Love

Love

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Of all the reasons people say they got divorced, one of the most common is that they simply “fell out of love.” This always leaves me wondering: how could this have happened? How can people fall out of love just as easily as they fell in love?

I think the problem here is with the word “fall.” What it sometimes seems to convey is that love is something completely involuntary, like falling into a hole, or falling down the stairs. But if this is the way people see love, it’s no wonder that their marriages often fail.

Just as truly as love is romantic feeling that comes over us, love is also a decision, and so it has both an emotional and a moral dimension. This is why human beings can love in so much more of a profound way than other animals like dogs and cats that are incapable of free-choice. But if the decision to love is free, so also is the decision to stop loving. So when people say that simply “fell out of love,” what it usually means is that, sadly, they no longer choose to love.