Dear noname:

“how to soothe the desperation?”- maybe a dog, this is how lots of people soothe their desperation for love.

“what to do with this desperate feeling?”

My answer: you mentioned the word love hundreds of times in your writing over many months, and three times yesterday: “the need to feel love“, you wrote in your recent post, and “one day love might be more accessible to me when I need it”, and “I can function in this misery and hopelessness.. but.. I’d rather live with peace and love“.

But what if you have the wrong definition of love. Maybe love is not accessible to you because love, as you perceive it, doesn’t exist?

And, if you let go of wanting something that doesn’t exist, you will gain access to something that does exist.

I will develop this thought (and try to  not read the following on a strictly intellectual level, try to take it in on the emotional level): this desperation was born in your childhood over years. You were not loved as a child, weren’t given hardly any attention at all. Lonely and alone, that is an unloved child. What happens in the mind of an unloved child through years of such devestation: he imagines being loved, he fantasizes about being loved. A child has great imagination and he entertains magical thinking. In a child’s mind everything is possible and anything imagined, can come true sometime in the future.

Your perception of love was created in those years of great imagination and magical thinking, love was the most wonderful feeling in the world, something to look forward to and anticipate a whole lot. The more miserable a child’s life is, the more magnificent is his perception of how wonderful life can feel tomorrow, or sometime in the future.

Again, the more miserable a child’s life, the more magnificent he imagines life can be.

This kind of imagination carries the child through the misery of every day life. It motivates him to keep going. It therefore has an evolutionary purpose- survival.

And so, the child imagines life and love to be the most magnificent emotional experience, a euphoric, heavenly, perfectly wonderful emotional state or condition, lasting and everlasting.

Fast forward, this child has survived and is now a man. He still perceives love to be that grand. So he rushes to get that magnificent love-experience that he imagined all these years. He signs in to dating sites, meets this or that woman, and rushes to get that long-imagined super wonderful emotional condition. He rushes, excited and falls, because what he imagined all these years is not realistic, it doesn’t exist. There is no heaven, there is no euphoria forevermore. He is chasing what doesn’t exist.

The man needs to relearn what love is: it is not that great, not that grand, not that wonderful.

For as long as you keep the wrong perception of love, the wrong definition, you will remain disappointed and depressed, I believe. Change your perception of it, understand the correct definition, and it will become accessible to you. It will not feel as great as you imagined it to be. But it will feel better than your consistent depression and misery though. And there will be good moments, just not the greatest, grandest, and so forth.

I wrote all the above without editing. I hope it is helpful to you once you consider this on the emotional level and understanding, not strictly the intellect.

anita