get over an unrequited love

Unrequited love

You want to take them home to meet your folks but they don’t even know you exist. If you’re caught up in Shakespearean love story, read on.

What is unrequited love?

Let’s say you fall for someone big time. You don’t even have to be dating. It can be a crush that turns to a fantasy, maybe an obsession. Whatever the case, if the object of your affection doesn’t share your feelings it can spark a sense of loss, yearning and frustration that may prove hard to overcome

Why do things get so out of control?

Every experience is unique, but a pattern has to build for the sense of love to become so strong that it threatens to overwhelm. For example, just spending a lot of time thinking about that person, without actually seeing them, can cause your feelings to grow out of proportion.

How do I deal with it?

Only time can help get strong emotions into perspective. You can’t fall out of love with someone overnight, after all, and in some ways you need to grieve for this lost love. It’s easy to become withdrawn from everyday life when you’re bewitched by someone who doesn’t feel the same way, but it’s vital that you get out and fill your time constructively.

Surround yourself with friends, and lean on them to help regain control. Talking will help get things in perspective, but if that makes you feel uncomfortable (blokes, are you listening?) then just time spent having a laugh in their company can remind you that there’s more fun to be had being a free agent.

why can’t I forget about her or least deal with this sense of loss?
I want my life to be without this desire I have for her.

does anybody ever think what would your family, co-workers or friends think of you, if they knew how much you loved this person?
I can’t tell family, friends or expecially co-workers how much I still love Ann.

In 2000, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College, London, located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love. They took students who said they were madly in love, put them into a brain scanner, and looked at their patterns of brain activity.

The results were surprising. For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair conclude, “that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through such a limited expanse of cortex.” The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes.