Have you faced "unrequited"(one sided) love?

Paulo Coelho writes "a perfect heart is not one that lacks a mess of scars and tears". In fact, a perfect heart has holes with love we’ve given away, it has mismatched pieces of other people who gave us a broken piece of their heart, only to fill those very holes left by others. For others love is God and the world they see around them. It’s the peace they find when they cry in prayer and have a hope of light that hugs all around them. Some fall in love with the sunsets and sunrises, they are in love with the sound of rain and the cold kiss of snow. Some people fall in love with the perfume of grass after a storm or scents from around the globe. People fall in love with the tastes of certain foods as they hum in delight and try to savor every bite.

Other people fall in love with the transcending levels of music, how a note of a piano could vibrate in your heart and set off ripples to far away memories. We fall in love with the smell of printed book pages, with the new world we get to step into when we play a video game. We fall in love with other people. Beautiful souls that fill our life with episodes of love. With some we share only a few months, with others we share our whole lives. Love teaches us sacrifice, how to give something so precious as our time or efforts, our care and compassion to someone else.

Love gives us a perfect heart, a heart that’s selfless, generous, compassionate, perfect in its imperfection. Love has no bounds because love is not related or restricted to any particular thing or person. Love fills the world you breathe in. It is everywhere and anywhere. The only thing that distinguishes it, is we all fall in love with different things and have our own unique way of loving, which is probably why…Love is the kind of term people still struggle to define. And yes, it has no bounds for life is an abundance of love.

Most people end up not finding real love. They fall prey to the love or should I call it ‘craze’ for the path they walk upon that leads to their perfect match. People end up loving the journey of hopping from one lover to another. And trust me, it might never feel like it, but that’s what the truth is. It becomes a game, and you get addicted to it. Your previous partner, ‘X’, always seems better than the present ‘Y’, and then to find better, you latch on to ‘Z’, but alas! Now you miss ‘Y’ and feel like you made a mistake. The worst part of it all, you thought you were in love with them. But were you really in love? Was it really love? Is love that disposable.

The bitter truth is, you end up making life a quest for love, when love should never be searched for. You won’t have to go search for it with a torch-light in the dark. It’ll come to you, at the right time. And I'm not an anti-lover kind of person. I'm just the one who believes in the bigger picture and thinks that there are bigger things than that cliched love. The kind of love I believe in isn't imaginary, and it's right in front of your eyes. I believe in the love of parents for their beloved children; the love between siblings; the pure love for rain drops, that you always end up drenched in the rainfall and you don’t regret it, even if you catch cold; the love that you love to shower on your pet, you’re always dying to see him and constantly worried about him while you’re out. I believe in this kind of love.

I believe in living and loving the moment. But the unfortunate part is that in the quest of pursuing the eternal love, we sideline the real one. We always overlook it over the virtual one. So yeah I think love is foolish! If you compile seven toughest things to do in a human life, ‘getting over your unrequited love’ shall be on top of everything. Sometimes Death feels better! Trust me, unrequited love is a heart-break in true sense; you can physically feel your heart aching inside your ribs. I have cried in uncontrollable sobs, and gotten up with swollen eyes and smudged cheeks. Unrequited love leaves you with immense number of questions that you can nowhere find the answers of.

The reason why unrequited love is so difficult to go through is that you don’t find any reason for not loving that person. You become a prisoner. If I stop talking to her, I miss her and so I call her. I call her and I tell her that I miss her. And then I get hurt because she doesn’t feel the same about me. So I decide to stop talking to her. If I stop talking to her, I miss her and so I call her. The cycle continues. . . It’s hard. It’s so hard and whoever said I am not trying is a liar. Whoever said it’s easy is a liar. I have become better in coping with that. But I am still in the process. Unrequited love is one of the most unique feelings in the world. It is so different!

I was sitting in one of my meetings when I heard the sweet 'tap tap tap' sound of heels on the marble floor. The wooden door opened and in walked the devil. It wasn’t until she sat down on the table and said ‘Shall We Start’ did we all realized (20 of us) that the entire room had fallen silent when she had walked in. To say she was out of my league was an understatement. Over time as I worked on the project, i got to know her better. She was probably everything I ever wanted in a girl. Smart, beautiful, intelligent and a smile of a lioness (I gave her that moniker). She knew she was that powerful.

