My guess would be that if someone doesn't love you even if you wish very much they would, then thinking about that person is just prolonging your suffering. Just stop. There are seven billion other people on this planet, pretty sure many of them are nice.
But why would any of those many strangers love specifically you? One possible reason is that people reciprocate love. So your best strategy is to become a loving person yourself. And then, one of the people you meet, will return your feelings.
And in the meanwhile, being a loving person already feels better than being focused on your own misery, so this is a bonus. Actually, it would probably be better to simply focus on being a loving person and not worry too much about when people start to return your love. Just make sure you meet many people; and if the strategy doesn't work for a while, change your environment.
With so many good people out there, don't waste your time trying to squeeze some love out of the bad ones. The worst thing you can do to yourself is to remain in a bubble with the bad people, because then it seems like the entire universe is bad. (Oh, and if someone says "I may seem like a bad person to you, but trust me that the others are even worse", they are lying; don't argue with them, but go outside and try for yourself.)
> But why would any of those many strangers love specifically you? One possible reason is that people reciprocate love. So your best strategy is to become a loving person yourself. And then, one of the people you meet, will return your feelings.
Is the purpose of love to be reciprocated? Is it worth loving if it isn't?
Genuinely curious about your thoughts, and not trolling, but this prompted some interesting questions in my head and I was curious what you think.
Humans have needs, and ignoring them probably wouldn't work well in long run, no matter how noble it might sound in abstract. If your needs are constantly frustrated, you will likely lose the motivation to do the noble things anyway.
Then again, there are differences among people with regards to their needs. Like, an introverted person would probably be satisfied with a smaller number of friends; but would probably still want more than zero.
To me it seems like it is important that some people reciprocate your feelings, and then it is not important that others don't. Like, if you love 20 people and 3 of them love you back, it's okay, but if you love 20 people and nobody loves you back, it's not okay. Of course the numbers are made up, may be different for different people, and it also matters a lot who loves you back and who doesn't, how specifically that love manifests, etc.
I would make an analogy that if you are a cook, and you prepare meals for hundreds of people, and then you eat one meal yourself, that can make you fully satisfied. If you cannot eat, you will starve, and it doesn't make it any different for you whether you have prepared meals for other people or you didn't. So while we can make a true argument that feeding hundreds of other people is a great thing, that one meal that goes back to the cook is also important.
Shortly, unreciprocated love can also make you happy, assuming that it is not all that you have. Feeling secure about being loved gives you the privilege that you can now be generous about the love you give, because you don't need anything more in return, and if something comes anyway, it's a nice bonus. Telling people who are currently not loved about how "loving others is better than being loved" is a bit like telling starving people to stop focusing on their hunger so much... the main message it delivers is that you actually don't give a fuck about their sufering.
(Then, there are also people who never feel loved enough, because their mental problems prevent them from having healthy relationships, and trying to give them more love doesn't improve things at all, it just all vanishes in a black hole... It's complicated.)
Sorry for the delayed response--not out of unwillingness, but busy-ness.
Your original response made me think of a few questions, but I think in the end it boiled down to asking what is the goal or purpose of love? Does it dovetail with a goal of maximizing happiness? (It seems to me no--that love can sometimes work towards our personal happiness and other times against it.)
We often use the word love in a multi-faceted way that would be better served by multiple words. The ancient Greeks had (at least?) four words for love that were roughly differentiated by familial love, friendship love, erotic love, and an unconditional love. They varied, I suppose, in goal, expectation, depth or quality of feeling, et c.
It seems like this last love was the sort that the father shows to his son. There is no real hope of reciprocation, nor yet a sort of surface-level happiness—indeed, it would be a very unhappy business for the most part. And yes, I think to your point there is probably some sustaining relationships there, too. At the same time, I expect there was pressure against him: remove life support, your kid's a vegetable, no hope here, et c. This isn't a love-nurturing environment exactly.
I guess what I'd say is that at least in some cases love seems to work against our personal best interest, not for it, and that our happiness sometimes realigns along different boundaries. I.e., that happiness is perhaps more flexible than we might assume at first, and love perhaps a little less flexible?
Again, just some ponderables. Thanks for the comment.
> We often use the word love in a multi-faceted way that would be better served by multiple words.
It would be nice if we just stopped using "love" as an emphasis for "enjoy". ("I love hamburgers" = I enjoy the taste of hamburgers.)
Getting this one out of the way, it seems to me that the common component in other forms of love is something like "your well-being makes me happy".
Mixing these two creates the greatest confusion, when "I love you" can mean "I wish that you be well" or "I enjoy being with you". Especially because these two do NOT have to be mutually exclusive: you can wish someone to be well AND enjoy their presence and interaction with you at the same time. But you can also enjoy interaction with someone, without caring about their well-being at all. This gives us three combinations of what one could mean by "loving" someone.
And the confusion goes like this: First, it takes some maturity to notice that some people enjoy the presence of other people (because they can get fun or sex or services or resources from them), but don't actually care about those people's well-being at all. (In other words, they "love" other people in exactly the same way they "love" their hamburgers.)
Then, the person who noticed this often over-reacts, and decides that if those two things are not exactly the same, then they certainly must be the exact opposites! It cannot be real love, if you derive any benefit whatsoever from the other person. If you are sexually attracted to them, it cannot be the true love! If you like it when they do something for you, or if they make you laugh and you enjoy that, it cannot be true love either! And even if you do something for them completely with no thought of reward, and you really get nothing in return, but then you suddenly notice that thinking about their happiness makes YOU happy... maybe deep down you were a horrible selfish monster all the time; you only pretended to love other people, but actually did this all only to give YOURSELF the happy feeling. Shame on you!
I wish this was a strawman, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_(ethics) -- a few famous philosophers actually supported this pathological, poisonous idea. It can seriously hurt emotionally fragile people when you expose them to this insanity pretending to be deep wisdom.
"Wishing other people to be well" is a thing; "enjoying interaction with other people" is another thing; and when those two things happen to go together, there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing prevents you from genuinely loving people whose presence also makes you happy in other ways. It's actually easier than way, because one kind of positive emotion prepares the way for other kinds.
> four words for love that were roughly differentiated by familial love, friendship love, erotic love, and an unconditional love.
I'd say the last one is the unreciprocated love, and the first three include some kind of expectation (different kinds). Yes, even a father loving his son expects something in return; at the very least, that the son will not knowingly try to hurt him. But usually there is also some expectation of politeness, of possible cooperation in future when the son grows up, maybe of care for the father when he gets old.
Enough theory. I guess the practical advice is to love others, love yourself, and don't feel confused or guilty when the love is reciprocated.
There's two statements in there. To unpoetic them, the first says that if you stop concentrating on the bad things, you'll find that there's an abundance of good things. The second is that while you may allow (maybe unconsciously) others to trigger emotions in you, you are the ultimate origin of your emotions, including love. Your emotional makeup is independent of external factors to the extent that you internalize this.
I said this, because it's something I wish I had heard a long time ago.
But seriously, can you explain what you mean by this?