About One Sided Love
When you’re in love with someone who reciprocates it, your insides are in a constant state of combustion — your heart stops working in tandem with your brain, and your brain just stops working at all. At the very heart of it, love feels like everything you’ve ever done in life has been worth it. You feel like you’re worth it, because somebody else sees you that way. Love is the most beautiful thing that can happen to a person, up until it stops.
Breaking up is one of the hardest things you’ll do, specially if it’s an amicable one. Because then, you don’t really hate the person you were with, you just hate that the situation or the timing wasn’t right. The process of moving on is much worse, because how can you forget so simply?
But what really got you out of the rut is time. Time adds distance to heartbreak, and when you look at pain from a distance, it just stops affecting you in the way it used to. It takes a while and everyone returns to normal at their own pace. That’s just how love is, if you choose to fall into it. But there’s something you can do to yourself that’s much worse than a break up. This phenomena is called the dreaded One Side Love.
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I want you to log on to Facebook right now and look up this glorious page called One Side Lover. It’s a page run by a few men from Chennai, and it is populated with posts featuring a very sad Dhanush lamenting the fact that the girl he loves doesn’t love him back. Or the girl he loves doesn’t know he exists. Or that the most beautiful feeling in the world is to follow your crush around without her knowing. So it’s like stalking, but with good intentions.
The overarching theme of this page, however, is celebrating one side lovers. It is celebrating people who are either too shy to admit their feelings towards someone they like or people who still continue to like someone even after they have been rejected by them.
I joined the page a few months ago as a joke, but when things that were happening on the page began to happen in parallel with my own life, that’s when I realised that whoa, we have a problem here. Yup, I fell in one side love too. Or at least one side like. And it isn’t pretty.
My one side love (I’m just going to call it that now, because it sound better) was the hey i like you-i like you too-now i don’t think i can like you because reasons-oh i guess i shouldn’t like you too then-but i still wanna see you sometimes-oh cool we can do that but what do i do with these feelings-i don’t know but i can’t like you-okay well umm okay i guess we can do this-no we can’t-oh so what do we do-let’s just hang out and yeah i think i like you-what-no i’m sorry i can’t like you-what are you doing to me-no really let’s just be friends-okay…-but also i like you-wow what is going on here-no but also i can’t like you…
You get the gist.
As much as you’d like to romanticise the idea of one sided love, of pining away for your beloved in the hope that some day senpai would notice you, there isn’t anything more painful as waiting for that imaginary day that just might never come. And yet, you end up putting yourself through this pattern of disappointments because you feel that maybe, just maybe the person you like might start to like you back enough to turn this one sided love into a two sided affair.
But no, that usually never happens.
And the logical thing to do is to just get yourself out of this endless cycle of hurt that really isn’t taking you anywhere except a one way ticket to Disappointment Land. But the heart is a fragile, stupid thing. I was swept away in the ocean of feels, with my one side lovee(?) as a lifesaver, who never really saved me. So I could either swim or sink. And well, I sunk.
A breakup, as hard as it is, is actually more preferable than one side love. Because, with a breakup, everything is a finality. The relationship was legitimate, so to end it felt like a tangible thing was escaping you. What of one side loving then? It feels real, but there’s no name to this feeling. It’s not a relationship, but apart from the name, what you do share with your one side lovee certainly feels like one. So, to let go of something that, on paper, never really happened, feels like a rather painful task.
Even at the end, there is no real closure… because nothing officially opened to close. So the pain is real, but the reason for it, isn’t. It feels like a break up, but a break up of what, exactly?
After this last, well heartbreak, really, I thought to myself, is any of this worth it? Is there any glory in celebrating being a one side lover? Am I a bigger person for having to hold on to feelings for someone who might not feel the same for me? Of course the answer is no. One side love makes for a very entertaining Facebook page, but as a philosophy of life and living and loving and relationships, I now denounce it. I’d much rather listen to my sad music and cry for hours rather than wonder if my love was ever sufficient enough for my one side lovee.
No one really knows how a relationship will turn out when they’re getting into it. But if you’re seeing signs of it turning into a one side love, leave. Close that chapter, forget that book ever existed.
If it isn’t easy, it isn’t love. If it’s causing you to constantly question if you could do something different to make someone like you back, it’s one sided love and you better shut that shit down and run away from it as fast as you can.
