The Wrong Notion That You Can Fall Out of Love

I’ve always felt that the idea of “falling out of love” is, in many ways, a cheap escape—an excuse. Perhaps it became a convenient concept in our fast-paced world, where even human emotions are treated like disposable paper napkins. But love, true love, the kind that shakes the soul and transcends fleeting passions, does not fade, nor does it end. The notion that love can vanish, can be outgrown, or tossed away like an old shirt, is not just wrong—it’s a denial of what love actually is.

Why? Because real love has nothing to do with dopamine highs, romantic gestures, or perfect compatibility. It has everything to do with will, intention, and commitment. “Falling” out of love feels more like the inability to acknowledge that the thing you once felt is simply still there, buried under ego, complacency, or neglect. And that? That’s on us, not love.

Spiritual Truths About Love

In the Bible, we’re taught that love is eternal. First Corinthians 13:8 could not put it more clearly: “Love never fails.” There’s no fine print saying that love might run out under certain circumstances, or that love burns out like a candle. Love, by its very nature, is infinite. So, when someone says they no longer feel love, maybe what they’re admitting is that they’ve stopped nurturing it, not that love itself is gone.

The Bhagavad Gita, too, speaks to a love that is enduring beyond the transient. Krishna tells Arjuna that the love built on attachment and worldly desire fades. But divine love—the selfless kind, the one beyond ego—remains indestructible. That, I think, is the distinction many of us fail to see. Perhaps we equate the disappearance of lust or infatuation as proof that “love has ended.” But those things were never love in the first place, were they? Lust fades. True love transforms.

Philosophical Musings

Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.” Love demands we give everything of ourselves, drawing from the deepest parts of us to uphold our bonds. When people claim to “fall out of love,” what seems truer is that they fell out of their patience for love—and maybe their courage, too. Because loving someone is brave work.

The Greek philosophers distinguished between different types of love: eros (passionate love), philia (friendship), storge (familial love), and agape (selfless love). While eros may waver, agape—a selfless commitment to care for another human’s well-being—is much harder to lose. I wonder if we’ve forgotten these distinctions. Did we mistake the heady fireworks of eros for something sustainable, and when those sparks see their natural course, proclaim “I’ve fallen out of love”? What hubris that is.

Literary Truths

Shakespeare, the ultimate observer of human emotions, described love as something unshakable in Sonnet 116:

"Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark."

He saw love as steadfast, unwavering. The kind of love that persists even as circumstances and people change. When we say we’ve fallen out of love, I think we’re guilty of letting our altered circumstances define our feelings rather than allowing love to anchor us through the change.

Victor Hugo in Les Misérables offered yet another take on the subject. “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further.” Hugo recognized that love is an act, not a possession. You don’t “fall out of” acts; you just stop performing them.

And then there’s Rumi, who devoted his life to expressing the eternal nature of love in his poetry: “The moment I heard my first love story, I started looking for you,” he wrote. Rumi’s understanding of love wasn’t just romantic—it was a vast and encompassing force that exists whether or not we choose to see or feel it.

Historical Evidence

Think of Antony and Cleopatra, two historical figures—no, two souls—who showed us what it meant to cling to love even when their world crumbled. Their story wasn’t about perfect love or conditions for staying “in love.” It spoke to a depth of connection that defied ambition, politics, and survival itself. Did Cleopatra fall out of love when Antony lost Egypt for her? Did Antony fall out of love when he faced ruin? Love like that transcends mistakes, pain, and even death.

On the other hand, take Henry VIII. He said he loved Catherine of Aragon—the woman he fought wars to marry—but when the glitter of their union faded, he moved on with impunity. Was it that Catherine became unworthy of love? Or did Henry simply abandon his commitment to love her? The truth—ugly but revealing—is that if love fades, it’s often because someone chooses to stop feeding it rather than because love itself ceases to exist.

Personal Reflections

When I think about love in my own life, I’ll admit something: I’ve claimed to fall out of love before. It’s easy to say, isn’t it? “I just don’t feel it anymore,” as though love were this mystical thing that you either have or don’t. But looking back, I’m not proud of those moments. If I’m honest with myself, what I meant was that I stopped choosing love. I stopped tending to it, the way one might stop watering a houseplant and then blame the plant for dying.

In my family, I’ve seen marriages weather storms that should have sunk them. My grandparents occasionally fought like thunder and lightning, but I never doubted their love. Their secret? They chose to stay. They chose to forgive, again and again. They never surrendered to the illusion that their love was gone just because the feeling ebbed.

What People Get Wrong

Maybe we need a reminder that love is, at its heart, an action, not merely a feeling. Feelings are fickle—they rise and fall like tides. But actions? Actions are things we deliberately control. When people say things like “we fell out of love”, is it love that’s gone or convenience? Contentment? The butterflies of infatuation? Real love—soulful, enduring love—doesn’t vanish.

Let me leave you with this thought from C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves: “Love as distinct from ‘being in love’ is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.” Modern relationships fail not because love disappears, but because we give up on cultivating it.

So, perhaps the next time you (or I) are tempted to say, “I’ve fallen out of love,” we should pause and ask: Am I sure? Am I certain that it’s not simply my willpower, patience, or courage to love that’s faltered instead? Because real love—the stubborn, radiant, all-encompassing kind—isn’t something you fall out of. It’s something you return to, again and again.

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