Can we fall out of love?

Image: Kiss with lit­tle voyeur cour­tesy of kris­de­cur­tis

When I started this blog, I wrote for myself. The blog started as a col­lec­tion of ran­dom thoughts I was hav­ing, pri­mar­ily dur­ing bor­ing busi­ness meet­ings (What? I thought this was about love!” You’re right, dear reader. Hang on there and we’ll get to it in a second)

How­ever, as time has passed, these reflec­tions evolved. My blog became an inter­ac­tive chan­nel of reflec­tion. Huh? Let me explain what I mean by that.

When I was a teenager, I had a lot of trou­ble find­ing a girl­friend. It was very easy for me to become friends with girls, but I con­tin­u­ously fond myself at the pointy end of a con­ver­sa­tion that started with “I-don’t-want-to-ruin-a-wonderful-friendship-by-becoming-involved’; or had to lis­ten (again!) to my crush of the moment start telling that “It’s-not-you-It’s-me-I-only-see-you-as-a-friend”. Despite an enor­mous amount of energy going into the pur­suit of roman­tic ful­fill­ment (Hol­ly­wood style, noth­ing less!), it wasn’t until I started Uni­ver­sity that I had my first real girl­friend. Dur­ing all those teenage years I also spent a lot of time rumi­nat­ing on a vari­ety of top­ics. This habit of think­ing and using my brain for other pur­suits led me to an engag­ing and reg­u­lar social set­ting. With my five best friends, we estab­lished the rou­tine of get­ting together (at one of our places) every Fri­day or Sat­ur­day night; open a bot­tle of Rum, ‘Aguar­di­ente’, or the alco­holic bev­er­age of our choice at the time; and have deep and mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sions on any topic. We talked about reli­gion, art, pol­i­tics, uni­ver­sity, love, and comic books. We called these meet­ings our ‘Ter­tu­lias de los viernes’. (Friday’s Tertulias)

As I left Colom­bia and my group of friends behind, I stopped par­tic­i­pat­ing in these reg­u­lar intel­lec­tual debates. I also found my other half; mar­ried her; and have spent the last 12 years of my life with her.

Then I started this blog. I reflected on my own. And then the most mar­velous thing started hap­pen­ing: I found some blog­gers who shared some of my inter­ests. I started perus­ing their writ­ing. Reg­u­larly. And since a few weeks ago, I started hav­ing my own vir­tual ver­sion of ‘Friday’s Ter­tu­lias’ by respond­ing to their posts in my blog.

There it is. That’s the intro to my arti­cle on whether we can fall out of love or not. What started me think­ing about this topic was (you guessed it) another blog­ger. Moriah posted an arti­cle enti­tled Ram­blings on inter­net dating/long-distance rela­tion­ships , in which she explains why inter­net dat­ing just does not appeal to her; and why on the other hand long-distance rela­tion­ships hold a cer­tain level of appeal (I know it sounds weird, but when you read her post, it actu­ally makes a lot of sense. I sug­gest you head over there and read her post; you will prob­a­bly agree with my com­ments). Through the com­ments sec­tion of that post we engaged on a dia­log. On my first response to the arti­cle, I dis­cussed how the ‘get­ting to love’ some­one hap­pened along slightly dif­fer­ent paths in today’s world than in olden times (think ‘arranged mar­riages’ vs ‘falling in love’)

Then Moriah asked Can one fall out of love per­ma­nently or does it take one moment, built upon another, until one’s heart becomes hard toward another? My imme­di­ate reac­tion to her ques­tion was that one can (and one does) “fall out of love” per­ma­nently; but that it just isn’t some­thing that hap­pens instan­ta­neously. Let me rephrase it. Love is like honey: If you try to fill a glass with it, it will take a while for it to fill. Try emp­ty­ing it, and it will also take some time for it to reach empty.

As I wrote this, I under­stood that the prob­lem we’re hav­ing is seman­tics. Falling “in love” and falling “out of love” are rea­son­ably imme­di­ate actions. Get­ting to love some­one, on the other hand, takes a bit more time and energy; and I don’t think you ever stop lov­ing some­one you once loved deeply.

Peo­ple that go from rela­tion­ship to rela­tion­ship with­out giv­ing them­selves (or their part­ners) an oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence a deep sense love are usu­ally fol­low­ing the fick­le­ness of their hearts; mov­ing with the wind as they fall in and out of love with oth­ers. This notion plays very nicely to Hollywood’s roman­tic view. You must feel but­ter­flies in yout stom­ach when you see him; want to spend every sin­gle sec­ond in his pres­ence; laugh at his every joke, love his every hobby, and think he is the most hand­some man in the world. But as real­ity sets in, you start feel­ing that his pas­sion for col­lect­ing stamps is rather bor­ing; you start think­ing that his looks are more com­i­cal than hand­some; and you stop laugh­ing at his jokes. Then it sud­denly hits you. Oh my God, I fell out of love with him and I had not even noticed! you think to your­self. Then temp­ta­tion sets into your heart, and you start look­ing for The One. You know, the one who is per­fect. The one with whom there are no com­pro­mises. The one who will make you happy for­ever after. The one. 

But life is full of com­pro­mises. As we mature, we learn this, be it the easy or the hard way. We also learn to find the things we need to do to choose trade offs that make us bet­ter off. With matu­rity, we are able to start mak­ing the right calls: We stay with a part­ner despite the fact that she dri­ves us crazy with her inabil­ity to close the prover­bial tube of tooth­paste the right way; we stay with her because, as we look at all the pos­i­tive and all the neg­a­tive aspects and com­pare them to the joy we get from sim­ply being around her, we come out ahead. In a way, matu­rity gives us a process for assess­ing and con­struct­ing an Emo­tional Bal­ance Sheet with with­drawals and deposits, and to use it in our roman­tic decision-making.

With this new per­spec­tive, let’s try to answer the orig­i­nal ques­tion: Can we fall out of love? Of course we can. After all, what goes up, must also come down”. But it is also true that we never really stop lov­ing those we once loved. This is true for most roman­tic and pla­tonic forms of love. And in this sense, we can never truly fall out of love.

Tagged as: Essays, Life, Love, Philosophy, Reflections, Religion, Reply to other blog post