When They'll Never Love You Back

Loving someone means the expression of absolute vulnerability. But what do you do when you love someone who will never love you back? Where maybe everything you’ve ever wanted is standing right in front of you, but is not yours to have. You imagine a life together, but the closest you’ll ever get to it is in your dreams.

Unfortunately, life is not a Disney fairy tale; love doesn’t always end in a happily ever after. It’s heartbreaking, but you can’t even say anything because how do you explain or justify heartbreak when it’s someone you’re not even with?

The pain is real; the love is deep. It cuts to a point where you’re crying alone because the only thing that hurts more than heartbreak is finding the right person and knowing the relationship would only ever be possible in a completely alternate dimension. The most suitable way to describe it is self-inflicted torture.

It all begins with spending more time with the other person—sharing quirks, experiences, dreams and ambitions, flaws and the depths of his or her heart. In return, you divulge your deepest secrets and desires. They know what it takes to make you laugh or feel exceptional, and you build memories together that makes any kind of suffering that much easier to bear. It makes you feel hopeful, and before you know it, you’re in love.

To me, loving someone involves revealing aspects of yourself that you hide from the rest of the world. Everything changes the moment you look at a person differently. You start to notice intricate details you didn’t before: the gentleness of her eyes, the bushiness of his eyebrows, or the way he or she laughs.

You realize how much you admire this person and the utmost you can do for him or her. When you’re around them, you feel your heart start to palpitate, and your fingers begin to fidget.

Once you feel a full-fledged love for the person, you spend so much time hoping that they’ll see you the way you see them, or finally leave the person they’re with because they’ll realize you’re the one. And it all turns into an obsession based on a sliver of hope.

It’s like eating junk food when you’re not even hungry because you’re so sure that it will satisfy you. That it will make you happy. But that feeling never comes, so all you’ve done is mess with yourself. It is agonizing loving someone who you know deep down will never love you back.

And I can attest to the fact that spending time with someone who will never love you back hurts like hell. It’s not just an emotional pain, but a physical ache. Sometimes I’ll feel like life is meaningless, and the next moment, I’ll be in sweatpants with a gallon of ice cream and a bottle of wine.

And in my eyes, the two of us would have been an unstoppable force and a fantastic love story. I wish that he or she could see the world through my eyes—a romance tangled with lively debates, bad fights, and passionate sex.

But then reality sets in, and you realize that you won’t lose this person who you’ve idealized, who you’ve loved unrequitedly, and you definitely won’t miss out on what could’ve been because most of it was all in your head.

Unrequited love means prioritizing a fantasy over your own reality. But what do you do when it’s past the point of pure infatuation? What do you do if, like in my case, you’ve loved this person for years, developing a connection that grows stronger with time as you get to know each other, but you know you will never be together?

There’s a substantial part of me that wants the feelings of love to go away because it’s only amounted to severe pain. And sure, over time I’ve distracted myself with other relationships or started doing the “I'm working on me” thing, but then a song comes on that reminds me of him or someone asks me about that person, and the pain bleeds through the cracks of my mending heart, and the love comes back ten times stronger.

The question ends up being: “will this ever get better?”

The truth is, I can’t give you an answer because I still feel this deep unrequited love. Sure, time moves on, and the aches of my heart will probably begin to fade away, but there’s this intuition that no matter what, those feelings of love will never truly go away. So what then?