Title: When The Love Of Your Life Doesn't Love You | Psychology Today
Headings: When The Love Of Your Life Doesn't Love You
Alex Lickerman M.D.
When The Love Of Your Life Doesn't Love You
Why love changes depending on the stage of the relationship in which it's felt.
THE BASICS

Content: For all sorts of reasons, when we lose a love that's freshly minted we often feel like our lives are falling apart and that we'll never be happy again. But people who lose love when in a different stage of a relationship than the beginning—perhaps several years or even decades on—or in a different phase of life from their youth (when emotions generally run to extremes), tend to experience suffering over the loss of love in a slightly different way. When we lose love through divorce in middle age, for instance, there are often other things lost as well: children, homes, lifestyles, and dependable companionship. article continues after advertisement
Though the loss of these things compounds our suffering, often the suffering we feel is less tinged with a sense of dramatic tragedy. Most people in this circumstance are better able to glimpse through their suffering the truth that life will go on, that they will be happy again someday, as studies on the set-point theory of happiness have now begun to demonstrate. When we lose love at the end of life, however, most often due to the death of our spouse or life partner, recovery tends to be just as hard as when we lose love at the beginning of our lives as teens or young adults—but for different reasons. It's not that our emotions run as hot as they did when we were younger. It's that we know our own demise is coming sooner rather than later and our constitution and confidence are often not what they once were. Our scope of interest and involvement in the world has often narrowed so that without our life companion in it we often have little else in our lives to return to after we recover from our loss.