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Why Do We Love the Ones Who Don’t Love Us Back?
The simple explanation behind our obsession
We always want what we can’t have. This not only applies to things but to relationships with other people too. Sometimes the more people push us away, the more we want to be with them.
This idea should be familiar to people who constantly strive to get what they don’t have. It can be a dream job or a person — it is something not readily available. For example, you build a relationship with someone; the feelings are mutual, everything is going well. However, after a while, your partner distances themselves, and instead of letting them go, you attack them with endless messages and calls. You feel like it’s only getting worse, but you can’t control the strong desire to correct the situation. The more your partner distances themselves, the stronger you seem to pursue them. It goes on until they finally leave. It happens because we assign more subjective value to the one who doesn’t want us.
Subjective value, in a nutshell, is the idea that an object’s value is estimated not by its actual innate value but by how much people might need or desire the object instead.
The less the partner meets our expectations, the more value we assign to them. When the object of our desire is not reciprocating our advances, we assume that…
