The most common advice on how to get over unrequited love is to simply take your mind off things. Distract yourself, the narrative goes, and over time your brain will forget this person. Passively waiting for time to do its job, however, may not be the most effective way to solve your predicament.
After all, if you can do it faster — why not?
Here are two simple principles to help you get over the person you like and continue on with your normal life:
Rewire your brain
The parts of your brain responsible for emotional things are distinct from the parts of your brain responsible for logical reasoning. When in love, the emotional parts override the rational parts much more clearly than usual, disabling you from functioning as effectively as you normally would.
Rewiring your brain to go back to its rational state is like practicing a muscle. When you are in love, your brain is commonly occupied with sentimental things. You consume sentimental poetry, love songs, romance fiction, and so on.
Doing the activities listed above trains your brain to strengthen the pathway required for those sentiments you want to get rid of. While it is cathartic to indulge in our emotions, the fact that you are reading this article means you are tired of feeling this way.
Noting the fact that you are reinforcing unwanted neural pathways so far, we can therefore conclude that you can also train your brain otherwise.
Rewiring your brain to go back to its rational state is like practicing a muscle.
Training your logical muscles involves distancing yourself from media and art that causes your sentimental muscles to strengthen, and instead consume media that strengthens your logical muscles — for lack of better word.
Reading scientific literature like Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth helps you not only to distract yourself, but also to rewire your brain to think logically and scientifically. Moreover, books like these help you appreciate the beauty in non-human things.
Perhaps we can redirect our love for a person to our love for the universe.
Devour them
In the anime Attack on Titan, people who possess Titan powers get to ‘steal’ the powers of another Titan when they devour them. In real life though, while it is not possible to literally eat someone (unless you’re into that) I did certainly found it useful to also absorb someone’s powers.
When you like someone, you like them because of certain qualities they have. For instance, they might be extremely talented at music, funny, kind, and so forth. Yet, some people might argue that if you have a reason to love someone, you don’t really love them.
Nonetheless, my point simply is that regardless of whether or not you will stop liking them once they stop having those qualities, the reason why you are attracted to the person in the first place must be because of some virtue or talent they inhabit.
If you surpass this person in what they were admired for, your admiration of them will be put in perspective. We all have an ego, and doing this satiates it.
The French philosopher La Rochefoucauld noted that when in love we are doing it more for the benefit of ourselves rather than the object of our love. He doesn’t try to moralize it — the fact that this is the case is neither good nor bad.
If you surpass this person in what they were admired for, your admiration of them will be put in perspective.
Establishing that, once you acquire your loved one’s Titan powers, you’d realize that the love that used to be directed to a person who pays us no attention would be directed in self-love — not in the narcissistic sense, but in the healthy confidence-improving sense.
We can redirect our love for a person to our love of self-improvement.
Conclusion
To get over unrequited love, do not just simply distract yourself by self-destructive habits. Instead, try the following:
- Rewire your brain from sentimental thinking to logical thinking by seeking out media that causes that to happen.
- Focus on improving yourself to the point that you will beat them at what they are best at.
Either that, or improve a skill you personally value regardless of whether it is related to their skills.
Previously Published on Medium
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