A 21-Year-Old’s Guide To Unrequited Love

A 21-year-old girl’s life involves a lot of dating and thus, a lot of guys. Once you have experienced this phenomenon called “unrequited love”, your life changes. There is a constant hopefulness with no basis at all that maybe, just maybe, sometime in the future, when the time is right, things will fall into place for the two of you. Which in turn leads to a change in your thinking, your whole mental and emotional process regarding a potential love interest. It is just not the same anymore. How do you get over “the unattainable one”? So many questions and no answers.

Love in our times is so fast paced. Every relationship is. The pace is actually terrifying. In my head, it’s a combination of a feeling of care, undeniable lust and a mutual mental connection, not necessarily happening in the same order. And in my case, it involves an immature teenage fantasy as well. Big laughs, eh? Anyway, when all of these combine, it’s a messy affair. But what do you do when you’re in a situation where your heart belongs to an unattainable one. The “unattainable one” isn’t fulfilling any of your needs and you need for those needs to be fulfilled. The talking and caring goes out to good friends, the interesting new conversations to random strangers and the lust to other strangers. Your life is sort of in pieces. Different pieces deriving nourishment from different sources.

Faint feelings of happiness, sometimes real, sometimes more like an illusion, occur to you and you think yes, finally I didn’t think about him today. But that thought itself, is about him. Every guy you meet, you somehow, in some way, consciously or subconsciously, compare him to “the unattainable one”. After all, HE is the unattainable one, the idolized one.

It’s not a secret that we girls are a sucker for an exciting new love interest. So someday you meet somebody new. Let’s call him “the good enough guy”. You go through all your usual emotional stages in probably a less intense way than usual, and more consciously. Maybe it’s the consciousness that affects the intensity. But you dive in. Hoping that maybe he will be your savior and the “attainable one”.

It is all a charade. A continuous, tiring charade. Right guy plus wrong timing equals a lesson. Wrong guy, no matter what the timing, also equals a lesson. You learn these lessons, you move on forward but with a little part of your heart still clinging to the past, to that hopefulness with no basis. Your heart is free. Mostly. Maybe you go back, one time or multiple times, it may work out, it may not. But if it doesn’t, you have your lessons and your excitement. The rest? Even I’m not sure about that. I’m still in the phase with the little part of heart clinging to the hopefulness with no basis. But I’ll figure it out. And so will you.