. If reciprocity has passed, a new person and new feelings will come. We change, life changes, love changes too. Or an object of love.
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