Unrequited Love...5 Things You Need To Do When You Have A Crush

Unrequited love is the feeling of being head over heels, hopelessly in love with someone who cannot or will not return the love. The object of love may be unaware, and completely oblivious to the love directed at them. Or they may be very aware of the feelings for them, and completely uninterested and rejecting the affection.

When I think of unrequited love, I often think in the terms of school girls crushes. School girl crushes are usually sweet, but can be obsessive.

At a young age it can hard to convey feelings, and read the object of your love to know where you stand. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprising, is the fact that unrequited love situations do not end with teenage angst.

5 Things To Do

Test The Waters

Love from afar is cute, but it doesn't get the guy. You have to get in there, do some flirting, and see what response you get. I am going to make the assumption that if you believe that you are in love with someone, then chances are you want to be with them.

Test the waters by making your feelings more obvious. You have been hiding your feelings, maybe too well, and they may be completely clueless about how you feel, and where they stand with you.

Confess Your Feelings

There are few things scarier than putting yourself out there and confessing how you feel to someone when you have no idea where you stand with them. Some people are terrible at picking up on clues. If you are not sure that they know how you feel, tell them.

What if they feel the same way? What if they have been in love with you from afar as well? Take a risk, be brave, and be honest. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

Move On

After you have confessed your feelings, and the response was less than positive, you have to start to move on. It will be hard at first, maybe even feel impossible after all the time you have spent fantasizing about a future together, but letting go is a must.

It's not going to happen. Sounds harsh, right? Just remember there are plenty of men out there, and believe it or not, you will fall in love again, and be happy, but not if you continue to waste time on "not the one".

Give It Time

With unrequited love, we see all perfection and not the flaws. We are all flawed, but once we place someone on a pedestal, not only do we fail to see the real them, they also become out of reach.

Eventually, over time, as your feelings fade you will see the real them. Not that they should be viewed as a horrible person because they didn't return your feelings, but it is okay to recognize and acknowledge their imperfections.

Analyze

Unrequited love situations can happen, but they shouldn't happen to any one person all of the time. It is important to make sure that you don't have a pattern of falling for people who can't or won't return your love, or are somehow unavailable.

If this is the case, it is important to recognize the pattern, and break it. It's not healthy.

There is a sweetness to unrequited love, but there is also a lot of sadness. It can be hard to see the reality, when your love existed in a perfect vacuum of hopes, dreams, and fantasies. 

I look back on the two times I had huge crushes on guys in high school. It was unrequited, they were older, and unavailable. I later had an opportunity with both guys. The first guy turned out to make a better friend than anything else.

The second guy revealed himself to be a no good guy while trying to hit on me years after my crush, but that's a story for another blog.

My experience has been that the guys later regretted missing out on the girl with the crush, but too little too late as I had moved on, and my feelings were gone. I suppose if it was real love it would have stayed. 

What is your experience with unrequited love? Did you confess your feelings? Did you get the guy? Did you ever get over it? Please share!

To want and not to have, sent all of her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have - to want and want - how that wrung her heart, and wrung it again and again. - Virginia Woolf

Photo by Matheus Bertelli from Pexels

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