Unrequited Love Hurts Like Addiction, but Science Shows a Way Out

Unrequited love is romantic attraction that the other person does not return, and the research I could verify says it hurts more people than the one doing the loving. In a landmark 1993 study, rejected admirers described pain and humiliation, while the people turning them down described guilt, irritation and helplessness.

Brain scans of people still in love with someone who left them show activity in reward, craving and pain regions, which helps explain why you cannot simply decide to stop.

What works in practice is quieter than the songs suggest: acceptance, distance, time and a new focus for your energy. Below I lay out the evidence, the stories that shaped how we think about one-sided love, and the steps psychologists recommend.

At a Glance

• Definition: Unrequited love is one-sided romantic attraction. Researchers call the person who loves the “would-be lover” and the person who says no the “rejector.”
• Both sides suffer: A 1993 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found the experience distressing for both parties, with rejectors telling more uniformly negative stories.
• Brain evidence: An fMRI study of 15 people still in love after being rejected found activity in reward and addiction-related regions. Those people had been rejected by partners, so it is not a perfect model of a crush that never began.
• Time helps: In the same study, more days since the rejection meant less activity in a region linked to attachment.
• What helps: Acceptance, distance from the person, no forced closure, and a new project or goal. Therapists and psychologists repeat these points across sources.
• Honest caveat: The strongest studies here are small or old. I flag every figure I could not trace to a primary source.

What Is Unrequited Love, and How Common Is It?

Unrequited love is a situation in which a would-be lover tries to build a romantic relationship with a rejector who does not want one. That is how a Baylor University thesis frames it, drawing on Baumeister, Wotman and Stillwell.

The same thesis notes that the experience cuts across ages but hits hardest in late adolescence and early adulthood, the stage Erik Erikson labeled intimacy versus isolation.

How common is it? Probably more common than most of us admit. The Baylor thesis says it is believed that unrequited experiences occur more often than requited ones, yet it also points out how little empirical research exists.

A Deccan Chronicle feature on the topic reports that, among the students Baumeister and Wotman studied, only about two percent had never been on either side of unrequited love. It adds that men reported more such episodes than women, which contradicts the common assumption.

The same feature lists four types researchers have described: a crush on someone unavailable, a crush on someone nearby, longing for a past lover, and an unequal love relationship. I find that list useful because it widens the picture.

Unrequited love is not only the teenager staring across a classroom. It is also the colleague who never notices you, the friend you cannot confess to, and the ex who has moved on while you have not.

Why Does Unrequited Love Hurt So Much?

It hurts because the brain treats romantic rejection less like a polite disappointment and more like the loss of something it was built to chase. The best neuroimaging evidence comes from Helen Fisher and colleagues, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 2010.

They scanned 10 women and 5 men who had recently been rejected by a partner but said they were still intensely in love.

The details matter.

According to Rutgers University, every participant said they spent more than 85 percent of their waking hours thinking about the person who rejected them. The average gap between the rejection and the study was 63 days. When the participants looked at a photo of their former partner, the scans lit up several areas:

• the ventral tegmental area, a midbrain region tied to motivation and reward;
• the nucleus accumbens and parts of the prefrontal cortex, which Live Science notes are associated with cocaine and cigarette addiction;
• the insular cortex and anterior cingulate, regions linked to physical pain and distress.

Fisher put it bluntly to Live Science: “Romantic love is an addiction.” Her team’s own wording in the paper is more careful. They report that the passion of romantic love looks like a goal-oriented motivation state rather than a single emotion, and that the results are consistent with the hypothesis that romantic rejection resembles a specific form of addiction.

That last word, “hypothesis,” deserves weight. Fifteen participants is a small sample. They had been in relationships, so they are not the same as someone who has loved a person from a distance for years. Still, the finding that fits my own reading of the literature is this: the reward system keeps firing whether love is going well or badly.

As the NBC News coverage of Fisher’s work makes clear, in her view you remain in love whether you are happily or unhappily in it. Therefore the pull you feel is not weakness. It is machinery doing what it evolved to do, only with no one to receive the signal.

There is also good news in that paper. The study found that the more days that had passed since the rejection, the less activity appeared in the right ventral putamen and pallidum, a region associated with attachment. In plain terms, the grip loosens with time.

Fisher also told Live Science that it seems healthier for the brain to think the situation through actively than to wallow in despair, since regions involved in emotion regulation and evaluation were active too.

What Does the Person Who Says No Go Through?

The rejector often feels worse than we assume, and that is one of the most surprising results in the field.

The 1993 paper by Wotman, Stillwell and Baumeister, titled “Unrequited love: On heartbreak, anger, guilt, scriptlessness, and humiliation,” compared written accounts from both sides. Its abstract reports that the experience was distressing for both parties, marked by mutual incomprehension and emotional interdependence.

The two sides remembered the same events very differently:

• Would-be lovers looked back with a mix of positive and intensely negative emotions. They tended to believe the attraction had been mutual, that they had been led on, and that the rejection was never communicated clearly.
• Rejectors were more uniformly negative. They saw themselves as morally innocent yet still felt guilty about hurting someone, and many described the admirer’s persistence as intrusive and annoying.

