How to Heal When the Person You Want Was Never Meant to Stay

Why does it happen? Why, out of billions of people, does one person appear who makes every cell in your body vibrate, only to be taken away before you have a chance to hold on? It feels like a cruel twist of fate, a glimpse of a soul that seems cut from your own heart, yet can never stay there. What if this profound pain, the ache of loving someone you cannot have, is the very key the universe uses to unlock what you’ve hidden even from yourself?

A Sacred Encounter in a Fleeting Glance

You get used to suppressing your hunger to be more. You pretend you don’t feel, don’t want, don’t dream so high. This continues until a single glance, a brief presence, or a fleeting touch awakens everything at once. In that moment, you realize that true loneliness isn't the absence of another person, but the absence of yourself.

Carl Jung believed that nothing that enters our lives is accidental. What you resist, persists. Perhaps you have resisted your own potential for so long that life has sent you an impossible person to shatter that denial. They appear without asking for permission, and you are rarely ready. It might be a minor detail in a common conversation or a touch that was never there, but suddenly, a void is born that feels greater than any presence. You might try to rationalize it, to laugh at yourself and call it a phase. But deep down, you know it isn't about the other person; it's about you.

Every soul, as Jung might say, carries secret pockets of emptiness that cannot be filled by routine or a tamed, comfortable love. Then one day, life sends someone who touches that very emptiness. You call it love, desire, or fate. But it is simply you remembering the parts of yourself you allowed to fade.

Falling in Love with Your Own Reflection

This impossible person becomes your cruelest, yet most sacred, mirror. They show you who you could be if you weren't so afraid—if you didn't settle for crumbs of life, crumbs of love, crumbs of courage. This person didn't arrive in your life to be yours, but to serve as your warning: Wake up. Beneath this tired skin, a fire still burns.

In Jungian terms, this powerful attraction is often a projection. We project onto another person all the qualities we fail to acknowledge in ourselves. We fall in love with someone who freely lives out the courage, passion, or freedom that we have suppressed to fit into a life we call stable.

Look closely at this person. What is it about them that makes you burn? Is it their carefree laughter? The way they move through the world without fear of rejection? The depth in their eyes? All of this is yours, not theirs. They are merely a reflection. It is a mirror your own unconscious has placed before you so that you might finally see the fire that still exists beneath the gray ash of routine.

The pain comes from the paradox: you can see it and touch it, but you cannot possess it. This is where the confusion begins. You start to believe the other person is the solution, that only with them can you feel whole. But they are not the savior; they are the messenger. They did not come to fill your emptiness, but to show you where it is.

The Pain That Heals

It feels unfair. How can you witness such light and then be expected to return to the darkness? How do you breathe with this burning void in your chest?

Some presences are too immense for everyday life to contain. We want to tuck them into a Sunday morning coffee routine, but such encounters do not fit into the mundane. They are meant to live in the soul, which is why they hurt and, simultaneously, why they liberate. You cannot possess what has come to remind you of the infinity within you. If this impossible person became routine, the fire would dim, and the divine spark of the encounter would be suffocated by daily life.

Perhaps it’s time to stop fighting. Instead of asking the universe to bring back the impossible, ask yourself, "What did this impossible connection show me about myself?" Jung said that those who look outside, dream; those who look inside, awaken. This person is your invitation to stop dreaming of another and finally awaken to yourself.

From Longing to Becoming

You will not forget them, nor should you want to. That feeling of emptiness is now your fuel. Every time the ache returns, remind yourself: "I am capable of feeling this, which means I am capable of living up to it." This impossible person is not your other half, but a declaration of your own wholeness.

When nostalgia tears at you, embrace it. When memories squeeze your heart, smile. When your chest burns, breathe. You are alive, and this pain is your certificate of existence. Let it burn away everything that is not you. Close your eyes and recall everything that charmed you about them—their courage, their laughter, their fire. Now ask yourself with ruthless honesty, "Why did I tear this out of myself to be acceptable and restrained?"

The other person left, but they left you with a map. Now, every step is yours. One day, you will understand that this person was neither your destiny nor your punishment. They were a call to become whole. They were the impossible encounter that came only to teach you how to finally be possible.

References

• Jung, C. G. (1933). Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Harcourt, Brace & World.

  This collection of essays provides an accessible introduction to Jung's core ideas. The chapters on the stages of life and the structure of the psyche help explain the concept of the unconscious mind projecting its hidden contents onto others, which is central to the article's theme of seeing oneself in an "impossible" love. It clarifies why certain people can have such a profound and unsettling effect on us.

• Johnson, R. A. (1983). We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Harper & Row.

  Johnson applies Jungian principles directly to the experience of romantic love. He masterfully explains the phenomenon of projection—how we "fall in love" not with a real person, but with the projected, idealized parts of our own soul (the anima or animus). This book supports the article’s central argument that an intense, impossible attraction is often a confrontation with our own hidden potential, mirrored in another. The entire first part of the book is dedicated to this concept.

• Hollis, J. (1993). The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife. Inner City Books.

  While focused on midlife, this book is profoundly relevant to the article’s theme of transformative crisis. Hollis, a Jungian analyst, describes how life often presents us with painful situations or relationships that force us to shed our illusions and connect with a deeper sense of self. It affirms the idea that such a painful, "impossible" love is not a failure, but a necessary "passage" that breaks down an old, inauthentic identity to make way for a more whole and conscious one.