5 Causes Of Unrequited Love and How To Prevent Them

Foreign hello there, podcast listeners. Welcome back to the Love Life podcast. I am your host, Stephen Hussey, and today I want to do something a little bit different than usual. Obviously, usually we set up something with Matt in a clip or me chatting with Matt or something else, but today I want to actually give you a little reading talk from a blog post I posted last week on the five common causes of unrequited love and how to prevent them. I think unrequited love is such a universal experience and one that I am constantly dismayed to see people go through again and again. And they come and tell me about a friend who they're crazy in love with and they're not sure how to tell them, or someone they have had feelings for for a while and who doesn't really notice them at all. Maybe at work, maybe somewhere else, maybe someone already in a relationship and they're pining after them. Wonder maybe after they go through this string of bad relationships, they'll finally turn and notice me and everything will be like a wonderful romantic movie and we'll finally be together. And if you've been there yourself, you know the tiny morsels of evidence that you cling to as hope, just tiny bits of hope that maybe they are coming around, maybe they're noticing me. They showed me a bit of attention today and. And you go further and further down the rabbit hole. And of course, when someone occupies this space in your mind in such a vast way, there's a lot of dangers to it. So that's what I want to talk about right now. So I'm going to begin at the beginning of this piece and just work through it and talk through some of the points as we go through. I haven't done a podcast in this format before, but I think it would be fun to try. And you can email me podcastathewhassey.com and let me know how you like it. So, the five common causes of unrequited love and how to prevent them. There's a ridiculously simple principle Matt talks about in his seminars. So simple that it seems kind of silly, naive even. But I've come to think it actually distills great wisdom. The principle is this. Matt used to say, make it a rule only to like guys who. Who like you back. If you can do that, you'll never go wrong. And we can obviously extend this to make it a rule to only like people who like you back. And a noticeable bulk always ripples through the crowd when they hear this. And I get it, it sounds ridiculous on the surface. After all, attraction isn't a simple choice, right? We're taught that attraction is a biological reaction in our brain that we can't control. Attraction is triggered instinctively when someone just inflames our desire and we can't resist them. It's like that moment you inhale the popcorn in the movie theater, the scent of the popcorn, and your brain tells you there's no way you're getting through the next two hours without a bucket of that sweet, buttery goodness in your lap. Many of us feel that we have no control over who we become attracted to, which can often lead to that great generator of humanity's worst misery and best poetry. Unrequited love. Unrequited love is when we fall hard in love with someone who doesn't love us back. It's the painful kind of obsession that keeps you awake at night and sees you spending hours at your laptop, obsessively scouring your crush's Facebook profile, praying they don't change their status to in a relationship. Or it makes your stomach convulse at the very thought of catching them kissing another person. But can unrequited love be avoided? Is it really completely out of our control? It's perfectly natural to want people who don't like us back. But some of us choose to actively pursue the situation. Even when we've received signals that there's no future hope for a relationship. We ignore the signs, shrug off rejections, or we see our crush pursuing other people, but think they just need time to truly notice me. Then they'll fall in love with me. Why do we get into this unhealthy fixation and keep pursuing someone who clearly doesn't want us back? There are many reasons, all of which can be traced back to a lack of confidence, lack of standards, or lack of other important qualities that prevent us from moving on from. From unhealthy situations. Unrequited love, like any love, is a complex topic. But here are some common factors that lead us to pursue a lost cause. Number one, you project traits onto someone that they don't have. This easily happens when we feel like we're in scarcity mode. You meet someone who ticks a few of your boxes, that is nice, smart, attractive, and over time, we fill in the blanks and build a fantasy image of them in which they represent our version of total perfection. So this is often very much when, if you've been like six months without meeting someone you really, really like, and the first person you meet who seems just to kind of generally Fit the bill even. You just think, wow, they're hot and they're a nice person and they seem to be nice to me. You can suddenly build an entire image that this person is a complete unicorn. And because you haven't met anyone else in a while that you really, really like, they are your vision of perfection. You think, I must have them. And of course then you've lost objectivity. You stop seeing this