Does unrequited love/heartbreak/abandonment leave a person heartless?

[mhowe]

I didn't say your opinions mean nothing. I said I wouldn't take relationship advice, meaning "romantic" relationship advice, from someone who had never been in a romantic relationship. It's like going to a priest for marriage advice -- there is looking at it from the outside, and there is true life experience.

 

You are looking for things that people aren't saying. And taking everything much too personally.

[cadmiumblue]

What's the difference between seeing it happen and being inside of it?

 

I should also mention that my troubled friendship with my ex friend was like a romantic relationship in a lot of ways. No, we did not physically do anything, but many of the emotions I experienced were like that of someone in a romantic relationship. I'd say I know a bit more than someone who has never been in a relationship and who also has never been in love--because I HAVE been. So I think I know something.

[camus154]

What's the difference between seeing it happen and being inside of it?

 

Everything. This is like saying, "I've seen my friend fly a Cessna, so I should be qualified to pilot a 747".

 

I should also mention that my troubled friendship with my ex friend was like a romantic relationship in a lot of ways. No, we did not physically do anything, but many of the emotions I experienced were like that of someone in a romantic relationship. I'd say I know a bit more than someone who has never been in a relationship and who also has never been in love--because I HAVE been. So I think I know something.

 

You have experience with feeling love towards someone--not being in a romantic relationship with them. Relationships are much, much more than simply emotions.

[cadmiumblue]

Okay but what I'm saying is that during the friendship, a lot of things happened that wouldn't really happen in a platonic friendship, everything except sex. I never said it was just emotions.

[penelope13]

You don't need to have experienced everything yourself in life in order to give advice (apart from it being impossible). I'm not married yet, still I can give advice to my married friends if they have marriage issues and ask me for input.

 

Even when I have personal experience in any particular aspect of life, my personal experience will always be necessarily limited in comparison to the huge variety in human behavior and interaction.

 

The best advice givers (IMHO) are not people who have necessarily shared the same experience, but are the ones who can recognize behavioral patterns and underlying make up of the people involved and use their personal experiences to emphasize an argument rather than use their personal experience as the only possible answer to an issue.

[cadmiumblue]

I would say I know a bit more than someone who never dated anyone AND never fell in love with a friend.

[penelope13]

It's not really about who knows more and who knows less

[cadmiumblue]

I mean more qualified to give relationship advice than someone who really has absolutely zero experience, which I would not say I do.

[penelope13]

Now you are using the same argument that you complaint about to other people: you are claiming you are more qualified to give advice than someone who has zero experience, while you were upset that other people said that you are not qualified to give advice because you haven't been in a proper relationship.

 

Do you see that you are essentially doing the same as what you didn't like other people were doing to you: to dismiss what you had to say based on your personal history.

 

I thought you would recognize that my response on this thread was giving you backup in terms of that amount of personal experience is not always a good qualification who should/should not give advice.

 

instead your response is: well other people 'qualify even less', because they have even less experience than i have.

 

not everything that you read is a judgement of you and your life choices and requires you to point out that there are people who have even less experience, are more stuck in their situation, have done less to improve their situation etc.

[cadmiumblue]

Okay. I misspoke. I should not have said that. I guess it just feels very insulting when people tell me I know nothing about love, when I've BEEN in it.

[Moontiger]

I think you have been in obsession not love. This person has completely taken over more then 6 years of your life. That is dysfunction and obsession not love.

[cadmiumblue]

I disagree, Moontiger, but I appreciate your opinion. Thank you.

[greywolf]

No, I never showed anger toward my ex friend. I realized that she didn't feel the same and hoped we could just forget about it. She couldn't. Two months after I told her, she was gone, with plenty of avoidance in those two months. I could tell she didn't feel the same, and spending time with me had become a chore. Makes me wonder why her family all thought we were dating. Weird.

 

.

 

I don't think I've seen you mention before that your ex friend stayed around for 2 months before she cut contact with you. This makes more sense, honestly. I don't know exactly what happened because I wasn't there, obviously, but it is a possibility that your friend did try to remain friends with you but that you weren't the one who could accept it. She probably knew that you'd never be able to move on.

