“Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse” is a column by Kai Cheng Thom to help you survive and thrive in a challenging world. Have a question for Kai? Email askkai@xtramagazine.com.
Dear Kai,
Like many queers, I’m struggling to manage a friendship with someone I used to date. We had an on-off, very ambiguous relationship and I was much more sure about my feelings for them than they were about theirs for me; it ended with them rejecting me. Since then we have had a meaningful, caring and difficult friendship. I feel easily rejected by them, jealous of their partner and still feel somewhat in love with them. I can’t shake these feelings and don’t know how to relate to them!
I think we have a beautiful friendship, so I don’t want to stop being friends. We talked about how to manage some of these difficulties together, which made things a bit better. I’ve also tried taking a break. I’m very happy with my current partner, and we can talk about my feelings for my friend, so that doesn’t feel like a conflict. Still, I have persistent and sometimes overwhelming feelings of rejection, desire and loss that just won’t go away.
How should I deal with this? I feel despairing that our friendship will always be painful. Is there something I can do that will make it easier?
Many thanks for your column,
Frustrated
Dear Frustrated,
There is no pain quite like the loss of someone who is still alive and close by, but yet no longer available to receive your love. The blogger Jamie Anderson once wrote that “grief is just love with no place to go,” and through that lens, it makes sense to think of unrequited love as a kind of grief.
Queers in particular are vulnerable to the grief of unrequited love because our romantic relationships are so loaded with meaning. In a society where queer love is still taboo for many, what does it mean to have an unfulfilled romance? Even under the best of circumstances, it takes enormous courage for queer people to express our love, and so the experience of rejection carries a heavy weight.
I say this, Frustrated, because it seems to me that you have done all of the “right” things in terms of managing your friendship with your ex-partner: You’ve talked to them about the difficulties you’re having, you’ve taken a break and you’ve been open and honest with your current partner. These are all excellent, practical relational strategies. Something you might wish to consider, however, is that managing a relationship and processing grief are not the same thing.
Grief is a response to loss, and it might be described as what happens when our internal experience (I still love this person) no longer aligns with the external world (the person I love is no longer in my life or doesn’t love me in the same way). It may be said that the discordance between our inner felt sense of connection to a person, place or thing, and the external reality of disconnection from that person, place or thing is what causes us pain in the wake of a loss; this is that feeling of “love with no place to go.” Death doula and ritual healer Sarah Kerr describes grief work as supporting our inner reality to come into alignment with the external world, and while she primarily refers to this process in regards to grieving death, I think this is also a useful metaphor for working with all kinds of grief.
So how do we work with grief? How do we bring our inner experience into alignment with the outer world? The truth is that this is a difficult, sometimes messy process that doesn’t usually follow a clear timeline. It’s not like you can take a Grief-B-Gone pill or a grief management class and feel better in six easy steps. And I think that grief of unrequited love is made all the more painful from a lack of recognition in the dominant culture. If you lose someone to illness or you lose your beloved family home to a natural disaster, people expect you to grieve. But if your partner breaks up with you, then you’re supposed to eat ice cream in your pyjamas, watch romantic movies for a weekend and go to work on Monday, good as new.
But of course, things aren’t so simple. Experiencing unrequited love and rejection can awaken deep wounds. Our fundamental human fears of being unworthy and unlovable can arise, particularly when our ex-partners find new people to be with, leaving us to wonder: What, exactly, was wrong with us? If only we were richer, smarter, younger, fitter. If we’d eaten fewer carbs and listened to more personal growth podcasts, would we have been enough?
“Experiencing unrequited love and rejection can awaken deep wounds.”
The loss of a hoped-for love can be intense, even grievous—especially for queers, since many of us enter love with emotional baggage and trauma attached. For many of us, romantic love is supposed to heal or redeem the shame and rejection we felt as young people growing up in a world that said our love was wrong and harmful to others, that our love was destined to end in ruin. So the first step to grieving love, I think, is to allow ourselves to grieve at all.