person as human, as ie, a flawed person, and begin seeing them as an ideal. This leads you to feel crazy about them and completely overlook the potential negatives they might have. Now this isn't about just always looking for the negative in people, but it's about having a sober view of the person in front of you and not filling out just because you've had a couple of interactions with someone that have been good, assuming this person would be an amazing fit for me in a relationship. Because until we have that, we really don't know. And I see way too many people get excited about someone where they're basically in the dark about how this person is in their day to day, normal, mundane life. And that's what you need to know before you can actually decide you're crazy about someone. You need to know how are they normally not, how are they once a week and I occasionally see them or maybe at the office, like what are they actually like on a day to day basis? So that's the first one. Projecting traits onto someone they don't actually have and believing in what they could be on paper. Number two, you focus too much on impressing them instead of whether they meet your needs. The classic victim of unrequited love is the person who spends all their time dreaming up ways to win over the object of their affection or scheming about how they can find excuses to be alone with them and try to adapt themselves to their likes or dislikes in order to become the perfect partner. In all of this effort, though, they forget to think about their own needs. They are simply investing and investing. They think if they push hard enough, they will logically convince the guy or girl to fall in love with them. The best way to combat this, crazy as it sounds, is the principle we talked about at the start. Like people who actually like you back, or more specifically invest emotionally in people who emotionally invest in you. This is easier said than done. It's a hard mindset to get into initially, but once you do, this is one of the most powerful mental spaces you can be in. To do it, you need to have a a clear picture of all the things you need in your ideal relationship or even as a base level for any relationship you would be in. That is real affection, trust, loyalty. Someone who loves you for who you are, Someone who reciprocates your devotion and gives you the affection you need in return. Someone who meets your needs without having to be cajoled or persuaded to. Someone who sees your inherent worth and value and makes it their mission to make you a priority in their life. Second, you need a strong sense of what you deserve. So your mindset is this. I need to be with someone who is crazy about me, who can see what an incredible catch I am, and who puts in the effort to appreciate and invest in being with me, who shows affection and who recognizes on their own how happy they can be with me in their life. That should always be our standard for falling in love instead of just, I really, really, really like this person. Even if they barely notice my existence, even if. Even if they date other people while I sit on the sidelines, even if they overlook me and show no romantic interest. That mindset is a recipe for massive pain and is often an indicator of our own low self worth and low self esteem, which causes us to have low standards in the kind of people we're looking for to date. So if you don't feel like a catch right now, that's okay. That's another issue. But this may be the wake up call that you need to work on other areas of your life in order to feel truly worthy of someone amazing and to work on your own things that give you that sense of inner self confidence and self worth. And practicing self love on a daily basis. Ways that you actually take care of yourself, treat yourself like your own best friend. Okay, number three, cause of unrequited love. You are substituting falling in love for something missing in your own life. So that links on from the point I just made. People who frequently fall into unrequited love hope that their crush will fix certain areas lacking in their own life. This might be known as the wanting to be saved syndrome. And it happens when we latch ourselves onto people that maybe we perceive as having it all together or having qualities that we'd like to have in our own life. And we think it's, if I'm with that person, then maybe just by proximity, you know, kind of their greatness will seep into me and they'll kind of save me from my humdrum existence that I'm in right now. And you know, maybe it's a guy who just seems stable or he has a great lifestyle or he seems to have a good family or, you know, whatever it is, it's often an indicator. And if we find ourselves fixating on that person in spite of them showing us nothing in return, it may just be that we fixated on the fantasy of what they represent. And we think falling in love with them will somehow fix holes in our own life and kind of give us those things just by osmosis. So again, this is a wake up call that we need to actually say, hey, what am I doing to actually make my life an amazing, fun, exciting thing that I love waking up to, that I actually feel I have to offer to someone else so that I'm not looking for someone else to, to fill a hole in my existence. Number four. Number