How do you Fall out of Love with an Inappropriate Person You're in Love With

Hello,

Okay, well I'll try and keep this short: I seem to have "fallen in love" with my best friend , who has a partner, and it is making me horribly depressed. I can't seem to get over the love, and it is holding me in depression. I'm still doing my best to go about my daily life, and have started using your exercises etc., but it is incredibly difficult to fend off the bouts. The two are not helping me maintain a good relationship with this person. I feel they have gotten more distant lately, probably because they have noticed that despite my best effort, or I might just be imagining it, but either way it only makes me feel worse.

I really just have no idea what to do, it all seems tied together in a complicated lot of fear, insecurity, etc. I'm also not sure which one precipitated the other. It could be the insecurity of the depression triggered the neediness that I'm calling love for the time being, or the other way around. They both started at the same time and they both seem to be feeding into each other.

Any advice you could offer would be unbelievably appreciated!

Thanks,
C_________

Dear C________
If you can distance yourself physically from the "loved" one whom you do not think it is appropriate for you to be in love with, if you simply do not see them for a while, cold turkey, the "love" will fade in two or three months.
In a year you will hardly remember your passion for them. If you keep seeing the person, the passion can last years. It is painful. However if you simply accept the pain every time it appears, it soon fades, as well. But physical distance is by far the easiest.

Seeing the person all the time is just self-torture. Distance yourself physically. You can pick up the friendship after the passion is over. The mating instinct is built into us to continue the species, it is strong, it seems like our very soul. It isn't, but it seems like it when it is happening. Afterwards we can't believe we ever felt that way.. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A.B.

Unfortunately, physical distance isn't an option as I go to college with this person, but never mind, I'll just have to take the path less traveled by and hope for it to ease in time. It's just a feeling and some thoughts, after all and I'm the one who is probably giving them all this significance. I'll try and just accept them like you suggested and see what comes up.


Dear C________

Also it helps to refocus your life. Everyone has some great talent that can define them. Perhaps you are not doing what you need to do to become a more independent and strong person in your own right. Do you have a life's work, a mission, a craft that gives your life meaning beyond the everyday mundane..

Do you have some "work" that helps to identify yourself to yourself as "I am that." In my own life, for instance, "I am a writer." I do other things, I am a wife, I love my husband dearly and he returns that love, but this in itself would not sustain me "in the cosmos" by itself. I help people get out of depression, I raise children and help with grandchildren but my core identity and the thing without which I would not be truly myself is that "I am a writer."

Earlier in my life I had a burning desire to play the guitar and sing which I did for many years but this was not my core interest. Behind this "burning desire" I always knew I was supposed to write something, some great life work. . Not great to anybody else, mind you, but great in my own eyes. It wasn't until late in life that I finally "got" what it was I was supposed to say. I did write that book. It is called The Children of the Gods and is my least successful book. But after I wrote it and published it, some great burden was lifted from my neediness. I felt I trod the world more solidly, assuredly. I had done what it was I was supposed to do. I had done what, since the age of 4, I realized I was supposed to do. I realized myself as "a writer."

Now and then someone will contact me and say it is the most profound book they ever read. One person did that the other day who was given the book 15 years ago and never read it until just now. I feel good about that. It sustains me because I know the work is good, whether or not most people understand it or not. All during my life, when things were terrible, when I was failing, there was always the thought in my mind that "someday I will write that book." And I did. A. B. Curtiss