Understanding Unrequited Love and How to Move On

Key Takeaways

• Unrequited love can hurt, but you can heal by focusing on personal interests and goals.
• Spend time with supportive friends to help lessen the pain of unrequited love.
• Understanding your attachment style can help you develop better relationships in the future.

It often goes something like this: you and a friend or acquaintance are getting close, hanging out a lot, having a great time together. One day you notice butterflies in your stomach and you realize you’re catching feelings for them. The feelings grow stronger and you finally work up the courage to tell them.

Devastatingly, they respond with, “Oh, that’s so sweet of you to say, but I really only see you as a friend, I hope that’s ok.” Ouch! Even though they still value you, the deep pangs of romantic rejection are very real—and now you’re expected to continue on being their friend as if nothing happened?

This is just one scenario in which unrequited love can occur. But no matter how it does, it can leave you feeling depressed, rejected, and sometimes even unloveable. Luckily, the pain of unrequited love does not have to last forever and there are many ways to move on in order to find the reciprocated love you deserve! Here are our tips and insights.

Unrequited Love Takes Many forms

There are a few different types of unrequited love, which can include:

• Loving someone who does not return those feelings
• Pining for someone who is not available
• Mutual attraction between people who are both in other relationships
• Desire for an ex after a relationship has ended

It is important to recognize that it is common for people to experience unrequited feelings at some point. Recognizing the signs of unrequited love may help you learn to deal with it more effectively and find ways to move on.

Unrequited love involves having strong romantic feelings toward another person who does not feel the same way. It is a one-sided experience that can leave people with feelings of pain, grief, and shame.

Signs of Unrequited Love

There are signs that can help you understand what is going on and if the love you are feeling for someone is being reciprocated. Some people describe feeling as if they are getting “mixed signals” from a love interest only to find that it is, in fact, unrequited love.

“Am I Unlovable?”

You’re Always The One Reaching Out

Are you the only person making effort to communicate? Are you the only one reaching out to check in with the other person to see how the day is going or find out what important things are happening in their life?

When you are the only one taking the time to reach out and connect with the other person, follow up with them about things, or inquire about their life, it can be a sign that this love is unrequited.

In healing dynamics, two partners who care about each other are motivated to connect with each other and share in the pattern of fluid, healthy communication. The exchange of energy between partners in a healthy relationship feels balanced and doesn’t leave one person bearing the responsibility of connecting.

Research has shown that people who reject other people’s affections often experience guilt. Rejectors tend to view would-be lovers as unreasonable, self-deceptive, and annoying; would-be lovers, on the other hand, tend to view their rejectors as mysterious and inconsistent.¹

You’re The Only One Who Desires Physical Touch

Do you desire to touch the other person, to hold hands, to kiss or hug? Longing for connection often includes the desire for physical contact, and when people are equally attracted and desire physical intimacy, both parties want to connect on a physical level.

If you find that you are always the one initiating any physical touch, or that when you attempt to physically connect, you are met with resistance or the other person pulling away, it can signal that this is a one-sided longing.

You Put the Person on a Pedestal

Many times, in situations of unrequited love, one person has the other on a pedestal. The love interest is perceived as near perfect and any imperfections are easily explained away. There are rarely healthy boundaries set in unrequited love.

When people build a healthy romantic bond, they can both still see one another’s faults, vulnerabilities, or imperfections. Healthy relationships allow for space for people to make mistakes and use those opportunities to help create closer bonds.

Each party can see and hear each other and their areas of vulnerability. In an unrequited love dynamic, only the emotionally invested person is able to see and hear the other party. There is not a mutual, healthy acknowledgment of each other in unrequited love.

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They Never Take Time to Get to Know You

Getting to know another person takes time. Over the course of time, partners in a healthy relationship go through experiences together, ask questions, and make an effort to understand and get to know each other. In an unrequited love dynamic, there is emotional investment on only one side.²

You might find that you are always asking questions, initiating contact, and making efforts to invite the person into conversation or experiences. In turn, the other person may know nothing about you at all, never ask you questions, or never seem to invite you into any meaningful conversation about you, such as your desires, interests, goals, or hobbies.

You may long for the other person to know you but the opportunities for sharing with them never seem to come.

Possible Reasons for Unrequited Love

How the other person feels has more to do with them than with you—but how you respond to those feelings might be because of conflicts or challenges that you are dealing with.

Sometimes, you might love that person because you’ve idealized them in your mind. You are attached to that ideal version without really viewing them as a full, complex individual with flaws and even undesirable characteristics.

For some people, it might be a case of simply wanting someone they know they can’t have. The fact that there can never be a genuine connection is part of the appeal. For someone with an insecure attachment style, being in love with someone who won’t return those feelings means they can stay in a distant relationship without making other real connections.

