Do you believe in falling out of love?

People age, people change. There’s a difference between “being in love” and “loving” someone. Being in love is a state of heightened arousal and attraction and infatuation, and overlooking faults. Loving someone is seeing all that and accepting them anyway for being who they really are at their core.

It is possible to be in love with someone that you truly love despite their imperfections, and they love you despite your own imperfections. But if one is in love but not truly loving, then it’s easy to wake up one day and see them for who they truly are, and Fall Out of Love

“Falling” in love is mostly a hormonal cocktail to begin with in those of prime reproductive age. One can genuinely feel deep caring and affection ( love ) for another without it having to last “forever” or be considered not love if the relationship runs its course. As the infamous “they” say.

“Immature love is hot, mature love is warm.”
The hot versions of supposed “love” usually do not go the distance.
“True” love is accepting another for exactly who they are, and what most people consider falling out of love usually translates to falling out of the image you have projected on the other person.
“True” love may also be much more warm than hot, especially as we mature.

It is unrealistic to expect to find some lusty plateau of “love” and think it sustainable every minute of every day “forever.”
Those that do will consider the reality of love to be a disappointment.

I think you can stop being “in-love” with someone but still feel love for them… does that answer your question or am I not understanding it correctly?

True love doesn’t need falling into like a puddle or a ditch.

Shel Silverstein’s Missing Piece. People change. Love isn’t something predestined. People grow into each other, then grow away.

Shane Koyczan said “We never promised each other much,
we were always just kind of touch and go.
As if we knew somehow we’d grow differently
so we did and we do.
And none of this is to say that it wasn’t worth going through,
or that i care any less about you.
shoulders to lean on are hard to come by.”
I think that sometimes we just grow differently. Grow apart. It isn’t falling in and out of love. You will always love them, at least a little. But sometimes you love someone so much that you wonder if you ever really loved anyone before them.

I think we can fall out of love. Or, stop loving someone maybe is a better way to put it.

I think love is more rare than falling out of love.

Some old couples may not have sex or anything yet die within months. To me love is a soul merge not the cutesy stuff.

A friend of mine once made the brilliant observation that people (and relationships) can be compared to ocean liners on the high seas. Sometimes they travel in a parallel line and travel closely aligned to each other. And sometimes they just pass each other briefly as each goes to its own destination. In either event, eventually the ships (and the people in the relationship) veer off to their own destinations and ports.

I tend to agree with her. Breaking up (or falling out of love) is just another phase in a continuous cycle.

Or like cruises which follow their own paths from port to port where they disembark, intermingle and enjoy each other for a while then separate again for their own journey to the next port where they repeat the process.

The only type of love I think is real is what many Spiritualists, Gnostic Christians and Eastern philosophies call unconditional love (sometimes called the Divine love). Everything else to me is just infatuation, feelings or emotions. How many relationships are based and built upon unconditional love for each other?

Not really. Love is something you don’t fall out of. What you mistake for love can be fallen out of.

“Need we say it was not love now that love has gone.”

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

I think that love + commitment (relationship/marriage) requires constant work and communication.

It’s much harder AND much more wonderful than I could have imagined to be married.

We went through a patch when I thought daily about leaving. Thankfully, we went to therapy and worked on some fundamental communication issues.

I hope that we are committed and strong enough to keep working. But if only one of us is not, then we might not end up together forever.

That doesn’t discount the love and commitment we have at this moment.

I loved my ex-husband when we got married. And I was devastated when he decided that he didn’t want to be married any more. Perhaps he never loved me… I will never know. But my love for him was very real. And it no longer exists. I do not love him anymore.

Sure. I think that, if the love was real, feelings will always exist between the two people, but those feelings don’t have to include being “in love.” If two individuals meet, fall in love, perhaps get married and have a child, and then one of them has an affair – the other person might find it mighty hard to love a person that would hurt them in that way, but that doesn’t mean the love between then never existed in the first place. People change over time, sometimes becoming different people altogether. And maybe those two new people just can’t be together. It happens.

@Blackberry “I think love is more rare than falling out of love.”

Seems like there’s something fundamentally flawed about that argument, no? Do you not have to be in love in order to fall out of it?

Love is not a FEELING, love is a a verb, it is about loving ACTIONS. This is the problem with what most people consider love to be. Once the initial high wears off, most relationships go belly up.

I think you can fall out of love, yes. Because the only constant thing in this life is change, and thus, love can change as well. Does it mean that it wasn’t real love? I’m not sure. Just because something is not eternal, does that make it fake? And what is real love really? Feelings are true.

Yes. I have so much more but I will refrain.

I think we read too much into love. My theory is if you have strong feelings for someone and they mean a lot to you, it doesn’t matter how long that lasts or whether other people would say you were experiencing “true love” or mere infatuation. If you believe that you love them then it doesn’t matter what others would call it. As for falling out of love, yes I think this can happen but again, only you can decide whether you really loved them in the first place.

“It’s just, nobody knows, Honey, where it is love goes…
But when it goes it’s gone, gone”

Bruce Springsteen

@zenvelo – has beautifully expressed my opinion and observations on the topic. Being “in love” is some fictional romantic concept that essentially just means infatuation, and is not representative of true love.

I find the whole discussion of true love to be somewhat specious any way sincewe all have our own definitions of it. There is lust, infatuation and more or less mature (i.e., unselfish) love but I don’t find discussions of what is true love very helpful.

@janbb Your answer made me realize I never even thought about love in any serious way until I was well into my 20’s. I used to say, “I love you,” to my boyfriend in high school, but I didn’t really have a definition of love. My family never talked about love really. Love was not really used as a parameter for relationships, but of course there was love present in many relationships around me and involving me.

Also, I find most of my romantic relationships have various combinations of all three components at different times plus any carryovers of meshuggenah baggage I bring from my childhood. Self-knowledge helps sort things out.

Yes, it is possible to fall out of love. Those who claim it wasn’t really love if you fall out of it are committing the no true Scotsman fallacy.

@janbb Thank you for using “meshuggenah”

@Leanne1986 Anytime, bubbeleh!

Love is a frame of mind. Falling out of love is as easy as changing your mind.

Yes, of course, it is possible.