8. The Psychology of Unrequited Love - why we love those who don’t love us back.

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of your Twenties, very unprofessional podcast, where by eye your unqualified guide talk through some of the big changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Okay, so welcome back. I'm recording this episode in my car in my backyard today just because do you know how it is lockdown or my housemates at home, I don't really want to annoy them with my ranting about this week's topic. It also means if you hear like some beautiful bird noises, hopefully it brings something to the ambience. It's very snow white esque. Okay, let's get into it. So this episode is probably my absolute favorite I have ever recorded. And don't don't get me wrong, I really have loved all the other topics that I've covered, but I think that none have kind of struck me so personally as this one. And it's really hit a bit of a raw nerve honestly, like researching theirs thinking about this because currently, if you don't know, Gambra is in lockdown due to the Delta strain, as as many parts of Australia. Thanks Sydney for that one. But as much as it has created some existential dread, it's also given me a lot of thinking time and reflection time. And something that I've been really thinking about a lot in this period of isolation is unrequired. It's unrequited love. I posted about this on my Instagram, I think, maybe like a week ago, and overwhelmingly people really wanted to hear about the psychological underpinnings of this experience. You know, a love that is unrequired and unreciprocated is such a universal and shared experience, and I think it's such a consuming one too. You know, it suffocates all else in our minds, and it extends beyond reason and rationality in so many ways, just by all acknowledgement. You know that someone does not love you back, we cannot help but pine and suffer after them. And as a repeated victim of this love sick situation, I really kind of wanted to uncover some of the hidden psychological secrets, maybe behind why we develop strong feelings for those who could never reciprocate those feelings back. Now, I feel like I don't really need to explain how unrequited love relates to our twenties. Like, let's not kid ourselves and Spotify. It gives me a little wrap up of the ages or demographics of people who listen each week, and overwhelmingly are as. You know, the title of my podcast could probably predict. The majority of you are in your twenties, and I'm sure are very familiar with this feeling, that fucking gut wrenching feeling of having these insanely strong emotions and expectations of someone who will never you know, could never return them, and the pain the confusion of unrequited love. I think it is its own psychological challenge. And if you know you say you've never experienced unrequited love, well, firstly, this episode is not for your ears. Please kindly leave. This is a safe space. But secondly, I think I think you're probably lying to yourself. You know, I refuse to believe that there is someone out there who has only ever loved those who has loved them back in equal measure. It's impossible, like psychology literally says it's impossible, which will obviously get to in a moment. Anyhow, Like I mentioned, I've been thinking about unrequired love quite a lot in this time of lockdown. You know, I kind of used to semi joke that I came out of the room in a state of unrequited love, and I still slightly believe it. You know, it feels weird to share this insanely personal dimension of my life, but fuck it, I think it is a universal human experience that needs to be shared. And for a long time, unrequired love really did define much of the narrative I would tell about myself. You know, the men I was so in love with, so devoted to so it had so much admiration for who would never reciprocate. It was such and I think still is a fundamental part of my experience with love, or maybe my misguided interpretation of what is I. You know, I don't really feel any shame in saying that, especially through some of my investigative work for this podcast, I do think, you know, you never really escape the ego wound of loving someone who doesn't love you, and there's a part of your soul and your self conception that does not forget that hurt. It's a wound that really does cut deep into your psyche, and it becomes ingrained into you, and it does become part of how you address all future experiences of emotion and feeling because it is it's bigger than rejection. You know, unrequited love is is not just rejection, it is heartbreak itself, and a lot of research into how our brain reacts to human connection really does confirm this. There have been so many people who I have believed I have loved and who have not loved me back. You know, one of them is even married now. And there are times, especially in this recent week, strangely, when you know I have had time to reflect on that emotional experience, that I do feel these like strainly old urges and the pain of longing kind of slipped back into my consciousness, despite knowing very well that this is not something that will ever come to fruition. You know, he's married, Like, it's never going to happen. So why is it that our brain reacts so irrationally when we are