Relationship
You think about them when you wake up and they aren't going to feel the same way and you can't make it stop.
You think about them when you wake up. You read into the way they typed their last message. You scroll their social media looking for clues. You replay every interaction looking for the one where they almost said something. You imagine the conversation where they finally tell you they always felt the same way. They haven’t. They aren’t going to. You know this and you can’t make it stop.
This isn’t really about them anymore. It’s about the loop you’ve built in their direction.
The thinking-about isn’t slowing down.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came up with a parent whose love you had to work for, and the experience of wanting someone who doesn’t fully reciprocate is the most familiar shape of love you have. You may have grown up watching the adults around you long for people who couldn’t give them what they needed, and you absorbed that longing is what love feels like. You may have built your adult sense of yourself around being the person who feels everything more than other people do, and the unrequited love is one of the few places that intensity has somewhere to go. You may have lived through a stretch when nothing else in your life was producing emotional weather, and the fixation on this person filled a gap that hadn’t yet been filled by something real.
Every time you think about them, you get a small reward. A flash of imagined connection. A moment of feeling alive in a way you don’t feel the rest of the day. The reward reinforces the thinking. The next thought arrives because the system has been trained.
The state has a name in clinical literature: limerence. It functions like a low-grade addiction, with the same loop-and-reward structure as compulsive behaviors. The fact that they don’t love you back doesn’t end it. It might intensify it.
If the person you’re in love with isn’t your partner and you do have one, see I’m in love with someone other than my partner .
The reward isn’t them. The reward is the imagined version of them you’ve been visiting.
Strategic therapy treats limerence as the addictive loop it is. The mental visits, the social media checks, the imagined conversations all get scheduled into specific blocks rather than allowed on demand, and the reward those visits gave you stops being available the way it was. The fixation runs out of fuel, and your attention comes back to the room you actually live in.
You get your hours back. Then you get your taste back.
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