Love , Love Me Do

Since the past few weeks , I have been running into into questions from lovers, about unrequited love. The questions usually go like this.. “We were so much in love!When we were together, we were really happy..enjoying the bliss of pure love. and now he/she has left me, to be with someone else.I now feel worthless and incomplete without him/her. I am going into depression day by day..I just want my love back in my life. I keep thinking about him/her through out the day and my tears dry up only when I go to sleep..pls help.. I don’t wish to be so miserable.Pls take my pain away”


Across cultures, I have found, that there is a fascination for unrequited love, and even in a recent Hollywood flick, there was dialogue”Only unrequited love can be truly passionate”

I had also come across, some literature about recent studies being done on romantic love, by scientists, in labs across the world. So I thought, why not dig in deeper, and see if modern science sees eye to eye with spiritual truths.

The most recent studies have been conducted by Larry Young of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Dr Lucy Brown, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and Helen Fisher, a researcher and professor at Rutgers University.

They are all experts in a relatively new field focused on explaining the biology of romantic love. And the unpoetic explanation is that love mostly can be understood through brain images, hormones and genetics.

One of the research findings isn’t so complimentary: Love works chemically in the brain like a drug addiction. “Romantic love is an addiction; a wonderful addiction when it is going well, a horrible one when it is going poorly,” Fisher said. “People kill for love. They die for love.”

But sometimes love doesn’t keep us together. So the scientists studied the brains of the recently heartbroken and found additional activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is an area of the brain even more strongly associated with addiction.

“The brokenhearted show more evidence of what I’ll call craving,” said Lucy Brown. “Similar to craving the drug cocaine.”
So when the appropriate dose of Love potion is unavailable .lovers have withdrawal symptoms. This shows up as the desperation to be together, and possess the other person. This happens for people who are dating or are still in relationships. Their thoughts are obsessive and the actions are compulsive. "I have to have you. I can't live without you. I must control you and make you mine."

While people who have been left heartbroken feel worthlessness, miserable and an immense amount of pain.
So , what is the way out? What is the solution? The solution is to realize that everything in this world is temporary, including your short life ,your body and the presence of your lover in your life.

The solution is to be aware, and absorb as much as possible of this short life and the even shorter duration, your lover is going to part of your life. The solution is be intensely present with your partner today, knowing that they may not be there tomorrow because people change, situations change ,feelings change over time and that’s the truth. So love them completely while they are there and don’t try to possess them.

When our current partner goes away, a new one will arrive because that’s the flow of life.

It requires a high degree of acceptance and surrender to life. It’s life’s way of preparing you for your future , and your future lover.The irony is the new love may not be a person at all.It maybe a new passion, that you might discover, once your lover is no longer in your life.

So we have to make the most of today, and when tomorrow comes, we will be free from misery .We will be at peace :)
Perhaps nature has designed us in this manner, as Dr. Lucy Brown says
"Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a 'natural' addiction. Our findings suggest that the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology. A natural recovery, to pair up with someone else, is in our physiology, too."

And our job is to be just aware about it.