Introduction

I wrote this article early on in my career for a magazine called Recoverying. Hopefully, it still offers some helpful information about a self-defeating form of behavior.

Unrequited Love

“Does the imagination dwell the most upon a woman won or a woman lost?” William Butler Yeats in The Tower

Many people find they have a history of falling in love with an unavailable person and they wonder why this keeps happening to them over and over again. The following is a list of the most common reasons they keep falling into this trap.

Reminders of our first love: We are always attracted to people who remind us of our first love. If a person's first love was an absent or emotionally unavailable parent, then he or she is only attracted to unavailable people, and this is the only kind of person they pursue. They do this out of habit, despite the pain it will cause them later on.

Looking for the happy ending: Many people are not only attracted to unavailable people, they choose them as partners in order to recreate the past and change the ending. They often become obsessed trying to gain, through their current partner, the love they never got as a child. They do this unconsciously over and over again. It is a form of insanity. It is their inner child forcing his or her will on them despite the painful consequences.

Unrequited Love: Some people can only fall in love with the person of their dreams. Since no such person really exists, they project their fantasies onto someone and then see in that person only what they want to see. These completely unavailable people are a good target for this kind of projection because the love addict never really gets to know them. They are always who the love addict wants them to be. People who are also addicted to fantasizing, are drawn to the phenomenon of unrequited love.

Excitement: Chasing after someone who is unavailable can be exciting. It can really get the adrenalin going, not to mention the libido. Romance addicts often go after unavailable people because they are addicted to the chase.

Unconscious Fear of Intimacy: While many people consciously obsess about love, they often have an underlying fear of intimacy. Choosing to fall in love with someone who is unavailable (to one degree or another) is one way to avoid facing this fear.
 

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