confronted with these feelings and expectations. And what I really wanted to find out in this episode is if that is really love? Like all those intense emotional experiences, are we correct in labeling them as love? Even unrequited love or love of a lesser degree. So, like I said, a highly personal episode, but I think you know, I've always said this podcast was for my own self exploration, and if you get something out of it, if you connect to my stories of you know, always being the one who has more to give than I could ever receive, I'm glad that you can get something out of it. And I feel like I've talked to my friends about this so often. You know, this is probably time for an immense shout out to my friends like Kate and Aaron, friends of the show, who I think for years have witnessed me becoming overly invested in silly little men and then crying on their shoulder a month later. But I always hear the same line of reasoning for this predicament. You know, it's always you love too much, you care too deeply, you see the best in everyone, you have so much to give. And this episode is really dedicated to raising that myth that only those who have this surge capacity to feel end up in a predicament of unrequired love. Like make no mistake, unrequired love has an origin in our formative experiences and how we've been taught to expect rewards and returns from our expression of emotion, and unrequited love can occur because our mind is simply hijacked or programmed to respond to what we interpret as love in a very specific way and beyond a level of consciousness. So okay, with that kind of fun thought in mind, let's jump into the psychology of it all. I once had someone tell me that unrequited love was the purest form of love, and despite that being kind of highly manipulated for the situation that we were in. This was years ago, like four or five years ago, and what he has said has stuck with me because his sentiment is absolutely everywhere. But whether it's correct it is probably a whole nother debate. You know, there's that quote that all poets must have an unrequited love, and true love is that which we can never meet. And we see unrequired love showing up everywhere in pop culture and mediate performances, movies, you know, call me by your name, Great Gatsby, obviously, folks of being a wallflower, even Forrest Gump. It is such a deep inspiration for a lot of creative works like like music and arn't as well, and oh my gosh, that there's that one, this one song that always gets me when I find myself in these situations as they regularly do. It's Adele's version of I Can't make you Love me. And if you are currently experiencing I love that is unrequired, unrequired, run requited, listen to that song, feel your pain, and take it as a sign to move the fuck on, because if you are listening to Adele, they are not the one. They are just not it. But in all seriousness, it is a really beautiful song. And I think the repeated theme of unrequired love across a lot of creative media really expresses two things that relate to the psychological underpinnings of this concept. You know, Firstly, the experience is universal and has some innate premise that makes it so commonplace. You know, as I've kind of alluded to, everyone has experienced this. We all tend to make other people sacred in the absence of true emotional connection. You know, placing someone on a pedestal is better than acknowledging that we have been shortsighted in essentially worthshiping someone that's really not worth our time. I think very few of us can rationalize desire and can rationalize wanting someone who does not love or want you back. And I'll go more into this later. But a love that is unrequired, unrequired, it is very much tied to our brain chemistry. It's tied to reinforcement and behaviorist theories as well as attachment style as well, which I think is often must you know, really misunderstood, but does greatly contribute to this experience. And essentially, there are core aspects of the human psyche that inexplicably lend themselves to experiencing unrequired love, even it's from even if it's you know, from a distance, but you know, I think, as I'm sure we all know it's it is often experienced for those who we do have somewhat of an emotional or pre existing sexual or physical connection with. Secondly, from how this experience is portrayed as romantic as a powerful force, we can see that unrequited love is somewhat glorified by our society in a kind of an unnecessary way. And I definitely want to talk more about why I find this interpretation so incorrect later on, because I think although we romanticize the suffering and grief of longing of not being loved back, it is actually a really fucking terrible feeling. And can we even call that love? You know, feeling that is that painful in many ways, is it right to kind of combine that with something that is meant to be as beautiful as love? And I think the romanticization of unrequired love also relates greatly to our glorification of things that are beautiful, particularly art. And as that quote I cided before, kind of captured, we have this preconception or idea that pain lends itself so fully to creative expression and feeling human in a way that few other emotional experiences let us do. And much life, grief and death, the