Dear Chris:

“I had what I feel like was some kind of spiritual experience a few years ago”- reads like an emotional experience: you felt very intensely for this woman.

“we always seemed to have a magnetic connection to each other with very intense eye contact etc.. an intense energy between us“- reads to me that you felt a magnetic and intense connection to her, but she didn’t feel that way. It was a one sided experience: yours, not hers. It felt to you that it was mutual, you believed it was  mutual, but you were wrong.

“I gently kissed her.. It’s like I was paralysed by the kiss and having an otherworldly experience”- you had an emotionally intense experience that overwhelmed you, it felt so intense that you figured that this feeling must belong to another world.

“her eventually saying she had to go and running away… she couldn’t seem to look at me.. I loved her and ran after her to ask her out. She said no… she couldn’t seem to look or speak to me- in fact she actively avoided me.. added her as a friend. However she .. didn’t accept the friend request”- she was consistently not interested in you, not as a friend and not as a boyfriend.

Even though she never expressed an interest in you and repeatedly expressed a disinterest in you, you kept believing that she was interested in you because your left ear “was burning and very red”. Now, why would a person dismiss the woman’s expressed disinterest and focus on one’s burning red ear as a sign that this is after all a love story meant to be..?

After you kissed her and she ran away from you: “I remember my left ear was burning and very red for at least an hour”. After you asked her out and she said no: “That same night my left ear was burning again”. For months: “I would quite often feel the same phenomenon of my left ear burning”. When you were in the hospital: “my left ear started burning again”.

At the hospital, because your left ear was burning again, you “vowed that I would contact her when I was better and returned home”- because you believed that your burning ear was a spiritual sign that meant that she loved you and that you should contact her. Later you saw that she had a new boyfriend, and you figured- with no evidence at all- that she wanted you to be her boyfriend, but you were not around, so she settled for another man.

“I also wonder what the left ear burning actually meant and if it really was true love”- it was true love in your experience, not in her experience. The “burning and very red” ear (if you did not experience other symptoms in addition to the burning, red ears,  such as fever, flaky skin, swollen ears, etc.) could be a result of what is called flushing: a severe form of blushing, caused by emotional excitement: the hormone adrenaline is secreted into the blood, causing the heart to pump lots of blood into the arteries, all the way to the ears, and because the blood vessels in the ears are very close to the skin, the ears look red and feel like burning. It could be that you touched your left ear a lot when that happened, causing it to look more red and feel more burning than the right ear.

www. medicalnewstoday. com: “Flushed skin occurs when the hundreds of tiny blood vessels just beneath the skin dilate, or widen.. they rapidly fill with more blood, which can make the skin appear red or pink. This effect is more noticeable in regions of the body where the blood vessels are closest to the skin.. Flushed skin may also feel hot to the touch or cause a slight burning sensation… Being anxious or embarrassed can cause the body to release hormones, such as adrenaline, that temporarily dilate the blood vessels and lead to reddening of the skin… Alcohol raises blood pressure and causes the blood vessels to expand which can cause flushed skin”.

In summary: I think that you suffer from a delusion (a false belief that is not based on evidence and doesn’t change with contradictory evidence), and your delusion is that she loves you and that there is a love story that is meant to be with her, meant by some spiritual entity. I think that during this lockdown, it is important that you exercise every day, take a fast, long walk once or twice a day, if possible, that you prepare a daily routine otherwise, so that there is some structure in your day. Look at the home page of this site for guided meditation suggestions and such. Headspace is a website that offers many guided meditations and mindfulness exercises for people suffering during the lockdown (and otherwise). If you don’t suffer from symptoms other than an occasional red ear, pay attention and don’t touch or rub or scratch your left ear. If you do suffer from other symptoms, contact a medical professional.

anita

What a sad story.

And like Fleur, I know what it’s like too, in my own way.

I have no desire to go into detail at this point– it was years ago and far away– but the man I’m spiritually connected to has not left my mind or heart after well over a decade. We met as coworkers, as in Chris’ case. We don’t speak now but have sort of “thought out loud” about each other on Facebook and elsewhere in the past.

Objectively, I’ve always known he was no damn good for me. He was married when we met, and had a reputation for being a skirt chaser as well as a foul-tempered narc with a drinking problem. Right there are tons of good reasons for not even wanting to be in the same county! Yet none of that, nor time nor distance, has stopped me from wondering “what if” anyway…