The book version, Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love by Roy Baumeister and Sara Wotman, runs 241 pages and was first published by Guilford in 1992.

Its publisher summary says that, contrary to stereotypes, rejectors describe their experiences more negatively than heartbroken lovers do. It also describes the would-be lover’s encounter as a high-stakes gamble and the rejector’s as a no-win proposition.

One reviewer quoted by Guilford called it the first systematic attempt to uncover the patterns of unrequited love, though that is a blurb, not a verdict from me.

The word “scriptlessness” in the paper’s title stuck with me. I read it as the absence of a shared script. We have countless scripts for dating and for breaking up, but almost none for the awkward middle where one person wants more than the other.

That is my interpretation, not a line from the abstract. Even so, it explains something real: people in this situation improvise, and improvisation under strong emotion tends to go badly for everyone.

Why Do We Mistake Friendliness for Love?

We do it because attraction is common between friends, and because hope fills the gaps that clear communication leaves. A study led by April Bleske-Rechek surveyed 88 pairs of opposite-sex college friends.

The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest reports that men felt more attraction to their female friend than the reverse, and that across two samples about 32 percent of participants listed attraction as a cost or complication, five times as often as they listed it as a benefit.

Notice what that means for unrequited love. In a cross-sex friendship, one person’s attraction can sit unspoken for years, and the other person may never know the friendship carries a weight. Bleske-Rechek herself told a campus newspaper that attraction does not stop a friendship from being genuine.

I agree. The problem begins when one person wants the friendship to become something else and keeps reading warmth as an invitation.

The 1993 finding about would-be lovers believing they had been led on fits this pattern. Rejectors, in contrast, usually felt they had been clear enough. Both can be sincere. Both can be wrong about what the other understood.

Is Unrequited Love Real Love or Idealization?

It can be both, and the honest answer depends on what you mean by love. Journalism professor Lisa Phillips, who wrote Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession after her own episode of obsession, surveyed 260 women about loving someone who did not love them back.

In a Maclean’s profile, she credits psychologist Reid Meloy’s concept of the “narcissistic linking fantasy,” in which an obsessive person idealizes a partner and believes the perfect relationship will complete them.

Phillips argues that seeing the self-centered side of the obsession changed her recovery. Rejected people often prefer to think the other person is the selfish one, she says, when the more useful question is what the longing is really about. One woman she interviewed concluded her love stood in for a career she should have pursued.

Phillips calls the adult version of this an echo of the adolescent “identity crush,” where you want the person because you want to be like them.

Therapists frame it differently but land close by. Licensed psychotherapist Amber Robinson, quoted by Psych Central, says unrequited love is usually discussed in therapy as a sign of insecure attachment. Clinical psychologist Nancy Irwin, in the same article, separates it from love addiction: unrequited love simply means the feeling is not reciprocal.

The School of Life takes a sharper line, arguing that devotion to an unrequited situation can be a clever way of avoiding real intimacy, even though it looks generous and romantic.

None of this makes your feelings fake. It means the feeling and the person are two separate things, and unrequited love sometimes tells us more about the lover than the beloved.

What Do Dante, Goethe and Sarat Chandra Teach Us About One-Sided Love?

They show that unrequited love has been shaping literature, and our expectations of love, for more than seven centuries. Three examples, from three very different eras, reveal three different ways people cope.

Dante and Beatrice: Turning Longing into Praise

Dante’s La Vita Nuova, written around 1293, recounts his feelings for Beatrice, who comes to stand for the ideal woman. Britannica’s summary traces the arc: his first sight of her when both were nine, her greeting nine years later, his efforts to hide his love, and the crisis when Beatrice withholds that greeting.

The Italian word salute, the New York Review of Books explains, means greeting, health and, by extension, salvation. So when the greeting is withdrawn, Dante loses far more than politeness.

Phillips notes in Maclean’s that the torment was so severe Dante chose to avoid Beatrice’s presence and instead wrote words of praise about her. By the time he put the book together, Beatrice was already dead.

Dante’s coping strategy was distance plus creative work. It is not a bad template, even if few of us will produce a masterpiece.

Werther and Lotte: When Feeling Becomes the Whole World

In Goethe’s 1774 novel, Werther falls for Charlotte, who is already engaged to Albert, yet he stays close and becomes trapped in the triangle.

Goethe drew on his own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff and on the death of his friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, according to the Penguin Classics description.

The book made the “Werther effect” a famous phrase, a term sociologist David Phillips coined in 1974 for imitation suicides after publicized deaths.

The history is less tidy than the legend, though.

A 2023 Health Communication study found that evidence for a suicide epidemic after the novel itself is limited to unsystematically documented cases, and notes that Phillips himself wrote that widespread imitation was never conclusively demonstrated. Goethe, for his part, feared the book’s possible effect from the start and reworked it for an 1787 edition, per Wikipedia.

My takeaway is about framing rather than panic. Werther treats feeling as proof of worth, and the story shows where that logic can go.

If this subject touches you personally, please talk to someone you trust or a local crisis service rather than carrying it alone.