four, cause of unrequited love. You're confident enough to. Sorry, you aren't confident enough to show romantic interest. So you always fall for people who see you as just a friend. So this is obviously a very classic trap that people fall into as just being seen as, hey, you're a great pal, you're a great buddy. I love spending time with you. You make me laugh. I. But I don't see you as, I don't see you in that way. I don't see you as someone I can actually be with. And this is often a confidence and a self worth thing where we keep our desires, our real desires concealed. Maybe because we're scared of rejection or, you know, we're terrified of. What if I actually be vulnerable, put myself on the line? What are people gonna say if it doesn't go right? What are people gonna say if I get rejected? And so we go for a kind of trying to get a relationship through the back door approach, killing them with closeness and hoping that just spending more and more time together will magically transform into love. So part of fixing this one is tactical. I mean, it may just be that we're not very good at flirting and we don't really, we haven't really exercised that muscle very much. We don't really have those skills. And for that, obviously there's hundreds of other articles you can find on our website, howtogetheguy.com on how to flirt better, how to get out of friend trap and do all those things. So there's, you know, our how to talk to men program covers that. There's plenty of that in all of our material online, whether free material or actual products. But, but it may also just be that again, you haven't built up the confidence and self worth to actually put yourself on the line. And you need to start practicing in very small doses, taking those little risks and just, you know, exposing yourself to small amounts of pushback, whether it's on, you know, online dating and where you can just practice from your phone and just flirt with someone. And if, if it doesn't go well, you can say, oh, well, and just swipe left on that person. Or if you want to just, you know, when we can leave our houses again. After COVID 19, actually practicing on just, you know, giving someone a little cheeky compliment, a little flirtation when you're at the coffee shop, you know, say something nice about their eyes or their smile or hey, I love your hair, I love your shoes. Just practicing little moments of showing flirtatious interest so that you don't get stuck in that trap. Finally, final cause of unrequited love, number five, you are unable to accept rejection. So some people fear rejection and never expose themselves to it. Some people are not good at accepting rejection. So even when they get a rejection, they continue to pine over the same romantic interests instead of taking no for an answer. And again, this is often, this is often an issue to do with, because if you value yourself, this is why it's often an issue of self worth. Because if you value yourself and feel like you're deserving of great treatment, the fact that someone rejects you should cause something in you to actively be turned off or to shut down or to be like, ah, okay, it's like it really, if you have really high self worth, it kind of should just be an indicator that, ah, this person's not for me. Because I need someone who thinks I'm awesome. And if this person's not excited about me right now or is not even attracted to me in that way, then, you know, it's not my job to win the person over. And it's not that you have to you, you don't want to be like crappy about it and be like, fine, you're not attracted to me. It's, you know, it's not. Nothing in it is personal. It's just completely objective. But it should more just be an indicator. Like if someone, it's like I used to, when I was younger, I used to have this thing of thinking if someone rejected me, it would make me put them more on a pedestal. And I think, wow, they must be above me, are, you know, a level above me. And the fact they're rejecting me, you know, if only I could win them over. And as you, you know, as I got older and more confident. It was a case of feeling like, you know, if I. If I. When I was in London and dating, you know, if I'd get like a flaky Tinder conversation and that person would just kind of be on and off and hot and cold, I'd just be like, ah, what is this? Like, delete. And that would be it. It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be some ordeal. It wouldn't be some commentary on me. It wouldn't be me sort of suddenly projecting all these things onto them. It'd just be like, ugh, Like, I don't need this. Like, there's plenty of people. I am their cup of tea. They think I'm the shit. They think I'm awesome. I'm going for them. And the people who don't, it's like, okay, there's the pile of people who don't get it. That's great. They can go do something else. The people who want to play games, people who want to be hot and cold, great. They're over there. I'm looking for the people I want to be amongst, the people who love what I have to offer. And the more you gravitate to that, the happier everything gets. It. Suddenly things feel so much easier and healthier and better. And you think, why didn't I do this before? Why did I? You know, the really messed up thing is some people think that if they get