Overtime we got close especially as she used to laugh at all of my jokes and one day I just casually asked her out for coffee. I knew I was not her type at all. So all I wanted was just have that validation of taking a girl like that out. One more friend, so to speak. Surprisingly she agreed. We met at my favorite coffee house and despite being a quick meeting, it ended up being a 3 hour date. It was like I had found my twin flame, my soulmate or even my other half. From liking the same food to discussing the same topics, same music, same thoughts to the point of erotic-sexuality, it was like we were talking as one person.

This was hopeful and I thought, okay this could be a good friendship, maybe even love. I asked her out again and again and again and every time she accepted and each time we shared and shared and shared. We started doing everything that couples do. Dinners at the fanciest restaurants, got her gifts (and let’s just say half her wardrobe now has brands like Fendi, Armani & Gucci), we even decided to create a single music playlist because she genuinely loved everything i listened to and i everything she listened to and we both agreed that was more efficient. She would constantly tell me “You’re my Home” and I would believe her. From books and literature to even the movies, we were twin flames. She would always tell me “your’e the closest I’ve even been to with anyone in my life” (this probably should have been taken as a warning btw) and the day she said “I have no qualms in admitting it… I love you”… I think I was over the moon and stammering back I told her I felt the same way (this was probably just the only validation she wanted…. should have kept my mouth shut).

To cut the long story short in the unrequited love…. she was broken. Her last three serious relationships especially a 9 year long one had all ended badly including one in abuse. When I met her, she would go through men like a hot knife would go through butter. We were together for 6 months and I counted at least 20 guys she saw in the same period, some were sexual one night stands (we never were “passionate”… which probably made me madder still i think, because wasn’t I the sap she claimed to loved… ). .. and despite the beauty goddess with the most perfect facade, her home life too was a mess - alcoholic dad for a start.

I thought I could make her happy. I wanted to be her savior. Thanks to my connections, I got her a better job than she ever could have on her own. I blew money on making her more powerful than ever and the high i would get when I would take her out to my social events. I could see the looks of lust, jealousy and envy on the faces of those around me. Despite all of this. Despite the fact she could be herself with me (and said so openly). There could be no commitment and she was straight about that. She was even straight about the passion “I could never do that to you, what i do to them”. She setup these boundaries… and I had to accept them... I guess I realized that whilst she completed me in every which way a person could, i could only complete her as an ‘Intimate Friend’.

I respected her decisions but I hated them but God I truly loved her. I never knew I could write poetry until I felt those pangs of anger coming out with every word I wrote. I never knew I could be jealous until I saw what I was thinking and writing down. Just the thought of her being with someone else was enough to destroy my day and just her being with me for coffee in the morning was enough to create a high that even made my work prosper (the first month after she said I loved you, I ended up winning many new projects I was so high).

But I had to let her go. I couldn’t be with a friend. The jealousy alone was killing me. It’s not that i didn’t try. I lost weight and got ripped. I made her choose my wardrobe, so i could dress the way she liked me. I went out of my way to spend time, money and energy on her. When she broke up with her latest boyfriend I was there to comfort her. I wanted her to see I could be enough, that I could be everything she wanted…. but she loved me but she didn’t want to belong to anyone. She wanted everything I could give her but… she didn’t want me. … “I will never leave” you she would say, but she never acted on that…. and I wanted more.. I wanted US and there would never be an US.

In the end, I crushed the one thing which connected me to her ‘hope’. I crushed and accepted that some people cannot be pinned down no matter how perfect you’re together, you might both want something else. Over time I slowed down the messages and the dates and the 10,000 ways I told her I loved her to a few hundred. I became the friend she wanted me to be and nothing more. She always said she wanted a tattoo of a butterfly on her back.

To this day, I keep putting up a sticker or something on my car or my laptop or something that symbolically reminds me of her. I have never given up on her though and honestly, if truth be told, i’ll take her back in a heartbeat. Someday I intend to write a book about my story “The Devil & The Trance" and they are both her. The devil who could burn you to hell and the trance who could make you feel the sweetest pleasures and the heights of heaven. Love made me believe that my lover is God himself, I got back to my senses when my lover said, God does not belong to any one person. Right? Cheers!