Q Dear Miss Abigail:
How do you accept the pain and heartbreak of unrequited love?
Sad
A Dear Sad:
It will be hard at first but I’m certain you will get over the loss. Stay strong and lift your head high! This, from Debbie Reynolds’s If I Knew Then (1962), is a good reminder of what’s to come, or shall I say, what should come.
1962: Disappointment in Love
Disappointment in love is one of the hardest things for girls to get over. We women were meant to be romantic creatures, I guess, and we take matters of the heart more seriously than men do most of the time (but not all of the time, thank goodness). Many girls moon away because the boys they wanted didn’t ask them to go steady …
Unbelievable as it seems at the time, you outgrow disappointments in love. When you’re young and a boy says he loves you and wants to marry you so you can always be together, it doesn’t always turn out that way. At a young age it’s often as easy to fall out of love as in. It’s better that it happens then, and not after marriage.
If a girl loses a boy, she shouldn’t go off alone with her burden of sadness. Obviously he wasn’t the right boy for her or he never would have left her. So why feed his ego by letting him know you’re pining away? …
You’ll find another man, and he’ll be even better for you, because he’ll recognize the values that the other fellow overlooked. But you can’t just wait for the new boy to find you. You’ve got to keep busy – meet people, do things, work on projects. An active girl is an attractive girl.
Source: Reynolds, Debbie. If I Knew Then. New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1962.
~ pp. 69-70 ~