absence of love is such a moving experience that we must glorify it because of what it produces artistically and create lee. But the pain and discover and discomfort of you know, it's not something to be understated. From a psychological perspective, that feeling of hurt that is associated with something deeper than rejection. It does cause long term shifts in neural pathways, our schemes of the world, and how we learn to interpret people's actions as either threats or as encouragement. And before we dive into this, I do think we firstly need to talk about the origins of unrequired love. You know, I've mentioned that I do believe it's a universal experience, and it's often given this beautiful, honey gold tint to it, longing for someone who may have no interest in you, or or maybe someone else does seem really beautiful at face value. But then why do these feelings emerge if we know that they are a logical and contradict how we may see ourselves as self reliant and independent. You know, That's something I often find is I have these feelings of unrequited love for someone I think I really care about them. You know, you can become obsessed with them, But at the same time, there's this contradictory voice in my head saying, you know, you don't need them if they don't you know. The phrase that my friend Aaron always uses is like the egg doesn't chase the sperm, Like if they don't like you back, that does create kind of a cognitive dissonance, with this sense that you are this independent person who who will survive without them. Okay. I have a few theories around this, obviously, which is like I'm making this podcast, But firstly, unrequited love it serves a purpose as an emotional curtain or a distraction from the real issues that we may be experiencing, you know, external to these feelings of desire. It can act as a substitute and a substitute emotional trial almost for the real underlying issues that are afflicting our ego. And I can definitely relate to this. I remember even recently an episode of love that was unrequired that I've been through with some guy I've been talking to for months, and you know, yeah, I started developing feelings for him that the obviously weren't reciprocated, But there was some small part of my brain that was almost grateful I had this person to preoccupy my mind with, because it meant that I could have a mental reprieve from thinking about the bigger issues that were going on. You know, I really remember it was almost like a conscious sigh of relief, like thank God, you've come along and fucked with my feelings because now I can project all this other shit onto you, and you can kind of be like a little thought vacation from the reality and then the past that I have to heal from. So if your mind is preoccupied with thoughts of another person, admiration for them, and fantasies of you, know what it could be like if your feelings were reciprocated, as well as that emotional discomfort of the what ifs, That is like the ultimate distraction from other aspects of your life that may be causing insecurity or general unhappiness. You know, our brain and our mind is at all times looking towards self preservation, and investing your pain in someone else is an excellent distraction and allows your brain to move away from other persistent thought patterns, perhaps about past loves in my case that's what it was, or even aspects of your life that are entirely unrelated. You know, unrequited love for a short while does serve as a substitute or a distraction. Okay, but it's it's obviously I think, more than just a coping mechanism for or other aspects of your life that you might not be happy with. Another theory, which is a more learning based theory, suggests that these unreciprocated feelings and this pattern of sinking deep into emotions for someone who's obviously unavailable, comes from a pattern of past love, perhaps starting early in life, that has taught you to crave what is being withdrawn and held back and on the flip side, it makes you scared of love that is obvious and available. You don't simply fall for people because of an innate weakness or a personality characteristic, but because it is a pathological pattern of behavior that you've been taught, especially from formative experiences, maybe like a first love, or from observing others like your parents, all those around you. So this experience and seeing these things creates memory roots in your mind that are associated with a particular feeling or reaction in this scenario, a feeling that is akin to what we believe is love. So for example, you know, say the first person you ever loved or dated was really inconsistent with how they showed or affection, or they would say things that contradicted their actions, like saying that they loved you and then showing little physical intimacy or few acts that actually reflected that love. You know, they had it, they had the words for it, but they weren't able to kind of demonstrate that they did have these feelings, you know, but they call it love, and you assume that's love. So in the future, when you have feelings for someone who reacts in a similar way, that's love to you. You convince yourself of the possibility that, you know, what is one sided. Quite obviously, it may actually be more nuance like no wonder, you'll be