Unrequited Feelings – How to deal with them!
There’s a quiet ache that doesn’t make noise, sometimes it may take over like a storm but sometimes it just burns as soft embers. It is not the heartbreak that screams, rather it is the steady gnawing knowledge that what you feel will not be returned in the same way.
Unrequited feelings are among life’s most humbling teachers. They show you that love, in its purest form, cannot be demanded — only experienced. You can’t control who you love, but you can learn how to act on those feelings of love. Emotions rise on their own, but what you do with them — that part is yours.
You can choose to act out of impulse or with awareness. And awareness is where healing begins! Love that isn’t returned doesn’t make you foolish. It just makes you human.
As Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says, “In true love, there is no room for heartbreak — heartbreak is just broken expectations.”
The pain isn’t born of love itself; it’s born of wanting something back. At some point, you have to make friends with those unrequited feelings. Let them sit beside you, quietly, like an old companion. Stop fighting them — they’re only trying to show you how deep your heart can go.
As I wrote once in Baazgasht:
“I made friends with my unrequited feelings for N. He remained a part of me, but I no longer looked to him for anything. This wasn’t a grand healing. It was simple. I had just… let go of him.”
Freedom doesn’t mean forgetting. It means releasing the expectations that kept you bound.
“Bas ussey jo ummeedein galti se kar baithe the,
Un ummeedon se ab hum aazaad ho gaye.”
- Aazaad hog aye, Baazgasht
Freedom came not from erasing memories, but from dropping the need for them to mean something more. While love stayed, attachment dissolved… And that changed everything!
Meditation helps you see this — not as an escape, but as a mirror.
When you sit in silence long enough, longing transforms into grace. You begin to see that love was never really “for” someone else. It was always a movement of your own heart.
Therapy helps too — to name what you feel, to stop fighting it, and to see it clearly and there-after process it. Because clarity doesn’t erase love; it refines it.
Sometimes, love unreturned still fulfills a purpose. It softens you… teaches you gentleness…
It reminds you that your heart can expand without needing to possess.
Unrequited love doesn’t always need to be healed. Sometimes, it just needs to be seen, to be honored, and placed back gently where it belongs: in your own heart.
Because love, when freed from expectation, becomes devotion.
And devotion always leads you home.
— Dr. Krish
Orthodontist | Mindfulness coach | Author
30th October 2025, 03:05 PM
