“You don’t just stop loving someone, either you never did or you always will.”

By: Kelly

I don’t think people truly can fall out of love. When people claim that they have, there are several possibilities:

1)They were never really in love with their partner in the first place. Rather, they got carried away and mistook infatuation for love, overestimating their feelings. This is the puppy love that teenagers gush about so often in high school.

2)They fell in love with an ideal. It’s natural for a person to idealize their partner initially in a relationship, but most people are eventually able to adapt their initial conceptions of their partner to fit with the reality of who their partner really is. If however, when they see past that polished version of their partner, they end the relationship because they aren’t happy with what (or who) they see, it shows they were never in love with their partner but only with whom they envisioned them to be. Love can be blind- our hearts can justify murder with the best of intentions when it comes to those we care for.

3)Either one person in the relationship or the other changed and became someone they hadn’t originally been when the couple first met. In this case, the love one partner has for another continues, but it is as if their partner has died because they are no longer the person they first fell for. It isn’t that they’ve fallen out of love with that person, it’s just that the person they fell in love with no longer exists. This is very common among teenagers and young adults who are still figuring out who they are going to be and what they believe in. We change a lot as we grow older and sometimes become completely different people than who were originally were.

4)People believe they’ve fallen out of love because they don’t “feel it” anymore. However, it is inevitable that the passion in every relationship will subside to some extent eventually. There is a natural transition in all good relationships to a relationship based more off of companionship. It doesn’t mean the passion is gone forever, it just means it isn’t the defining quality of the relationship. Just because you don’t feel something at a certain moment doesn’t mean that feeling is gone forever. Stick it out and be patient because love isn’t an easy thing to come by.

5)Then there are people who have scarred their relationships irreparably through vicious fights or tragic experiences. In cases like these, the love the couple shares isn’t gone but it is overpowered by the history between them. Each person serves as a constant reminder to the other of everything they’ve gone through. Even though they still love one another and always will, being together is too painful so they learn to move on and meet new people.

Here’s the bottom line- true love ever actually disappears. Sometimes, however, it does fade into the background. If you legitimately like someone and there is a certain inexplicable dynamic between the two you that just works- you naturally click- that bond never disappears entirely. It is always waiting in the rafters ready to swoop down at the most opportune (or inopportune) moment. Many times this abandoned (I’d say repressed, but I don’t want to go totally Freudian on you) attraction is kept at bay forever however, because you move on, meet new people, and forget about the one you once fell for. Sure, exes can be friends but they can never be friends the way they might have been before dating. Personal histories cannot be ignored and the intimacy you once shared with a person is always still with you, no matter how much you deny it. Love might fade with the memories but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still there, buried somewhere deep inside. As long as you can still remember why you fell for someone in the first place and your initial reasoning still makes sense to you, that possibility you once shared with a person continues to live on in some form, even if you never feel it or act upon it.

I fully believe that so much of what we feel and why we feel the way we do is hidden to us beneath our subconsciouses. Our hearts are not just mindless vessels of blood pumping life throughout our body. Instead, they are living organs that think for themselves and hide their intentions from us. They are the master manipulators, the double agents that physically control you without your understanding or permission. Be afraid. Be very afraid- because no one is immune to the power of love. Your heart will never cease to surprise you and rekindle old feelings that you thought had disappeared forever.

This is precisely why Monica and I are the experts we consider ourselves to be. We have the keen power of observation because we aren’t controlled by our hearts. True, we’ve had our fair share of times when our emotions have gotten the best of us when dealing with guys, and when that has happened to each of us, we’ve had to rely on the other to assess the situation because we were unable to do it for ourselves anymore- the bias got in the way and impaired us from seeing the whole picture. In general however, we don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves and haven’t fallen completely prey to our hearts. That is why we can interpret things as they truly are- we aren’t looking at the world through a pair or love-injected rose colored glasses. Not yet anyway.