Why do we crave love from another person?  We want a partner in life to lessen our burdens, but this is not necessarily love.  I don’t think we want another person to love us.  We just want to love someone.  And in the beginning, when you don’t know what you want, you pick people to love that may not be in your best interest, but that feeling is so strong, that you can lose your dignity, your respect for yourself, and who you are all in the pursuit of continuing to have those feelings.  We can’t actually feel what the other party feels towards us.  We have empathy, where we can relate to what they are feeling, but we can never feel what they feel, so the love we are seeking is the joy that unfolds in us when we love another.

Just because you don’t love someone, doesn’t mean they don’t love you.  Stalkers have strong feelings for their victims, and they on the other hand, may not even know they exist.  On the same level, you could have a long-standing crush on someone without them ever knowing.  Feelings are not a two-way street.  We can only feel our own emotions, so in actuality, we are seeking to fulfill our own capacity to love someone else.  So why do we want to love even if the other party doesn’t love us?  Love is a panacea to our everyday troubles.  It changes how we feel about each day and ourselves.  Love is a sense of hope in a hopeless situation.  It can be transformative, but often-times, we eschew it into things it is not because of what we carry into relationships.