Falling in love isn’t a choice. but staying in love is. When you start to fall in love, it’s an irrational chain of events that simply cannot be stopped. You can never control who you fall for because falling in love is like free-falling, there’s no way you can stop yourself.
It can happen slowly, over time, or quickly in a matter of moments. One glance. One touch. One eight-hour phone conversation. And before you know it, you are falling in love with them.
When you start to fall in love with someone, it’s a beautiful feeling. Falling in love is the easy part — the excitement that comes with learning what makes another person tick, and the equally terrifying counterpart of exposing your soul to somebody else. It’s interesting and unique. It never happens the same way twice.
But staying in love is a choice. An active decision-making process that requires work and dedication. It’s easy to fall in love with somebody for all their good qualities: they’re smart, sexy, funny. These things are easy to love.
Related: The Do’s and Don’ts of Falling and Staying In Love Based on Someone’s Love Language
But the real challenge lies in staying in love with them. When the rush and excitement dissipate and there are just two flawed people trying to come up with new ways to still love each other, despite all their imperfections, problems, and flaws. That’s the hard part when you think about how you can stay in love with them forever.
You start running out of things to talk about, you catch yourself telling the same stories over and over again. And the blinders you once had to each other’s imperfections slowly start to disappear.
Maybe it’s little things like he always seems to forget important days or isn’t as thoughtful as he used to be when he was trying to win your affection. Maybe it’s big things like when he screams stuff when he’s mad that he can’t take back.
At the end of the day, nobody’s perfect and everybody comes with their own unique set of flaws and features. People who stay in love don’t do so because they have no choice; every single day is a choice.
Over the course of time, you begin to realize that the person you fell in love with is imperfect, and the true act of love, the true definition of loving someone, is loving those imperfections as wholly and completely as you love the good.
“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy.” ― Taylor Jenkins Reid
Love is saying I see you, all of you, exactly how you are — the good, the bad, the things that you don’t want anybody else to see. I see what you’re ashamed of, what you wish you could hide. I see these things, and I still love you. I still choose you. I will stay with you. I am not going anywhere. I will not leave you just because you are imperfect and have flaws.
Related: How to Stay Crazy in Love: 5 Simple Hacks
And you hope and pray and plead for the other person to do the same.
To take your set of shortcomings and love them in the same way. To stick around when sh*t gets unimaginably hard and tough and complicated. To love you even on your worst days. To accept you despite your flaws. To choose you back.
Leave a Reply