[cadmiumblue]

Nothing I did indicated that. I honestly just wanted to forget about it and keep being friends. I didn't do anything nutso, if that's what you're implying. I didn't. But she was pulling away from me, I could feel it, and I did get a bit panicky. Because I was afraid of losing the friendship. I called her a few times to ask if she was okay and she said she was.

 

Then one day she just went away.

 

I don't think she tried at all.

 

I think it did hurt her, because afterwards, for nearly two years, I kept running into her. A few times I saw her and she was crying. I was always angry after that, because it's not like it was anyone's choice but hers to end things. So I decided she was crying because she'd seen me and she wanted me to disappear, not because she was sad that our friendship ended. That would make more sense.

[penelope13]

based on your previous posts, I believed you confessed your love and she ended the friendship right away without any further explanation.

 

Don't get upset about the next question: but how sure are you that she didn't feel pressured (even if unintentionally) because you were unable to get the old dynamics back.

 

By old dynamics I don't mean that maybe you said and did things differently from YOUR side - however that she started to interpret your interaction with each other as a constant (hidden) plea to change her mind about a potential relationship.

 

I can imagine that if you used to hug each other, or walk arm in arm through the city as some very close female friends do (as I do with very close female friends) before you confessed, that afterwards she may have started to feel uncomfortable because she could never be sure if this was a gesture of friendship or if this was done with the intent to 'nudge her into a relationship'. So while outwardly it may have appeared that nothing much had changed, internally/mentally/emotionally things could have changed significantly for her.

 

It seems she tried for 2 months, and probably was trying to change the dynamics of your friendship (because for her something had changed), while you wanted to keep everything as before. Since this is not what she wanted - she decided to end the friendship. She probably was sad about losing the friendship, since the little bit that you shared seems to indicate that she also didn't have many other friends beyond you.

 

I feel sad for both of you in this situation. Truly.

 

One thing I would like to challenge you to is: how able are you (in any given situation) to see things from the other person's perspective rather than your own.

 

I simply can't believe that she didn't try at all, but I'm a bit doubtful (just based on my very limited knowledge of what you have shared here) if you have recognized her efforts as such and just saw that she wanted the friendship to change, while you hoped everything would continue as before.

[cadmiumblue]

We didn't hug or touch each other. So...I don't know what you mean by trying to change things. I don't think she tried.

 

She has other friends now, don't feel sorry for her. I saw a picture of her and her friend on facebook. They were visiting the Met in NYC. My ex friend seemed to be having a lovely time. I can't exactly say I had a lovely time when I saw it, though.

 

Please don't ask me how often I'm trying to see things from someone else's perspective. All I'm hearing is you calling me selfish.

 

The friendship didn't NEED to change. I wasn't a different person than I was before I told her how I felt.

 

Also, does it change your opinion at all if I tell you that she wasn't surprised when I told her how I felt, knew all along, but still stayed my friend until I SAID something?

[penelope13]

I used the hugging just as an example. It could be anything that you share with a friend: while it was ok before a confession was voiced, afterwards it may not be acceptable to one person anymore, because they are interpreting it now differently. This is one of the major reasons why people in general feel uncomfortable to continue a friendship when one person is romantically interested, while the other isn't.

 

 

YOU are the one who hears being called selfish - I never said that. That is an interpretation of what I wrote.

 

Yes, I totally understand that YOU didn't change, that YOU were still the same person. However, it's quite likely that she was different afterwards, even if she had a suspicion that you may have feelings for her. For some people it makes a difference if it's a suspicion or actually having solid proof by being told.

 

 

The question is not what I think about this situation - the question is really how you will be able to get to a happier place in your life. All I can do is raise questions and give you food for thought to help you with it (I recognize that I utterly fail so far) and present some different interpretations of the events that you share. It's up to you to assign meaning to anything that has occurred in your life.