Loving someone, and being loved in return, requires making yourself vulnerable and accepting that authentic, two-sided relationships involve both risk and reward. Staying stuck on unrequited love allows you to remain in the safety of a pseudo-relationship that can never be real and will never require you to become vulnerable, accept risk, and commit to another person.

Negative Impact of Unrequited Love

Unrequited love can be a source of stress and emotional turmoil. Some of the potential effects of experiencing unrequited love include:

• Poor self-esteem: If you continue to have deep feelings of love for someone who does not return them, it can erode your self-esteem. You may feel rejected and worry that you are unworthy of their affections.
• Isolation: When someone doesn’t return your feelings, it can leave you isolated and lonely. This can be particularly pronounced if you fail to pursue relationships with others.
• Stress: Healthy relationships act as a protective buffer against the negative effects of stress.³ Loving someone who doesn’t love you back can be an unhealthy or potentially toxic situation that may increase your stress, create feelings of unhappiness, or even contribute to feelings of anxiety and depression.

How to Heal the Heartbreak

There are many things you can do to move forward after the heartbreak of unrequited love. It may feel impossible now, especially as you begin the healing process, but know that this takes time and healing can happen.⁴

Although unrequited love can feel extremely painful, it can offer an opportunity to grow in unexpected ways.

Through the experience of unrequited love, you can gain a better understanding of your needs, your patterns in a relationship, and how to become a healthy, positive partner in the future.

Take Time to Grieve

Unrequited love usually results in deep heartbreak and feelings of rejection.⁵ When you are emotionally invested in someone and they don’t seem to feel the same way about you, you might question your worth or wonder if you will ever feel loved.

Taking time to grieve your loss is important. You are certainly not alone in your experience, as many people have been through situations in which their love for another person was not reciprocated.

Challenge the thoughts that might creep in telling you that there is something wrong with you or that you are not enough. There are a variety of reasons why love may not be reciprocated that have nothing to do with your worth or being “enough.”

Stay Busy

It’s hard to move past the pain of rejection if you are dwelling and ruminating on your heartbreak. This doesn’t mean that you should completely avoid thinking about what has happened, but rather that you should find ways to stay busy so that you are not dwelling on negative thoughts.

Spend time with friends who can offer support. Over time, you will find that the pain lessens and you are in a better place to look back at the experience with greater objectivity.

Understand Patterns

This may be your first experience with unrequited love or you may find that this seems to be a pattern for you. Much of the way people view and experience adult relationships has to do with what they learned growing up, what they observed, and what they were taught about love and relationships.

Attachment style can influence how you develop and maintain adult romantic relationships. Attachment, as described by famed psychologist John Bowlby, is a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects people to each other. Primarily referenced within parent-child dynamics, more research is showing that attachment style has quite a bit to do with adult romantic relationships as well.

Understanding your attachment style can allow you to gain insight into your own patterns of relationship, your needs, and how to develop healthier connections.

Invest in Yourself

When you have experienced unrequited love, it is likely you have poured a lot of emotional energy into another person, and this may leave you feeling drained. To move forward in a healthy way, it is critical that you reinvest energy into yourself, your interests, your hobbies, and your personal goals.

Your sense of self can become lost when experiencing unrequited love since your sense of self may be strongly connected to your love interest and your continual longing for them to return that love. Instead:

• Take inventory of your interests, things that bring you a sense of peace and joy, and the things that make you, you.
• Evaluate your goals and your values, and become intentional about letting your decision-making and behavior reflect those parts of you.

When to Get Help

Dealing with unrequited love, a breakup, or another type of relationship distress can lead to complex feelings of sadness, anger, and sometimes depression. If you are struggling to cope because of unrequited love or some other relationship issue, consider getting help from a mental health professional.

A therapist can help if you:

• Struggle to get back to your normal routine
• Experience feelings of breakup depression
• Ruminate on negative emotions
• Have thoughts of suicide or self-harm
• Explore patterns that contribute to poor romantic relationships

If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database.

Tips If The Situation Is Flipped

It can also be challenging to cope if you are the person who doesn’t return someone else’s feelings of love. Rejecting another person isn’t easy, especially if you know how deeply they will be hurt. However, it is important to be clear to avoid future complications. 

• Don’t avoid it: Just trying to avoid an uncomfortable conversation can make matters worse in the long run. If you don’t return their feelings, tell them directly.
• Don’t be vague: It might seem like you are preventing hurt feelings, but not being direct might only add fuel to the other person’s feelings. Don’t leave them languishing in a state of hope or expectation. 
• Be compassionate: Rejection can be painful, so be as kind and compassionate as you can be when turning them down. 

