Every person strives to love and be loved, but sometimes these two desires do not coincide. Unrequited love becomes a source of strong feelings and negative emotions. However, even such a situation carries an opportunity for internal growth and self-improvement.

What is unrequited love?

Poets and writers, artists and directors talk about love as a kind of mystery, which is impossible to fully understand. A strong feeling of love can come at a completely unexpected moment and subjugate all thoughts and desires. At some point, the lover begins to realize that another person has become the center of his universe, with his own inner world and desires. Captured by thoughts of another, a lover tries to be closer to the object of his passion, to see him, to hear him, to spend time with him, to make his life better.

A lover always seeks to evoke reciprocal love from the object of his passion. Only at first it may seem that reciprocity is not so important: just to be close to your loved one. But over time, unrequited love becomes a burden for a person, exhausts his strength, occupies all his thoughts. Therefore, the emotional intensity of unrequited love can be much stronger and last longer than mutual love.

Unrequited love in psychology

The famous father of psychoanalysis, Erich Fromm, wrote that true love necessarily evokes reciprocity. He urged all people to learn to love correctly and called love an art. Understanding the reasons why love is unrequited and does not evoke a response in the heart of another, Fromm speaks of human laziness, selfishness and ignorance in this matter. Modern psychologists view love as a set of chemical reactions caused by a number of factors.

In order for a love feeling to arise, a number of signs that have a certain importance for him must coincide in a person’s head. Such signs can be: appearance, voice timbre and intonation, similarity with one of the parents, manners, smell, situations, etc. That is, for mutual love, the desired picture must match for two people. Unrequited love can be defined as a feeling caused by the representation of only one person and the lack of necessary matches in another.

Why does unrequited love happen?

Unrequited strong love can have different reasons:

• low self-esteem, which prevents a person from showing their best side;
• selfishness, as a result of which the lover focuses on his feelings and is unable to understand the desires and needs of his object of love;
• the program of the victim, which constantly leads a person into situations in which he must suffer and suffer;
• inability to communicate with the opposite sex;
• inability to love another person, understand, hear;
• inability to present oneself, to show one’s best qualities;
• mismatch of partners’ views on life;
• differences of partners in character, interests, intellectual level.

An unrequited feeling is spoken of with a negative intonation. At the same time, do not forget about what unrequited love teaches. She can tell a person that he needs to change, change some of his views or habits. Long-term unrequited love helps a person become more patient, loving, understanding, caring.

Unrequited love — signs

Trying to find the answer to the question of how to know that love is unrequited, you should remember that the situation can change. Unrequited love today can become mutual tomorrow. Therefore, you should not be upset and put an end to relationships that may become closer in the future. Although psychologists call signs of unrequited love, they always note that every relationship is special and you should not take all the signs as one hundred percent suitable for a particular case. These are the signs of unrequited love:

• the partner does not seek to spend as much time together as possible;
• a lover or beloved does not want to introduce a partner to their friends;
• a loved one avoids talking about relationships, does not want to be determined in the status of relationships;
• the partner is not looking for physical contact;
• a loved one does not show affection and tenderness;
• There is always some inconsistency in relationships.

Can unrequited love be reciprocated?

Unrequited love is very painful and often raises the question of how to survive unrequited love. Seeing a loved one nearby and not being able to create a full-fledged relationship with him is hard and painful. Even in this hopeless situation, there is a ray of hope: an unrequited feeling can resonate in the heart of a loved one. Practical experience shows that many married couples have developed from relationships in which at first only one person was in love. Whether love can bear fruit depends not only on the circumstances, but also on the efforts, wisdom and strength of the lover’s love.

Unrequited love — what to do?

Unrequited love for a man or woman is an occasion to look inside yourself and try to understand why love has no response. The following tips can help you achieve reciprocity:

• you need to learn to listen to your partner and understand him;
• talk more often about what interests a partner;
• find common activities or hobbies;
• try to enter the company of a loved one;
• find out what qualities of character appeal to a loved one and develop them in yourself.

How to survive unrequited love — advice from psychologists

Many people who have experienced unrequited love say that although they suffered from these feelings, they were happy with their love. If it becomes difficult to be in this state, you can use the following advice from psychologists on how to survive unrequited love:

• try to be in society more often;
• you should not often think about how to deal with unrequited love, it is better to be distracted from all thoughts about this with the help of communication and interesting hobbies;
• look at your love as an opportunity to receive pleasant emotions;
• understand that after a while a person begins to look differently at his past feelings and may be glad that reciprocity with that particular person did not arise;
• remember that time dulls any pain.

Unrequited love — consequences

Strong unrequited love often leaves a memory for life. What this memory will be depends on how the fate of a person develops in the future. A happy family, a loved one will allow you to remember unrequited love in the past with a touch of light sadness. A failed relationship in the present will make you think of past non-reciprocal love as a lost chance. The consequences of non-reciprocal love will depend only on the person himself, who must draw conclusions from the situation and create the right attitude towards it.

What does the church say about unrequited love?

According to Christian tradition, all love comes from God. From this point of view, pure unrequited love is a chance for a person to show their best qualities for the sake of another person. Biblical love is agape love, altruistic love that asks for nothing in return. This is the kind of love that God loves. Unrequited love teaches a person humility, patience and service for the benefit of other people.

Books about unrequited love

Non-reciprocal love is comprehensively described in many works of art. Books about unrequited love help to better understand yourself and the situation. The top best books on the subject include:

1. Margaret Mitchell «Gone with the Wind». The main character struggles with her unrequited love all her life and only at the end of her life she realizes that she has actually loved another person for a long time.
2. Francis Fitzgerald «The Great Gatsby». The book is based on the story of the unrequited love of a rich man who all his life dreams only of seeing his beloved at least sometimes.
3. Stefan Zweig «Letter from a Stranger». Lifelong love — this is the plot of this work. An unsuspecting man only many years later finds out how dearly he was loved all this time.