I love him but he doesn't love me

Love is the answer to all questions? Not quite. It also makes quite a few. Psychologist and couple therapist Oskar Holzberg answers them all. This time he reveals what to do if one loves and the other doesn't.

Hope alone is not enough

For a change, distrust your feelings. That we fall in love with someone who doesn't reciprocate our love has probably happened to most of us before. However, there is an increase in this: if we actually find ourselves in a kind of relationship in which we are the only one who loves. While our lover only sees us as a sex partner, sympathizer or always available leisure partner and the relationship can never be more than a "friendship plus" for him. For a while we hope that the other's feelings will change. But if our hope is not fulfilled, we actually know that we should let go.

Only: we cannot. We cannot go because we have so many feelings for him. But is it really love alone that holds us? Or maybe we are just so terrified that we will draw a line because we fear the cruel pain of separation and the loneliness that could lie ahead?

You have to face the truth

Separations are the earthquake of our souls, and some prefer to bear the pain of unrequited feelings than the hell of lovelorn. Then we have to deal with our fear of loss. Often, however, not everything we call love deserves this name. We can have gotten into an old pattern and confuse love with longing. Was our childhood determined by the constant struggle for the affection of parents? Do we only know love as an unfulfilled desire? In such cases we should face the old pain instead of repeating it endlessly. Or it is our emotions themselves that mislead us. If we have fought for someone for years, we glorify this one-sided love relationship simply because we overestimate everything in which we have put a lot of energy. We subconsciously justify the effort that we have made. It seems wrong to us to leave the other person now – and then we would have to admit that we were wrong.

Oskar Holzberg, 66, has been advising couples in his Hamburg practice for more than 20 years and is always asked relationship questions. His current book is called: "New key phrases of love" (242 p., 20 euros, Dumont).

It is so important to us to be reliable for ourselves that we bend reality ourselves and stick to our decision once made, even though it proves painfully wrong. Researchers like psychologist Daniel Kahneman have shown that we tend to make wrong judgments and distort our perception. So we all have a tendency to avoid visible losses. And that's why we don't just hold stocks for too long that continue to lose value. We also maintain relationships where our love has no chance.

It may sound a bit irritating, but we also can't always trust what we call love. When I speak to people trapped in an unhappy, one-sided relationship, "love" is often the only argument they give why they stick to it. It helps to ask exactly what is actually experienced in the relationship that is loved so. And there is often no good answer to that.

Would you like to read more about the topic and exchange ideas with other women? Then take a look at the "Relationship in Everyday Life Forum" of the BRIGITTE community!

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BRIGITTE 03/2020