How to Get over an unrequited love

Is your love unrequited? Follow these steps to get over it and move on. It can be very difficult, but you can do it.

Things You'll Need

• An Open Mind

Instructions

1. If your love is not reciprocated, or returned you may feel depressed. You may spend way too much time thinking about it and that can disturb your focus on daily activities and responsibility's. The first thing you need is an open mind. Be willing to be honest with yourself.

2. Write down the reasons you believe the love is not reciprocated. If "I haven't had a chance to show her / him the real me" is on your list scratch it off. Don't kid yourself you are here to get over this love not plan it out in your future.

3. Realize the person you love is probably better off without you. If they needed or wanted you they would probably have some desire to be with you and that desire would have already shown you enough reciprocation to stop you from trying to get over the love.

4. Don't be selfish. If being with this person would make you happy, but make them unhappy, you should prefer them to be with someone else. Love is about wanting what's best for the person you love, not what's best for you.

5. Don't try to contact the person you love if you already know its not a shared love. This could cause them anger or even guilt for knowing that you are in emotional pain because of them. Love can not be controlled and they can't force themselves to love you. You can't force anyone to love you either.

6. If you refuse to be with anyone else, then be alone. It's not so bad, contrary to what the movies and magazines will say. After a while you learn to deal with loneliness. What you might feel now is an empty depressing void burning in your chest craving to loved, can actually be a comfortable darkened crutch supplying your soul with endless amounts of self pity allowing you to shift the blame to a cruel "fate" rather than your own shortcomings.

7. Don't tell others how you feel unless you are ready for them to make fun of you and call you a baby. Sometimes you can take pride in the fact that you are able to hold tremendous amounts of misery within you and it not show on the outside.

8. Don't watch sappy love movies or pay any attention to the "happy" people at the mall. Life is no fairy-tale. You may never be in love with anyone else, or even ever be happy, but you can at least spare the person you love the awkwardness of knowing you are still in love with them.

9. NEW UPDATE* Shave the ramen noodle soup encrusted beard you've unknowingly grown, put on your least putrid smelling sweat pants and leave your house for the first time in months to find a local book store. Don't worry about that burning sensation in your corneas, it will take time to adjust to actual sunlight from that dim blue light emitted by your Nintendo 64 glaring off your high school yearbook.

10. Good you have made it to the book store. Now find the science isle, and grab any book. Read. Return and repeat process. Eventually you will learn, through logical reasoning that "unrequited love" is actually nothing more than chemicals in your brain behaving poorly and failing to function correctly. Did you really think you loved her? Real love is built, not fallen into. It takes months or years to build love between people, you cant just claim to be in love with every waitress who serves you at the diner or passer-by who offers more than a couple trivial congenial words of greeting.

11. Move on with your life. You have now read some science, and hopefully put the sappy movies away like I said. Use the logical reasoning skills you now know and realize that the only thing you had to look forward to, a chance meeting or phone call from the one you "loved", is pointless. Although you have probably invested years into your delusional fantasy world with predetermined "soul-mates", and the emotional scarring you have inflicted upon yourself will likely never heal completely, maybe things will be okay.

Tips & Warnings

• If you can't get over an unreturned love, you can at least cope with it.

• Don't aggravate the person you love by always asking them to reconsider. If they haven't loved you or even ever liked you, they probably never will. You may just be an unlovable person, or very low on the demand side of the charts. Or maybe there is someone else out there... you never know!

• Just so everyone knows this article was written as satire, a joke, I get a lot of emails thinking that it was real and complaining that I am a jerk, so I edited the article to tone it down a bit.

• Also thanks to the commenter who said it reminds them of The Wedding Singer, that is what I was aiming for!