Keep in Mind

Unrequited love hurts, but it is possible to heal, grow, and move on from the experience. It’s important not to take the other person’s lack of feelings personally—it probably has more to do with them than with you. Once you can accept the reality of the situation, you can gain distance and perspective that will allow you to move on and start building a relationship that is reciprocated.

Why Masculinity Needs To Be The Next Big Conversation In The #MeToo Movement

#MeToo has encouraged women to finally break their silence on abuse and harassment. But this conversation holds an opportunity for men, too — to start talking about how the rules of manhood are holding them back.

By Rachel Giese

February 28, 2018

Photo, Roberto Caruso.

I’ve spent the past three years embedded in the worlds of boys — a rather unexpected place for a middle-aged lesbian, who came of age in the Third Wave feminist, Riot Grrrl 1990s, to have found herself. Researching and reporting my forthcoming book on modern boyhood and masculinity was a project both professional and personal. I’m the mother of a now teenaged son, a swaggering, sports-and-video-game-loving boy who ranks high on the bro-scale, and who is also impossibly tender and affectionate. Just as my friends who are parents of girls grew anxious over their daughters’ princess obsessions and a world that blunted their strength and ambition, I worried about the messages my son and other boys received about their worth and value as men. Sociologists often use the metaphor of “the man box” to describe the social rules of masculinity: In order to be a “real man,” a guy has to be stoic, aggressive, financially successful, sexually rapacious, physically courageous, muscle-bound, risk-taking, tough and in control.

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What I learned by spending months talking to men, young men and boys, is that many of them are, indeed, struggling. Girls and women spent the past several decades catching up and, in some cases, lapping boys and men in post-secondary education and professional fields, and are now finding their way towards financial, social and sexual independence. But while we’ve focused on advancing opportunities for girls, we’ve overlooked some alarming stats about boys. Young men are more likely to have been diagnosed with conditions like ADHD and autism, which can lead to challenges in school. They are also less likely to ask for help, which can amplify those issues. According to a new Chatelaine survey on masculinity, 45 percent of men ages 25-29 reported often feeling lonely. Studies have found that men are much more likely than women to commit acts of violence, but are also frequently victims themselves of serious physical assaults at the hands of other men, and they are more likely to have a weapon used against them. In extreme cases of violence, such as terrorist attacks and increasingly frequent mass shootings, it’s almost inevitably troubled, angry men who are the perpetrators.

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Many have argued that men are naturally inclined to violence and that they are wired for aggression. But just as compelling is research into how the rules of masculinity foster this behaviour. Researchers have found that men who most strongly exhibit conventional masculine traits, or who are most anxious about their masculinity, are more likely to behave in ways that hurt themselves and others: more likely to have unprotected sex, to binge drink, to sexually harass women, to bully other men through homophobic slurs. Men who are heavily masculine-identified have the highest male status — and they are also more likely to exhibit the signs of depression.

Now, when the word “masculinity” is frequently preceded by “toxic,” and “male” is often followed by “privilege,” men have a tricky relationship to the status quo, one that has become infinitely more complex in recent months with the rise of the #MeToo movement. The flood of accounts of women’s humiliation and hurt at the hands of men, and the rage that has accompanied them, is both cathartic and disruptive — understandably so. What’s been revealed is not only the ubiquity of sexual violence, but the way gendered power dynamics continue to hold women back on every front – professionally, financially, psychologically, and in ways we may not have articulated yet.

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Some men have been re-assessing their past behaviour, and wondering how they’d been so clueless about the experiences of half the population. Some have aimed to distance themselves: Sure, there are bad guys out there, but I’m not one of them. Many don’t know how to be part of the solution or are afraid of appearing foolish or monstrous for even trying to engage. What if they say or do the wrong thing?

Some are threatened by the suggestion that their power and success are unearned and ought to be more fairly shared. Still others have denounced these multiple and multiplying accounts of rape, domestic violence, child abuse and fundamental systemic inequities as a “witch hunt.” The most pressing concern for them is not the millennia-long erosion of women’s safety and autonomy, but what this all means for men. Hasn’t this gone too far? Isn’t this all beginning to sound like male-bashing? What about the lives/careers/reputations of men who are falsely accused?

There are a lot of men, of course, who aren’t and who don’t feel privileged, or who don’t recognize themselves in the traditional definitions of masculinity. Working-class and poor men are shut out of economic opportunities that would allow them to be financially secure. Gay men, trans men and straight men who are gentler in their demeanor experience bullying and violence for not being “man enough.” Men of colour are subjected to racial bias and discrimination. Police disproportionately confront black and indigenous men, security officers at airports pull brown skinned, bearded and turbaned men aside for questioning. Teachers and school administrators are more likely to punish black, indigenous and other racialized boys with harsher penalties.