attracted to people who are similarly withdrawn or in some cases just like blatantly uninterested. Because our brain is confused, It's programmed in some way to take ambiguous situations or situations even of ambivalence from another person. Reflect back on those early experiences of love and match these experiences. You see those similarities and result this kind of results in a cycle of feeling of emotion of care that is, you know, really unsatisfying and probably often one sided because well you know, obviously you continuously fixate on people who are not interested. Love that is available, on the other hand, may be scary because it doesn't match your pre existing and internal conception of what that feeling should look like. It kind of all comes down to what we expect love and relationships to appear like. And this also connects to attachment styles which I alluded to earlier, you know, getting stuck in the loop or repetition of consuming you know, crushes and unrequired love. This kind of signals towards a fearful avoid and attachment style, which is in contrast with something like secure attachment. So let's break down break this down a little bit because I know attachment style gets talked about quite a lot, but what do they actually mean? Okay, so these four attachment styles. So yeah, there are four attachment styles, one of which really relates to unrequited love, and then there's a kind of two that are in the middle, and then there's one that's you know, secure attachment, and that's kind of we'll start with that one. Secure attachment is like the gold standard. Like, if you want to pick an attachment style, you probably want to pick this one. You know, people with this attachment style they have basically they have the ability to form secure, loving relationships. You know who doesn't want that. They're not afraid of intimacy, and they're able to depend on others without becoming you know, totally dependent on that person. They're also better able to recognize when someone is not interested and remove themselves. So it's kind of in the name secure attachment style. These people they're secure and how love is shown and their interpretations of love, and they can reciprocate but also receive. So next we have anxious attachment. This is marked by like a deep fear of abandonment and clinging behavior. And then we have avoidant or dismissive, which I think is probably like the shittiest or the second shittiest form of attachment style someone can have. So essentially, what this attachment style means is you just have a fear of intimacy and you really just avoid getting close to anyone. People with this dismissive and ambivalent, avoidant, whatever you want to call an attachment style, they're more likely to have relationships whereby one party is just highly emotionally unavailable and they really prefer to be independent. Finally, we have fearful avoidant attachment style, and this is kind of a combination of anxious and avoidant attachment styles. So people with fearful avoidant they desperately crave affection, but they also want to avoid it at all costs. This is kind of why it's also known as disorganized attachment, and it is associated with significant psychological and unrelational risks, you know, including a greater greater likelihood of a repetition or pattern of unrequired obsessions and unrequired love. And this style it's developed in the formative years of a person's life, and it's highly dependent on the responses and the nature of their bond with their primary primary caregiver, so usually their mother or their father, and the kind of bonding one has with their primary caretaker in their formative years goes on to define their attachment style. So someone with fearful avoidant probably had a parent or maybe an early relationship in which love was shown inconsistently and perhaps combined with a viole or manipulation or emotional abuse. And it may also then the flip side of that may be that a lot of love bombing may have taken place in response. So the person where it's a first boyfriend or girlfriend or a parent, they withdraw a love, they combine love with manipulation, and then they also you know, overwhelm you with love when they feel guilty. So this person kind of learns to crave a love that is withheld, but it's also fearful of feelings that are obvious and apparent because they indicate, you know, something else coming along, and this kind of leads to this cycle of unrequired love. Okay, obviously this is not the only answer, you know. I've pointed out multiple times the University universality of this experience. So there is another element, and it's not just those with fearful avoidant who would find themselves in this situation, because this attachment style only makes up four percent of the population. And if the statement I'm making it and I'm pretty sure I would be right, like most people have experienced unrequited love. You know, if only four percent of the population is fearful avoidant, this assumption that it's just because of your attachment style is obviously incorrect. So another theory put forward is that unrequited love also has a lot to do with sunk costs and variable reward and you know, self delusion as well. So if you like someone and you've built this image of a future with them or a fantasy in