Because doing so is impossible.
Even though I don’t want kids, if I were to ever have a daughter, heartbreak is something I’d want to spare her. Not necessarily the kind of heartbreak that comes at the end of intimate relationships; because indeed, there are many kinds of heartbreak…
How about our feelings for someone (anyone) that have nowhere to go? Can we acknowledge just how terrifying it is to feel big feelings for someone relatively new? Those feelings can make you question your entire existence — and if we’ve had lots of experiences of being rejected, belittled, criticized, patronized, mocked, shamed, and bullied, our big feelings towards someone might even lead us to question our worth. After all, time and time again, you’ve only been taught that no one really sees anything in you, so when you see something in someone, an internal panic arises that pushes you to block out that person in your mind and in your life because every hint of them is a reminder of how worthless and unlovable you are (and how impossible and futile your desires are). And to think yourself as being unlovable is equivalent to getting stabbed in the heart.
This is exactly what I don’t want for all the yet-to-be-born daughter souls: to have to go through countless cycles of lovelessness from birth until adulthood on a repeated basis; to have to watch as other girls get smiled at, have one romantic relationship after another, while you find reasons to stay purposeful and find some meaning in the chaos that is your home. Essentially, I wish I could spare all girls from unrequited love, and god forbid do I want all those unborn-daughter-souls to blame their lovelessness on their physical appearance, as my mind does naturally.
All in all, it’s an odd feeling of having nothing and being all alone. The phrase ‘you get the love you give’ doesn’t apply to you, because you were never given a chance at romantic love in the first place, and sadly, you can’t help but to strongly believe that it’s because of something abominable about you…Hand out all the warmth and affection you have to those around you, but the fundamental belief that no one could really love you will still tear you apart, because you really believe it to be true. And it’s not like the people you keep having big feelings for ever disprove your belief: in the end, you were always right in the first place.
So how do we get over unrequited love? I’m afraid there’s no single, easy answer. All we can do is wait: because as much as self-love is important, at the beginning, all of us social creatures learned to see ourselves in the eyes of another person (and we can’t force ourselves to just have feelings for anybody).
