When You Are in Unrequited Love

Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone, and the usual couples photos and videos flooded Instagram feeds and infiltrated TikTok algorithms. We were treated to the usual song and dance — couples being excited to show off their partners. This is the version of Valentine’s Day that we all see every year.

But there is another side we don’t see — the people who are in unrequited love with their situationship. The people who cannot be with the one they love on Valentine’s Day. These hopeless romantics spend the day just hoping their special someone will buy them flowers or take them to a nice dinner. Nobody ever posts on social media about their situationships, even if they are head over heels. So, sometimes it seems as though there is nobody left on the planet who is still struggling romantically. Unfortunately, however, there seems to be an overabundance of them.

Self-Inflicted Pain

Situationships are not something people readily discuss in everyday conversation. They force us to confront the parts of ourselves that we don’t like. You go over every interaction in your mind, wondering what the problem is, wondering how you can just be better.

It makes us vulnerable in a way we never experience before young adulthood. When we share everything with another person and they take it for granted, as situationships often do, we’re left feeling empty, with a profound sense of loneliness.

So why do we do it? Why do we subject ourselves to people who don’t love us for who we are?

The Science Behind Situationships

It turns out that this behavior is extremely common in those with disorganized or anxious attachments styles. People with this type of attachment to romantic relationships experience significant fear of abandonment. They may need more validation and reassurance than someone with a secure attachment style, and they are certainly more vulnerable to taking part in an unequal romantic partnership.

Once an anxious personality falls in love with an avoidant one, it’s all over. Without commitment, the relationship will inevitably sour. The anxious personality will instinctually snap into people-pleasing mode, unintentionally pushing the avoidant further away.

The avoidant will make promises, but then ultimately break them in the end. They both receive a kind of gratification from this interaction because it is in line with their respective self-fulfilling prophecies. A self-fulfilling prophecy is a psychological concept — a prediction that becomes true only because of a person’s belief that it will happen.

Having that mindset can affect your actions and feelings without even realizing it. Both parties expect to be rejected, usually based on past negative experiences, so they put on defense mechanisms. Little do they know that their defenses are slowly destroying them.

Self-Love

Every person on earth right now is on a lifelong journey searching for the one thing they need — acceptance. It’s human nature to want to be accepted, although we all go about it in different ways. Situationships are an extension of that rule. After all, if you can convince that one special person to love you, then it will make all the other pain go away… right?

Valentine’s Day does not only belong to couples. It belongs to the girls on the search for their prince charming, to the boys who act tough but still only want affection. It belongs to all the dreamers and hopeless romantics who have ever taken a chance on love.

“We accept the love we think we deserve” (Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 1999).

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