We need to find supportive spaces and ways of expressing our grief for an unrequited love. We might need to take time to ourselves. We might need an extended—or even permanent—break from the object of our unrequited love, including unfollowing them on social media. We might need a community of friends to help hold our grief. We might need meditation or karaoke nights spent singing dramatic broken-heart ballads or mornings spent jogging or swimming until our bodies are too tired or euphoric to feel loss anymore. We might need to write bad poetry, make maudlin art like the most unselfconscious teenager in the world. We might need professional support (which there is no shame in receiving). We might need to let our grief take up space and name itself for what it is: A love I wanted; a love that could have, should have been. A love I feel but no longer have.
Processing loss is a paradoxical process of holding on while letting go. It’s about saying goodbye while also naming what will stay with you. Almost all traditional grieving rituals are shaped around this paradox: At funerals, we talk about how much we loved someone and what we loved about them, how they shaped and changed us and also what we’ll miss now that they are gone. We tell them the things we wish we had said in life. We create closure. And sometimes, if they were very close to us, we visit their grave or keep their picture in our homes.
“Processing loss is a paradoxical process of holding on while letting go.”
It’s tricky to mourn someone who’s still alive. You’re not actually mourning the person but rather the relationship, or perhaps what you hoped the relationship would be.
So, Frustrated, when you reflect on your relationship with your ex, what did you want it to become? What did you imagine when you thought about your future together? What did you wish for from your ex that you stopped getting or never received? And how did not getting those things impact you deep down, in the place where your vulnerabilities and insecurities live? These are probably the things you need to grieve.
Sometimes we need to create rituals of our own: A symbolic process that will bring our inner world into the outer one and attempt to link the two. Some rituals we only do once, and others we do over and over again. Here are some ideas for grieving unrequited love:
- On a piece of paper, draw or describe in words the relationship that you wish you had with your ex. Use as much detail as you can. Place the paper in a bowl of water and wait until it’s totally dissolved. Then pour this water out into some soil so something new can grow from it.
- Collect some stones, each one representing an unresolved thought, feeling or memory from your relationship with your ex. Carry these stones in a bag to a lake, river, ocean or stream, and throw them in the water.
- Write a letter to your ex telling them exactly how you feel and what you wish they (or you) had done differently. But don’t actually send the letter. Instead, read it out loud to yourself and then burn it. Scatter the ashes somewhere beautiful or make a piece of art with them showing how you’d like your current friendship to be.
- Write a letter to yourself. Address the wounds and insecurities from your relationship with your ex. What do the parts of you that feel rejected, jealous and longing need to hear? What would you say to them if you were speaking to a beloved friend or precious child? Read this letter out loud. Keep it somewhere beautiful.
These are just meant to get you started—please feel free to make up your own. You can do these rituals alone, but sometimes it’s nice to invite a trusted witness along for the journey. Some people struggle with rituals because they “don’t believe in woo.” Grief rituals, however, are not really about woo or magic or even spirituality. They’re about giving your love somewhere to go.
Grief takes time, Frustrated. We don’t know how long it will take, or even what it will take to feel better. Grief is like faith, in that way. It’s a journey without an endpoint; what’s important is noticing that the landscape is changing, that we are getting somewhere even if we don’t know exactly where we’re going. Trust that you are getting somewhere, Frustrated. Remember that your grief is one of the best and most important parts of yourself making itself known.
Kai Cheng Thom is no longer a registered or practicing mental health professional. The opinions expressed in this column are not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content in this column, including, but not limited to, all text, graphics, videos and images, is for general information purposes only. This column, its author, Xtra (including its parent and affiliated companies, as well as their directors, officers, employees, successors and assigns) and any guest authors are not responsible for the accuracy of the information contained in this column or the outcome of following any information provided directly or indirectly from it.
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