[Answer] Is it disgusting or pathetic to keep pursuing someone who doesn’t like you?

[Answer] Is it disgusting or pathetic to keep pursuing someone who doesn’t like you?

Sometimes being entangled with someone is a state that is very hard to get yourself out of. There is a book called The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter that mentions an idea: the psychological states of the person who is loved and the person who loves are completely different.

In the eyes of the one being loved, the other person may seem clingy and relentless. They have no way of understanding how important they are in the other person’s heart, and they cannot really grasp what kind of emotional storm their every word and action might stir up in the other person, because most of the time we tend to think of ourselves as fairly ordinary. (For most people, that’s probably true.) But no matter how ordinary someone is, they can still be a perfect, one-hundred-percent ideal person in somebody else’s eyes.

This kind of feeling is not something people can easily understand by putting themselves in each other’s shoes. But for the person who actively keeps pursuing the other, the ability to do that kind of perspective-taking is still necessary, no matter how much they like them. If the other person does not share the same feelings, then all of your actions will feel negative and unnecessary to them.

There is also another possibility: maybe you do not purely like that person as much as you think. Maybe it is simply a kind of possessiveness. Like a child who does not even play with a toy anymore, but still wants to fight others for it.

If the person doing the pursuing could apply even a little rational thought, they might first evaluate what exactly they are feeling. Is it control, possessiveness, or sincere and wholehearted love? And on the other side, what kind of reaction and thoughts might the other person have?

But most of the time, this kind of rational analysis is neither meaningful nor useful, because people who are immersed in it cannot really take it in. They cannot listen to other people’s advice, nor can they think calmly.

In that situation, the only real possibility is to shift your attention—either actively, by your own effort, or passively, through life pulling your focus elsewhere.