Unfulfilled love

5 min reading time | published on: 21.08.2024

“The entire superficial life of a human being consists in pursuing some superficial desire, becoming frustrated by their non-fulfillment, becoming disappointed, only to try again – with another branch of the infinitely branching tree of desire.”*

What is the significance of unfulfilled desires in the search for happiness and love? Our search almost always arises from a perception of lack, from despair about what we do not have or have not received. Many people, especially women, pursue the conviction that they have not been loved enough and set out in search of love. The desire for love therefore arises from a state of unfulfilment and is thus linked to an ideal image: a beautiful dream of love and how we imagine it to be. How do I wish for love? What image do I have of myself as a lovable person? How do I want others to love and see me? Even as a child, these wishes flutter like colorful, beautiful butterflies into our imagination and fantasy worlds and create longing, sadness, hope…

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Lack of love?

The ideals that we associate with love create emotionalization and intense emotional states. Dramas in partnerships and relationships, heartbreak, the pain of abandonment, as well as euphoria, attraction, obsession. The stronger the emotion, the greater the love – that’s how we’ve learned it. This deception about love inevitably leads to disappointment. Where has love gone when the emotion ends? Has it really gone or have we left it? Is our search for love really about LOVE or actually and at its core about our expectations of love? The unfulfilled wish, as harmless as this term sounds, is quite something when we look at it more closely. We have to change our perspective to understand more deeply what mental attitude lies behind the idea of unfulfillment. Until now, we believed that our lack of love, our inferiority and the inner emptiness that we feel were caused by someone. Regardless of whether it is the mother, the father, the partner, the boss, the women/men – we feel like victims of people who withhold love from us. And while we feel lonely, unloved and dissatisfied with life and ourselves, we do not recognize WHO is withholding love from us.

The passion of envy

Envy is one of the nine characteristics that the spiritual Enneagram describes as a force that creates suffering by besieging and closing our hearts. If we want to better understand our deficits in love, we need to know about the destructive effects of envy. As unpleasant as it is at first to admit to envy and to explore it, it is enlightening when we want to uncover the deceptions of the supposed lack of love.

“First of all, envy thrives on a competitive situation with the ‘others’.” Others who are better off are the fodder for envy. Either they have certain material goods, or they possess certain desirable qualities and talents. They are bigger, richer, more beautiful, they are smarter, more mature, more advanced and they are loved more.”

Envy arises from comparing ourselves with the so-called others and, above all, from comparing ourselves with our own ideal images of love. If we are envious, we can only lose because in the end our deep conviction that we are not lovable enough is confirmed. Another term for envy is resentment and on this trail we discover a hidden attitude within us with which we do not grant love to others, but above all to ourselves. How can that be? Why should we not grant ourselves the love we have been looking for for so long?

The cause of the lack of love

describes the spiritual Enneagram in its ancient knowledge. It says that in the “world of unfulfilled love” it is not really about finding love. In this spiritual system, love has become a desirable good, a scarce commodity that we lack on the one hand, but on the other hand we want to possess, have for ourselves and control. We determine what love is and what it is not. We determine what can come close to us and touch us. We pursue our images of love, while at the same time rejecting what is there and close. The fact that we actually do not allow ourselves love in order to continue searching for it arises from a powerful desire to control love. And whoever wants to control love loses it. This insight marks the beginning of the end of an ancient victim perspective and also the suffering associated with it.

The heart as a gateway to the reality of love

Could everything be much simpler? Do we want it to be simple? Are we prepared to lose the meaning we have given to our pain, our lack and our unfulfillment in simplicity?

Deeper than our wishes and images, touching happens in the heart. When we begin to allow the beautiful and the ugly, the loved and the unloved, the pain and the joy and everything in between, the bitter and the sweet, the light and the dark with equanimity, then our heart can expand. Not limiting love to a feeling and experiencing that everything that can come close to us has an inner beauty and goodness at its core changes our insight into love over time. We need disappointment to gain these insights. We need the moments in which our wishes are rejected and our desires go unheard. And if we do not reject these moments with hostility, but recognize them as a reminder of the futility of our search, then they accompany us inward, in the return to the source and origin of love itself.

References in the text:

*Unfulfilled Love – The pull into apparent reality, OM C Parkin, advaitaMedia