rejected that. Yeah. They think inherently that person is worth pursuing because, oh, if they rejected me, they must be above me, and that must mean there are priors. And that means I need to find a way to hunt them down or to catch them or to make them see my value as well. That's messed up. That's a messed up behavior pattern. And it leads people to relationships where the other person's not as passionate about them and they're constantly fighting for their attention. They're always worried about whether that person's gonna lose the spark for them and get bored of them. It's a terrible place to be. And it all starts because we went for someone in the first place who wasn't super passionate about us. So go for the people who are super passionate about you. Yeah. And once you're able to accept rejection, once you're able to just accept that, you know, different people have preferences. People are making choices all the time based on reasons that aren't always to do with me. And you know what? If they are to do with me, that's fine. Some people don't want what I'm offering. That's cool. There's a bunch of people who do. And if I keep working on myself, if I keep building a life that I love, someone else is going to want to be a part of this and someone awesome is going to want to be a part of this. So once you have that mindset, you're invincible because you're not going to get yourself into these toxic scenarios or these scenarios where you're with a flaky person and trying to keep them by all these tricks and techniques and, you know, whatever it is, playing mind games to try and make yourself seem less available so that they'll want you more. Unrequited love is not something in our own lives to romanticize. It might be fine in films and entertaining to watch the person who's pining over someone and vicariously lived through them. And, you know, you get the Hollywood thing where maybe they turn it around and the other person does notice them most of the time. It's a massive waste of energy, emotion and time. And it leaves you feeling worse. It leaves your self worth going lower and lower and it can lead you to pursue unhealthy dynamics of relationships. And unfortunately, it does get very much romanticized and mythologized in modern society. And people think, well, I'm, I'm going through all these, this pain. And so there's got to be something to that. And it's poetic. And, you know, you have all this literature written about unrequited love, and again, that's all fine, but actually living through it. You can feel like you wasted a hell of a lot of time. Some people I've seen waste years on someone who never really wanted them back. And that's a tragedy. That's not something, you know, to indulge in and celebrate. I think Alice Hoffman said it really well with her sobering words. She said, unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue black sky is for suckers or maniacs. I think Hoffman's quote is too narrow. All forms of love lead us to act like suckers and maniacs at some point. But at the very least, when we find healthy, reciprocal love with someone who shares our feelings, we get to enjoy the madness with someone who feels the same. All right, that's it for this week. I hope this has helped you. If you are in a situation right now where you are pining over someone who doesn't know you exist or who doesn't show you any affection in return, I hope that this helps you see the light. I hope this helps you move towards a better situation to actually choose yourself instead of choose what? Waiting for that other person to choose you. There's a big world. There's a lot of people. There's people who are going to want exactly what you have to offer. You're going to be someone's vision of, oh my God, where has this person been all my life? That's the person you want to hold out for. And I'm not talking about a fake. They walk through the door and you lock eyes and there's love at first sight and blah, blah, blah. No, I'm talking about someone who actually, you know, upon they get to know you, they're interested, they're showing you the right things, they're actually texting back, they're excited to arrange a date with you and things move forward in a healthy, easy way. And that's how it should feel. It should feel. Oh, this doesn't feel like I'm having to play games. I'm getting to be myself. I'm getting to be the best version of myself. And this person likes it and it feels amazing once you have it. So that's it from me. If you enjoyed this format, let me know@podcastathewhussey.com and I'll sprinkle a few more of these ones in where I read a blog or talk about a particular monologue on a particular topic for a while. That's podcastathewhussey.com okay. And if you also are wanting to move on, you know, dating after heartbreak, you're looking to actually rebuild your love life again, check out our free guide at three secrets to love.com three secrets to love.com you can download the free guide, get started, and get your love life back today. All right. Well, I can hear the birds are chirping. We're into a nice another spring English day, so I'm gonna go and enjoy that. And I wish you well, wherever you are. Have a wonderful weekend. I'll see you soon. I see the vlog sites got a new wife, Shorty got a new boo. Yeah, love, beautiful.