In order for you to love, you need to choose to love. You need to choose to be loving. You need to look at the person you're with and choose to love that person over and all over again. Falling in love may feel like it just happens.
The only reason you want to fall in love is because the idea of love makes you feel all nice and fuzzy. No love is entirely unselfish. The act of falling in love is completely egocentric and shallow. Unless you understand this, you will never fully understand love.
Think about it. How can you know if you truly love someone when you barely know that person? You may think you know this person -- that’s what love does to us -- but you don’t. People think they fall in love all the time, but they're not truly in love.
That last statement isn’t as contradictory as it sounds. You should think of falling in love as simply the beginning of something that could potentially change your life. It’s just the starting point of what might be a beautiful love story.
You need to look at the person you're with and choose to love that person all over again.
Falling in love may feel like it just happens. To an extent, it does "just happen." But loving is voluntary. You must choose to do it. It won't be easy. It’s easier when the person you’re with is right for you, but it isn’t always going to be smooth sailing.
We're wired to be selfish. Selfishness is a core behavioral trait. You can't do anything for others until you understand the concept of selfhood. And you can’t have a concept of selfhood without some predisposition to selfishness. We're selfish for one simple reason: We would die if we weren't.
Egocentricity is basic, but people aren’t. We’re psychologically complex. We’re capable of understanding dualities that other beings can’t comprehend. But when it comes to love, all that intelligence seems to go out the door. We stop thinking and allow ourselves to be driven purely by emotion. We allow instinct to guide our decision-making.
How many couples split up because they "fall out of love"? How many of those couples could have made it work if they better understood love?
The truth is, you can’t fall out of love. You can only stop being in love.
Being in love is a passive state. It’s the highway to loving. You can’t love unless you’re in love first, but you can stop being in love before you make it all the way to actually loving. That’s really all there is to it.
When you choose to love -- when you wake up next to this person for the umpteenth time -- and for the umpteenth time you thank your lucky stars that this person is still a part of your life, that’s love. You only love one day at a time.
With each new day, you restart the process -- if you’re lucky enough. And if you’re smart, you’ll do this for as long as you possibly can.
"Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being 'in love' which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away..."
—Louis de Bernières, Correlli's Mandolin
"Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being 'in love' which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away..."
—Louis de Bernières, Correlli's Mandolin
I've come to the conclusion that the more energy we put into "falling in love," the less we have for actually loving other people. From my perspective, what we call "falling in love" is primarily narcissism, while "loving" is generous and selfless. We call it "falling" because we tell ourselves and everyone else that it's out of our control, which very conveniently provides the perfect excuse to cover all the damage we do to each other.
I read an article recently proposing that the evolutionary reason for falling in love is not really about the person we're connecting to (seemingly) but about the relationship we're desperate to get out of. In other words, we project lots of crazy stuff on someone because the frenzy we then create in ourselves provides a powerful lever to help us get away from someone else. "It's not you. It's me. I fell in love. What can I do?"
Looking back on my life, I can see where I've done this. I used the new woman to help me pull away from the woman I wanted to leave, but couldn't, for one reason or another (cowardice? weakness? love?). Or maybe it wasn't even a relationship I wanted to escape, but a dead-end job or just a phase of my life I wanted to leave behind.
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