which they play a role, you have invested in the notion that they are a good person and someone who is worth your time. We often will also make the mistake of viewing everything they do with rose tinted classes and giving their actions a lot more meaning than they probably deserve. So in this way, it's hard to break away from those feelings because of sunk costs. Essentially, we've already spent emotional capital on this person and time that cannot be recovered, and we have already metaphorically spent this emotional currency. We don't want that to go to waste, so we continue to pursue them, either in our minds or externally, because we want these sunk costs to have some output or a positive consequence for us. We don't want to lose that investment of time and energy and thought that we've placed in that person. Secondly, when we are experiencing love that is unrequired, we also have to consider variable rewards. So the use of variable rewards, it's more of like an economic term, but it's often used in marketing, But variable reward it's used in gambling all the time because it's a pattern of reinforcement that is just scientifically proven to be the easiest way to get someone hooked to an activity. So essentially, your behavior is rewarded on a schedule that is impossible to predict. So with gambling, you know, it's the best example because you just never know when you're going to get a jackpot or when you're going to get your money back. So in regards to relationships, for example, you know you text someone and sometimes they leave you on red for like days, and other times they're super in foods and they get back to you quickly, but it's impossible to tell when each response may occur. So think about it this in the case of unrequited love. You know, you have these feelings for a person, and occasionally that person may accidentally or maybe purposely reinforce them by hanging out with you, laughing with you, reaching out And every time we try and pull away and be reasonable or realistic about our feelings, this variable reward schedule kind of stinks us back into it. It's really difficult to escape. So we are really good at convincing ourselves of the things that we want to believe. So self delusion is, like I kind of said, there's also a huge part of unrequired love, you know, the fantasy that one day this person might change their mind, turn around, confess their feelings. It's really self soothing for a lot of those different reasons that I've mentioned, And often it is that person who is the most unavailable, which is why we become hooked, because it is their unwillingness to acknowledge you as a sexual or romantic partner that keeps you in a state of expectancy and longing, and this may especially be the case for those who are high achievers or those who have big ambitions. You know, we are so often told that if it was easy, everyone would have it, So you want the thing that is most unattainable, so you subconsciously go after the least available person because to win them would be just the biggest hit of self endorsement. So I think it really does go without saying. There is just a lot of insecurity and an unrequired love, And the thing that really does keep us hooked is the notion that one day things could change. What we ultimately are seeking is love and to be cared for and acknowledged and seen. And love is a social value, perhaps one of the most important. No other idea or feeling in history is as revered as love. But the way this concept, this larger than life emotion is displayed in our culture is really contradictory. And I think it's what contributes to this admiration of unrequired love, because there are these two distinct displays or depictions of love in our society that are so so very different, but they're equally admired, And I think this is what contributes to these confused feelings around reciprocation. So firstly, we see love as this stable, mutual, enduring force that it is comfortable and safe. This is often associated, you know, with long term relationships and ideas of marriage and long term couples. But on the other side of the coin, we are also taught to see love as this burning, electric desire, you know, characterized by butterflies and intensity and full of longing and hope and you know, just oh my god, it's someone's painful, like you just love them. It's nothing you can do to control it. And these two depictions they essentially make up our romance culture and it creates this like Madonnahore complex, but for love, whereby you have to have both. You have to be in pursuit of what is stable, but also constantly in a state of this all consuming electric feeling. And our idea of love as a society is so fucked in that way. You know, it creates such an internal confusion because if you think about someone that you're obsessed with this person, you know, you're assumed by them, and you're consumed by this electric feeling, and you know, all all this confusion and these butterflies and these uncertainty, and that's what you think love should be. And if only they could see this, or you could convince them, we could achieve that long term stability and comfortability that everyone wants, but that the initial feeling of obsession. Society teaches you that that's what love should look like, but I don't think it should. You