“XXX viewed your profile 33 minutes ago” A LinkedIn notification on a late sleepless night. The heart skips a beat. The emotions I thought were long gone rushed back in, leaving me confused and asking myself, “Why now?”.

Heartaches, heartbreaks, breakups, divorces and separations! We hear about them all the time, but do we really talk about the grief caused by love that never happened?

The what if’s! The Almosts! The ache of something that ended before it began!

There was never a confession, never an exchange of emotions, not even a single touch. We’d only met a couple of times, in work group gatherings. Just silently falling in love, wrapped in a hidden, mutual emotional connection.

I chose not to voice the emotions, not to acknowledge my feelings, not because I didn’t feel deeply, but because I really DID. But no matter how deep the feelings were, I knew it was the most perfect story at the most imperfect time. Everything about it felt misaligned. The timing was off, the circumstances were complicated, and all the odds were stacked against us.

One day, I decided to put a stop to it all in the hope of escaping pain and heartache. I pulled away and gradually limited my communication. After a while, he was just gone from my inbox, my social feeds and eventually from my life. He was nowhere to be found. No one knew his whereabouts. Years later, I heard a rumor about him getting married, but there was nothing to confirm it.

A decade later, because of a simple notification, all those unexpressed emotions, unexpected feelings came rushing back, as if no time had passed at all. What happens to unspoken love?  Well, I realized old emotions don’t just die when left unaddressed, but they silently hide in there until the right trigger bring them back to life.

Often, we don’t tell someone we love them to avoid heartbreak, but keeping it to ourselves can hurt us more. How do you grieve a love that never happened? Well, just because a love story never started, doesn’t mean you cannot grieve over the silent heartbreak.

Some love stories never begin, and that in itself becomes the story. A story of unspoken feelings, silent connections & unaligned stars.

Have you ever grieved a love that never got a chance to begin?