Relationships

A Love Unshared: How To Get Over Your Unrequited Love

by Paul Hudson

Love, like everything else, is a science. Most people would argue that it's not. All I'll say to those people is that just because you can’t understand the science of love doesn’t mean it's nonexistent.

It’s not a perfect science, of course. But when dealing with free will, nothing is ever perfect.

There may or may not be a reason for everything in the universe, but causal relationships certainly exist, and we can trace those back to the beginning of time.

Luckily, we don’t need to look that far back. All we need to do is focus on the relationships in our lives. Why did certain things happen? Could they have been avoided? Could there have been a different conclusion? Is there a lesson for us to learn -- a lesson that may help us in the future?

I’m speaking vaguely because this fundamental theory of cause and effect relates to literally everything. So its applications are endless.

If you understand why you love, how you love and why you stopped loving, you begin to see everything that has happened was caused by a specific event or group of events. Once you know what causes something to occur, you have a better change of steering your life in the direction you want.

Therefore, it would only be reasonable to suggest that if you can make yourself or allow yourself to fall in love, then you're capable of making yourself or allowing yourself to fall out of love. And this can come in handy when you happen to fall for someone who won’t love you back.

Unrequited love is a bitch. It’s always toxic and can be incredibly difficult to let go. But you have to let go.

So the "now question" is, do you need to wait until you move on, or do you need to be proactive and make that possible?

Find someone else.

The easiest way to move on -- and this goes for any situation, not just unrequited love -- is to fall for someone else.

Of course, falling for someone else is usually easier said than done. But that isn’t always the case. Many people fall in love with a rather high frequency, mainly because they aren’t very mature or experienced with love. That, however, doesn’t change how real that love feels to them. Love is relative.

The more you know about love, the more difficult it becomes to find it. And that's not because true love is any rarer than it's always been. Rather, the more you know about love, the less you mistake an imposter for the real thing.

Truth be told, most people have a difficult time finding love because they simply aren’t open to it. You may say you're open -- you might even think you are -- but until you are honestly and fully open to the idea of moving on, you’ll never get over that unrequited love.

Take the time to understand why you’re having trouble letting go.

I remember when I was head over heels in love with a girl who didn't return my love. I had plenty of reasons for why I loved her. But if I was being honest with myself, my love for her wasn't about how she was making me feel. Rather, my feelings had to do with how she was acting. There is a difference.

When people we want push us away, we want them even more. So it’s important to step back and understand why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling.

True love manifests only when the love is shared. Until that point, what you have isn’t really real. Until you fully know someone, you can't love that person for the right reasons.

It’s easy to get caught up and carried away by the waves of emotion, but there is much more to love than the high it gives us. You need to remember that.

Figure out why this person doesn’t love you back.

You’re a good person, right? Someone you think anyone would want to be with? Someone it would be easy to fall in love with?

Well, sometimes, you're your own problem. Sometimes you spend so much time thinking about what you want that you fail to stop and consider what it is the other person wants.

Other times, however, you aren’t the problem. Sure, we all have our flaws. But when love isn't reciprocated, it's usually because the person you like doesn't know what he or she is looking for.

Again, love is a science. There is a reason this person isn't returning your love. This person certainly has a reason, but it might not be a good one. This person might be lost or confused. He or she might be chasing a unicorn that just doesn't exist.

Sometimes people just aren’t in a place where they can give love properly. In fact, I'd say this is usually the case. So if you need a reason to get over that unrequited love, just focus on the fact that this person is actually wrong for you -- not the other way around.