LOVE SOS: What to do when you’re in love all by yourself

Love SOS: What to do when you’re in love all by yourself

Unrequited love. It can happen without warning. All of a sudden you’ve got feelings for a friend or colleague. It can be a soul-testing situation that may take a while to be resolved especially if the object of our affections doesn’t reciprocate our feelings. If you’re in this agonising situation what you can do and what’s the spiritual lesson here?

Be honest with yourself

Firstly, you need to understand that this situation will be resolved and you are not trapped in a never-ending cycle of pain and longing. Then take a hard, honest look at what’s going on in your life right now. Are you having problems in other areas of your life? Are you dissatisfied with your work? Have you been through a break-up or loss? Are you lonely? Are you feeling depressed or dissatisfied? Be ruthlessly honest here. Very often when an area of our life is no longer working, we can find ourselves attracted to a friend or colleague romantically due to the fact they make us feel good and offer a respite from our woes.

It’s easy then to take this one step further and develop romantic feelings. If your ‘life audit’ reveals a dissatisfaction with a particular area then concentrate on fixing this, then come back and re-assess your feelings from a position of happiness and wellbeing.

Is this part of a pattern for you? Again, be honest. Do you have a history of developing feelings for people who can’t or won’t return them? On a soul level you are being given an opportunity now to break the cycle once and for all. Once you understand what’s going on it may well be better to go ‘cold turkey’ on your friendship with the person for a while until you feel you have worked through the issue. You may want to stop seeing them for a bit and then pick up on the friendship later on.

Small steps

This is a common problem and one our readers get asked about all the time. If however you feel that you are not using your crush on someone as a means of escapism and you don’t have a history of falling for people who are unavailable on some level, should you tell the other person how you feel? It’s usually inadvisable to blurt out feelings of undying love as it can set us up for a big rejection and put the other person in an awkward position. However, it is a mistake to assume that the other party isn’t attracted to us in return. We need to approach this in the same way as we would any potential relationship – put a small amount ‘out there’ and see how the other person responds.

A compliment or a casual ‘we should have coffee sometime’ risks nothing and you can gauge the response. If we get positive feedback we can take another small step and see how that’s received and so on. This way we get to discover what the other person feels about us rather than just acting on an assumption!

Be gentle with yourself

If however, you discover your crush is seeing someone else, be gentle with yourself. Give yourself space to mourn the situation just as you would if you had been in a relationship with them. On a soul level we always have to remember that every connection we make is a growth opportunity. Even if you discover your feelings are not returned, these situations present us with lessons about ourselves that we would have missed if we hadn’t experienced it! Allowing ourselves to be open to love also allows us to be open to life. All love contains an element of risk but unless you’re willing to take the risk you’ll never receive love. That’s the paradox. No matter the outcome, know that the experience has brought you one step closer to knowing yourself and allowing true love to flow in your life.