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All of us, men and women, can recognize the very real ways in which men and boys are hurting without casting those struggles at odds with those of women and girls — or worse seeing men’s suffering as more valid and urgent. Men’s and boys’ suffering is in some ways the result of sexism and misogyny, too. Take everything associated with femaleness, like vulnerability, passion, nurturance and creativity, and determine it to be weak and without value, and you cut men and boys off from life-affirming aspects of their humanity. Tell men and boys that they’re owed women and girls’ attention and admiration, their bodies, their labour, and their obedience, and you erode men and boys’ capacity to have equal, loving and meaningful connection.

So, of course, the #MeToo movement and what it’s asking of men is hard. For the first time, there have been widespread repercussions: men have lost their jobs, workplace rules have been scrutinized, sexualized customs that had been taken for granted are being reconsidered. And in the early months of 2018, the momentum hasn’t slowed, as it often has before, but rather gathered speed and force. As journalist Laurie Penny recently put it, “I know that the climate is, for once, less than merciful to men. I know that men are scared. I also know that this could not have happened any other way… This would have been easier to avoid if we had not made it so very normal for men to be emotionally castrated, so very routine for them to expect women to shoulder all of the burden of emotional work in society.”

Not surprisingly, there’s a counter-force to #MeToo, that’s also gaining momentum: a backlash that encompasses men’s rights activists, reactionary talking heads and shock jocks, angry internet trolls, sulky gamers and pick-up artists, anti-PC libertarians, and men and women who prefer traditional gender roles and expectations. As I write this, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by provocative YouTube celebrity Jordan B. Peterson, is the number-one ranked non-fiction book on Amazon.com, and it sits at the top of The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list. The psychologist and University of Toronto professor, who is about to embark on a 12-city North American tour, catapulted to fame for his culture-warrior stances on hot-button issues such as gender-neutral pronouns (he refuses to use them) and white privilege (he considers the notion “a Marxist lie”). But, in particular, it’s his stern, quit-yer-whining-and-grow-the-hell-up, tough-love advice that’s struck a chord in his core fan base, a group he estimates is 90 percent young and male.

Amidst this noisy backlash to #MeToo, it’s easy to miss important work that’s happening to examine the core assumptions, systemic framework and countless negative effects of the “man box” worldview. It’s crucial we don’t. Over the past three years, I’ve met coaches, teachers, social workers, mentors and activists who are talking to each other about gender-based violence and inequality, and who are aiming to expand the definition of masculinity and manliness. They understand the stakes of this work not just for women and girls, but for themselves as well. These are men who want sustaining connections with one another, and more honest and equitable relationships with women and girls. They recognize that toxic masculinity is not only men’s problem to fix, but a problem for men’s well-being, too.

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One man who mentors teenage boys in Calgary told me that young men sincerely want to talk about issues such as sex, consent and power but have few venues where they feel safe to do so, where they can ask embarrassing questions and express their fears and anxieties. If we don’t find positive outlets for them to explore these issues, he says, they will turn to the only other place available to them – internet forums where these feelings are often hardened into women-bashing.

We have seen some important public examples of change, however. Like the evolution of #MeToo from public awareness to political action, lobbying for legislative change, for policies that create fairer, safer workplaces. There are also personal examples of accountability and forgiveness. Not that long ago, a comedian and writer named Megan Ganz called out her former boss Dan Harmon (the creator of the TV series Community) for having relentlessly harassed her. The scenario was a common one: He hit on her at work, singling her out for praise, but after she repeatedly him turned down and told him he made her uncomfortable (in addition to being her boss, he also had a girlfriend), he began to bully and belittle her.

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After #MeToo went viral, Ganz bravely addressed Harmon’s behaviour on Twitter and Harmon bravely responded. In an unflinching account on his podcast, he acknowledged that he had pursued her and then punished her after she rejected his advances. He admitted he didn’t see women as equals and couldn’t see beyond his own desire and ego. “I just didn’t hear [her],” he said, “because it didn’t profit me to hear it, and this was, after all, happening to me, right?” Then he apologized. Ganz said she felt relief, tweeting, “it is a masterclass in How to Apologize. He’s not rationalizing or justifying or making excuses. He doesn’t just vaguely acknowledge some general wrongdoing in the past. He gives a full account.”

There’s much to celebrate in the example set by Ganz and Harmon, mainly that if we can talk to one another with respect, empathy and honesty, we can move forward. This moment has been framed as a gender war, but it doesn’t have to be a stand-off. Men should be engaged in the work of gender equality because it’s a decent and just thing to do. But they also stand to gain from challenging the darker aspects of masculinity. For too long women and girls have been forced to keep silent about sexual violence. Now that they’re talking, men have to decide what they’re going to do without the protection of that silence. Will they lash out with fear and confusion? Will they choose to retreat? Or will they courageously join the conversation?