Devdas and Paro: Love Lost to Hesitation and Convention

Devdas, the Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, was published on 30 June 1917. Senses of Cinema reports it was written in 1901 but held back until 1917 because the author felt embarrassed by the story.

Strictly speaking, this is not a case where one person never loved the other. Publisher copy says Paro’s love matured long before Devdas realized it, and his hesitation at a critical moment built a wall between them.

Wikipedia notes that the novel shows how customs of early twentieth-century Bengal largely prevented a happy ending. Senses of Cinema describes the painful scene where Paro’s marriage plans have advanced, she calls Devdas a coward, and he strikes her on the forehead with a stick.

For readers in Bangladesh and West Bengal, the story is a reminder that unrequited love is not always about a missing feeling. Sometimes it is timing, pride, family and class doing the rejecting.

Devdas’s ruin comes from what he did with his pain, not from the pain alone.

How Do You Get Over Unrequited Love?

You get over it by letting the feeling run its course while refusing to feed it. No source I found promises a quick cure, and I would distrust any that did.

A Greatist article, which interviewed registered psychologist Dr. Joti Samra, frames the healing process as acceptance, adding that acceptance does not mean pretending everything is fine. Here are the steps that show up most consistently, in the order I would try them.

Name it as unrequited. Stop waiting for a sign. Phillips says the most effective endings in her own case came from hearing the person say it plainly, or from cutting contact the way Dante did (Maclean’s).

Create distance for a set period. One expert quoted by Women’s Health South Africa recommends cutting off contact for 30 days. If you cannot avoid the person, as with a colleague, reduce the extra contact: stop checking their social media and stop looking for reasons to talk.

Do not manufacture closure. Clinical psychologist Joshua Klapow told Elite Daily that you must not try to create artificial closure. A Regain guide likewise suggests letting time pass and giving up the search for a final explanation.

Think actively, not obsessively. Fisher’s comment to Live Science suggests that working out how you will handle the situation beats wallowing. A single honest review of what you wanted from this person may be enough.

Ask what the longing stands for. Phillips’s question applies: what are you really yearning for? A career, a different life, being seen? Answering it moves the energy back to something you control.

Redirect your time. BetterHelp’s guidance suggests a new hobby, project or volunteer cause. A wikiHow piece co-authored by psychologist Jessica Behr recommends setting big personal goals.

Talk to someone. A friend or a licensed counselor can give you an outside view, especially if the pattern keeps repeating.

A note on sources: BetterHelp and Regain are therapy marketplaces, so I give their advice less weight than a peer-reviewed paper. I use them only where they agree with psychologists quoted elsewhere.

If you are on the other side of this, the person being pursued, the 1993 research suggests you are probably carrying guilt and frustration too. Being clear and kind early, rather than hoping the interest fades, is the sensible lesson from rejectors’ own accounts.

Can Unrequited Love Ever Do You Any Good?

Sometimes it can, but only after the worst has passed and only if you do something with it. Phillips describes the creative side as “the phoenix rising from the ashes of disappointment” and says her own book came from a drive to make meaning at a dark time. Dante’s whole body of work, as the Maclean’s piece observes, was shaped by his love for Beatrice.

The ordinary version is smaller. Unrequited love can show you what you want in a partner, how you behave when you are afraid, and which parts of yourself you have been handing to someone else. I find that the useful lesson is rarely “I was not good enough.”

It is closer to “I now know what I am looking for, and I know what it costs me to chase someone who is not looking back.”

What I Take From All This

I read the evidence as pointing to one idea: unrequited love feels like a verdict on your worth, but the research describes something more mechanical and more shared. Your reward system keeps firing, the other person often feels bad too, and the pain fades with time and distance. Here are five lessons I would pass to a friend.

Pain is not proof of destiny. Fisher’s scans show the reward circuit active in rejection, which means intensity measures how the brain is wired, not how right the match is.

Silence is not a yes. The 1993 accounts show would-be lovers often believed the rejection was never made clear. Ask directly and accept the answer.

The other person is not your villain. Rejectors reported guilt and distress. Seeing them as a person lowers the heat.

Closure comes from you. Experts quoted above warn against forcing it from the other person.

Use the energy. Dante wrote, Phillips researched and wrote a book, and you can train, build or learn something. The drive does not vanish; it can be pointed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Wotman, Stillwell and Baumeister (1993), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Breaking Hearts, Guilford Press
• Fisher et al. (2010), Journal of Neurophysiology, via Helen Fisher’s site
• Rutgers University news release
• EurekAlert, American Physiological Society release
• ScienceDaily
• Live Science, brain areas and Live Science, Fisher interview
• NBC News
• Baylor University thesis on unrequited love
• Deccan Chronicle
• BPS Research Digest on Bleske-Rechek et al. (2012)
• Maclean’s, Lisa Phillips profile
• Psych Central
• The School of Life
• Britannica, La Vita Nuova and New York Review of Books
• Health Communication (2023) on the Werther effect
• Wikipedia, Devdas and Senses of Cinema
• Greatist, Elite Daily, Women’s Health South Africa, Regain, BetterHelp

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