Unrequited Love: The Dark Side of Love

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Everyone loves love. It's the most amazing, powerful, uplifting, energizing, motivating, exciting, and all around awesome feeling. However, like everything, there is a flip side; where there is yin, there is yang. Unrequited Love is the most hurtful, saddening, debilitating, painful, aching, and all around worst feeling imaginable. So how do we cope when love isn't on our side? What do we do when we feel at our worst because love has got us down?

"Love hurts, love scars, love wounds
And mars, any heart
Not tough or strong enough
To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain
Love is like a cloud
Holds a lot of rain
Love hurts......ooh, ooh love hurts"

- Nazareth

First step: Acknowledge the pain. Lets face it, rejection sucks, there is nothing fun about getting your hopes up and having them come crashing down around you. The fact of the matter is you're going to feel bad. Emotional pain can be just as devastating as physical pain. So you should treat it in the same way. Just as you would be tender and gentle on yourself with a physical wound, you should be tender and gentle on your self with an emotional one.

Take it easy on yourself, acknowledge you are in pain and take it slow for a little while. Understand you won't be back to 100% right away, wounds take time to heal. I'm not suggesting you lay in bed all day and mope, because that won't help you. But whenever you're at work or school or out and about, just take it easy on yourself, don't expect that you're going to get all the things done you would normally do. Slowly and gradually you'll work your way back to 100%. In fact when it's over, you'll be better than 100% because you'll know you survived deep pain, and now you're stronger for it.

Here's the thing, this deeply painful situation is far from unique. Even though you yourself are an amazing, complex, impossibly intricate, completely novel being; this situation is one that has been experienced by every human that has ever existed, period. At some point in our lives, everyone has felt the sting of unrequited love, be it from a lover, a friendship, a parent, or countless other ways a person has given love to someone or something and the sentiment was not returned. The point is this: You are not alone.

This next step can be daunting, you have to stop looking for closure. The hardest thing is acknowledging when something you've put so much time and effort into, just isn't working. You have to surrender. Just as an experiment, when you're thinking about how you've been wronged, just imagine, "I'm wrong." Let the person who wronged you be right, even if they are 100% totally and unequivocally wrong. Just flip it and let yourself be wrong in that moment. It's an interesting thing that happens in your mind. It allows you to see from a different perspective. Just let that other person be right, and move on, surrender and move forward.

"Surrender literally means to stop fighting. Stop fighting with yourself. Stop fighting the universe and the natural flow of things. Stop resisting and pushing against reality." - Dr. Amy Johnson

The healthiest way to move forward is to give up on trying to get closure and move on. This is the last thing anyone with pain in their heart wants to hear. We want to cling to the hope that the person or situation will change. The thing is 99 times out of 100, they aren't going to change, not unless they want to change themselves. So stop trying to paddle the canoe upstream, set the oar down, and let the current take you somewhere else.  Surrender to the reality of the situation, let yourself feel hurt, nurture yourself, and come back even stronger than before.