Withdrawal: A Love Story

Healing from unrequited love without losing yourself

Loving someone who doesn’t love you back is a bit like being hopelessly addicted to a drug that never quite delivers the high it promises. It teases you with the memory of pleasure, the illusion of connection, and the ghost of fulfillment, only to leave you more depleted each time you reach for it. You crave their presence like oxygen after a drowning, seize on the smallest flicker of attention as if it were a lifeline, and yet, paradoxically, every interaction seems to scrape away another layer of your dignity, leaving you hollowed out instead of filled up. It’s a tragicomedy of hope – that absurd, tenacious flame – flickering in the wind of reality. You try to shut it off, go cold turkey. You turn their name into a forbidden incantation, a silent void in your mental landscape. But oh, the withdrawal. The ache doesn’t roar; it sits, quiet, insidious, like a sullen houseguest who refuses to leave, lounging in the pit of your chest with the arrogance of permanence. You tell yourself it’s neurochemistry, you know, dopamine pathways crying out like abandoned satellites, but that knowledge does little to soften the sting when you catch their likeness in a stranger’s silhouette, or hear their voice echo unexpectedly through a song you once claimed as your own.

Detoxing from unrequited love is a paradoxical act of absolute self-care that feels, at first, like self-immolation. You must romanticise your own survival with the same fervour you once romanticised their potential. You hydrate because tears are dehydrating (… and oh, how many fall) and you coax your weary body into sleep not because it wants to rest, but because it needs refuge from your overactive, overanalytical mind. You write (… God, do you write) like a therapy patient moonlighting as a poet, each page a confessional offering to the gods of heartbreak, hoping that one day the pain will be worth the prose. And slowly, imperceptibly, the sharpness dulls. You begin to see that what you were mourning was never the person, but the illusion: a patchwork of potential and projection, stitched together with fantasy and embroidered with your unmet needs. Rejection, in that light, becomes a mirror, one that reflects not your inadequacy, but their inability. One day, you will cross paths again – in person or in memory – and feel nothing but the soft, bemused pity of someone who once believed in alchemy, now wise to the chemistry. Until then, let every pang remind you: this is not weakness. This is withdrawal. And it means the toxin is leaving your system.

“She Never Told Her Love” (1858) by Henry Peach Robinson - inspired by Shakespeare’s verse, this photograph captures a young woman consumed by silent longing, reflecting the inner turmoil of concealed emotions.

The first act of liberation is clarity: the quiet, revelatory recognition that what you felt was not love, but attachment dressed in the robes of devotion. Love, in its true form, is not unidirectional. It is not longing met with silence, nor presence answered with absence. Love is mutuality, the sacred meeting of two people in full awareness, full choice, and full care. What you are grieving is not them, but the imagined future you projected onto the blank screen of their indifference. As Haruki Murakami said with his usual succinct wisdom: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”. You may not have chosen to fall, but you can – with time and effort – choose to rise, not into bitterness, but into authorship. You get to decide whether your heartbreak becomes a tragic myth or a transformative narrative. The story is yours now. Rewrite it well!

So you begin the sacred work of recovery. With small, deliberate acts of defiance against your own compulsions, not with grand declarations. You build rituals like scaffolding for a new self: delete the messages that once felt like scripture, block the number that still whispers temptation, curate your inner world as though it were a museum. And you, its discerning curator, allow only what nourishes. No more playlists that wallow unless they rise to crescendo in defiance. No more digital archaeology, sifting through social media for a scrap of attention. If you must grieve, do so with elegance. Cry in cashmere. Light a candle, not in their name, but in honour of your own dignity. Give it a name. Watch it flicker and understand: the flame burns for you now.

Let rage arrive, if it must. Rage is clarity with velocity, not weakness. It is your nervous system screamingboundaries it once whispered. Rage reminds you that you are not a beggar at the altar of someone else’s indifference. You are not pitiful. You are powerful and awakening. Write it down, scream it into your pillow, shadowbox your old self – the one who mistook crumbs for a feast. Rage is the fire that burns illusions to ash. And in those ashes, softness will return, not as vulnerability to exploitation, but as a reclaimed intimacy with yourself.

Eventually… though not linearly, and not without relapse, a new story takes root. You are no longer the rejected. You are the escaped. The survivor. The sovereign. The rebuilder of your own inner architecture. You understand now that the point was never whether they chose you. The miracle is that you chose yourself in the absence of being chosen. Oscar Wilde, ever the master of wit and truth, once declared, “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance”. Let that be the grand love affair of your life: a devotion born of reverence, not of need or scarcity. Let it be obsessive, tender, unshakable.

And then, almost imperceptibly at first, healing starts to show its face in mundane places. You stop flinching at their name. You stop assigning moral value to memory. Your self-worth no longer haggles with your history. You walk past the café where you once imagined spotting them across the room, and all you feel is the breeze… the pleasant hum of freedom in a city that now belongs to you alone. If you speak of them at all, it is in the tone one uses for a distant country visited once – beautiful in parts, bewildering in others, but ultimately irrelevant to your current map.

And when love finds you again, as it inevitably will, though in a shape you could not have designed, you will meet it as someone whole, not as a hollowed-out version of yourself. You will know, this time, that real love does not hurt more than it heals. That real love does not make you question your worth. Real love reflects it back to you. And should you encounter another who tempts you to shrink for a sliver of affection, you’ll smile like someone who knows better, politely decline the invitation to self-erasure, and walk away, radiant, immune, reborn.

Because in the end, getting over unrequited love is not simply about letting go of another person. It is staging a defiance act against every part of yourself that once accepted less than you deserved. It is reclamation – of dignity, of power, of authorship. You emerge as the awakened, not as the abandoned. And the story you write from here, no longer about them, is the masterpiece you were always meant to compose.

With the clarity of one who knows what love is – and what it is not, in gratitude for the lessons disguised as losses,

T.

“Narcissus” (c. 1597-1599) by Caravaggio who illustrates him entranced by his reflection, symbolising self-obsession and the isolation that can stem from unrequited affection.