know, unrequited love comes with a lot of resentment for that other person because they can never fulfill your fantasy because well, firstly, they haven't consented to it. They may not even know it exists, you know, they may not even be aware. But we still feel anger towards them. And can can that really be love? Can a feeling that includes so much resentment and anger and frustration? It does that mean that unrequited love is real love? And I had a huge, huge discussion with my house made around this, which I think revealed like a lot of revelations about how we think about ourselves in the process. But that's kind of beside the point. What we came the conclusion we came to is that there are two broad strokes and I'm talking very broad strokes interpretations of love. Firstly, there's the idea that love is a feeling and a distinct, universal experience. It's something beyond our control. And on the other hand, we also see love as a performance, something that you need to work on and towards. So therefore we do see unrequired love as Whether you see sorry, whether you see unrequired love as real love depends on whether you see love as a practice or as an emotion, Because if you see it as a practice, unrequited love can never be confused as true love because, for you, love naturally needs two players, and there needs to be some mutual foundation on which to build this temple of care and reciprocation and empathy and giving. However, if you see love as an emotion, as an all consuming feeling of passion that arises naturally from some deep place in our conscious and our soul, then we can say unrequired love is true love, and it may even be pure love because that feeling can exist in only one person and still be valid. It doesn't need to be reciprocated to still be felt. I'm really skeptical to call it love because I think calling it that really glorifies the experience, and we put other people on a pedestal, which is really problematic. We begin to confuse things and move away from what a healthy and stable relationship should be. Yes, you know, we can call it love if we want, but if it is unrequired of the real thing, no, it's not. Love can only be felt at its deepest and most profound level, I think when it is shared, and love is the process of gradually revealing yourself to someone. And although you know it can be all consuming as well, and it's definitely incredibly natural and an organic feeling, it also needs to be deliberate and must be mutual to be fully felt. But again, like kind of what I was talking with, there is no right or wrong answer. What we expect from love is based on what the relationships around us have taught us, like our parents, or our first relationship or our crush, and that really determines how we view love. Okay, that was a bit of a rant. I think maybe it's time to wrap things up. Yeah, just I hope you enjoyed that discussion. Like I said, I really got into it. I think just like having that time to sit down and reflect on so many past experiences that I had, it really made me realize their own kind of calmic cycle of my relationships. And you know feelings that I've had for others, and it was really therapeutic to actually read up about why this happens, to kind of give this highly irrational experience more of a logical tinge and more logical input and psychological input as well. And yeah, just breaking it down it was actually really helpful. So I hope that you found it helpful as well. If you are in a situation where you're experiencing love that is unrequired, you have all my well wishes, it's really shit. It's really crap, and it's really hard to break out of. So I hope, yeah, everything works out for you. I hope that you know, I'm not going to hope that they're the one, because they probably aren't, but I hope that you can kind of see the irrationality and it maybe this has helped you realize that and just move on. You know, it gets to a point where you kind of have to be realistic with yourself, like, is is this person ever going to reciprocate my feelings? Probably not, and it's time to kind of buckle up and move on to something else. I'll just move on to being alone because it's kind of better than than begging for attention or begging for feelings from someone who has no intention of giving them to you. You know, you have everything that you need in yourself, so yeah, you don't need a man or a woman just getting very like new age RANTI like independent woman vibe. But you know what I mean. You can do it all on your own. You don't need to beg someone for the time of day, or for a message back or for a reply. So I hope you guys are all doing well wherever you are in the world. If you're in Canberra, well we're getting through it. We want to have eight cases today, which is so exciting. I never thought i'd say that, but yeah, I hope you guys are all staying safe. Remember to subscribe if you're listening for the first time on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and follow us on Instagram. Like I staid, this idea of this one came from like an Instagram polo did, so if you want to kind of contribute, it's up to you to what episodes I get to look into. Yeah, definitely give us a follow and thanks again for listening in. Take care of yourselves and remember the egg doesn't chase the sperm. Bye.