 

As far as I can see, you have trouble understanding why she did what she did. Of course I have no idea why she did what she did, but I can present you with possibilities.

[cadmiumblue]

Actually, it does help to have someone to talk to about it. It helps that you're talking to me about this because in real life, I have nobody to talk to about it, honestly. My family knows what happened, but they don't want to hear about it. My mom can't even accept my sexual orientation, and she is, quite frankly, homophobic.

 

If it means anything, I actually didn't confess love. Luckily a very wise person told me to just say I liked her as more than a friend. So that's what I did. Ugh. I cringe to think what would have happened if I'd been dumb enough to say "I love you" or "I'm in love with you."

 

At least now I can save that for someone who hopefully loves me.

 

Another thought. If people talk about emotional affairs...is there also emotional virginity? I feel like even though I'm physically a virgin, my ex friend took my emotional virginity.

[cadmiumblue]

I don't think she just suspected, though. Her dad asked if we were dating, which means I must have really being acting lovey dovey with her. I think she knew, she just thought...I don't know what she thought. I would try to touch her, be close to her, but she wasn't a really touchy person. It was hard because I really wanted kisses and hugs. : (

 

In many ways I realize she would have been all wrong for me, but then why did I have such strong feelings for her? It doesn't make sense. Just being with her felt good and made all my problems seem insignificant. She made the world go away.

[penelope13]

I never heard that term before, but doesn't mean that other people are not using it.

 

I assume you mean to say that she is the first one you have fallen in love with. I'm not too fond to assign categories and labels to everything and then people getting bend out of shape because of different interpretations of those.

 

By putting people into categories such as virgin vs. non-virgin (or even assigning yourself to any given category), it seems some people are trying to assign value to these categories - which I think is not useful when talking about human behavior and interaction, because nobody should reduce themselves to any given particular category.

 

Yes, I happen to belong to the category of 'women' (i'm using this as an example), but it's just one of MANY, MANY things that are applicable to me, thus it's not the defining category for me.

 

By using the term 'taking someone's virginity (be it emotional or physical)' it seems to imply that there is an imbalance in power and decision making, that it is not a mutual agreement to share something.

 

Your friend didn't take your 'emotional virginity' away: you happened to fall in love with her and she didn't return it. However I doubt that she intentionally set out to make you fall in love with her (which is implied when you say she 'took something from you').

[penelope13]

One of the mysteries of life is that when it comes to love there is no 'cause or effect': i.e. you can have the strongest feelings for someone, but there is no logic, nor natural rule that that can only happen when the other person returns your feelings.

[cadmiumblue]

Honestly this whole thing has made me not want to love again. So far it seems to have worked, since I haven't loved anyone since.

[cadmiumblue]

I've also noticed that when I merely have a crush on someone, they don't ever feel the same. Nobody I like EVER feels the same way. Never.

[cadmiumblue]

In a way, it wasn't...it wasn't a mutual agreement to share love. It was a I fell in love with her, she didn't love back, which did give her a lot of power over me. The person who loves less controls the relationship. Which is why I followed her around like a puppy dog...she would say "come here" and I would. I think she liked that, which is why she liked having me around, but as for feeling anything for me, no, she didn't. She didn't even like me.

 

I remember she told me she wished I would "just not talk." When I called her out on that we got into an argument. We had a lot of arguments...which probably came from the inequality of me loving her, her not loving me back. I would get jealous if she called some other woman attractive (although I didn't mind if she thought men were attractive). It was a very difficult thing.

 

Blah. Sorry for all these posts. I don't know what I'm thinking anymore.

[becomingkate]

No I don 't believe so. If it were true I would be the most cruel evil thing alive. I have had so much heart break in life it is sometimes hard to fathom .

 

It is your choice to be that way.

 

Couldn't agree more! I have had so may heartbreaking things happen to me, and through it all I have realized that I am in control of how I handle it. I am the only one that has the power to control how I think and feel and what I do.

 

After all the trauma of the 1990's, I can't tell you what a profound revelation that was!