Dear Heena Love:

Reads to me like the hope for love was awakened in you and it awakened strong- the desire to love-and-be-loved-in-return. The desire is strong because you feel that he will never be yours (“He will never be mine”).

Like a hunger awakened for something you can’t have.

anita

Dear Heena Love,

You love your friend and I hear you, I do. But there are various points things that must also be looked at.

First, you love your friend in a romantic attitude. That’s fine. But you also know that he is in love with someone else, something that he seems to have explicitly told you. Even when he seems to know that you have romantic feeling for him. Or are you implying that he knows as you’ve yet to tell him so? But let’s assume that he does know. Yet he does not answer you in the positive, negative or anything way. He has not answer you directly, but have told you directly that he is in love with someone else. And from that point on, you seem to have revved up your actions, doing what you can to meet him, even when he is in a different state. You don’t write whether you meet him during your visits, but that you still make a point of going irregardless. You don’t write whether he is even happy to meet you, just that you have to go meet him.

So now the question; why are you still clinging onto this unrequited love? You know he loves someone else. He might know that you love him, but have told you that he loves someone else. And then you are still trying to meet him irregardless of his schedule, irregardless of how much he really wants to meet you.

So when did this ‘love’ of yours turn from centering onto him to centering on you? When did it matter more that you are in an unrequited love with your friend rather than what your friend wants?

You write that you love him more than life itself, but in the letter, it’s still about your ‘love’, and not him. How do you love someone more than life when you don’t even think about his side of this situation? Have you even asked him what he wants and not assumed that?

You also write that you can’t give this up, but have you even tried, really tried, to distance yourself away from him? Of course, it’ll hurt in the beginning as you are mourning a loss, but it’s not just about you giving up this unrequited love, it’s about you respecting your friend’s wish of remaining friends as he chose to love someone else. So should you persist in allowing yourself to obsess over this unrequited love, you might just lose a friend. After all, it’s not that you can’t give it up, it’s that you won’t give it up. You haven’t even tried to moved on.

You tell yourself he is your everything and when you place someone on so high a pedestal, you don’t want to tear down the great illusion. You created a story of you loving a person whose been there for you, someone who knows some of your past, someone you can share things with, someone who support you, care for you and you don’t want to let go of that story. No one wants to let go of the great stories that they tell themselves as they try to make sense of the world that they inhabit. But when those stories involved actors who doesn’t want to take on certain roles, then you have a decision to make. Continued the story as is, or end the story.

In your case, it’s best to end the story. Your friend did not response to your feelings, but instead told you that he was in love with someone else. That was an implicit response, telling you that he doesn’t share the same feelings as you do. But the story you wove for yourself was so powerful that you became lost in it so you don’t want to end it. You want to continue this lovely story of a great person who might answer to your feelings one day. But that might never happen as it’s not even happening now.

It’s time to end this story. You can do it, you can do the hard thing of letting go.