“I’ve fallen out of love, is there any hope for the marriage?” or “I was never in love with my wife in the first place, I can’t see how I can start now.” These are common comments that I hear in my work with couples in therapy. Couples often react in surprise when they learnt that they can rekindle their love for their partner, or, for those who was never in love in the first place, they can grow to love their partner.
The myth that couples often come with is that love is a feeling. Love is not a feeling. Many people possessing a feeling of love, and even acting in response to that feeling, act in unloving and destructive ways. On the flip side, a genuinely loving individual will often take loving and constructive actions toward a person he or she dislike, actually feeling no love towards the person at the same time.
Genuine love is a commitment. It exists with or without a loving feeling. It involves the will to extend oneself for the growth of your spouse. It is a choice rather than feeling. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. The person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present.
Given that love is a choice, it then addresses the issue of attraction to person other than our partner. Our feelings of love may be unbounded, but our capacity to be loving is limited. Therefore, we must choose the person on whom to focus our capacity to love and toward whom to direct our will to love. We will come into contact with attractive people continuously. As I have often told my clients, we are married not dead. It is a conscious decision to not put our energy into pursuing them.
The implication of “love is not a feeling” for couples who undergo marital therapy is that, it doesn’t matter where the starting point is for you as a couple: “used to be in love but fallen out of love”, “never been in love”, “still have a little love”.
Genuine love is a commitment. It exists with or without a loving feeling. It involves the will to extend oneself for the growth of your spouse. It is a choice rather than feeling. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. The person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present.
Given that love is a choice, it then addresses the issue of attraction to person other than our partner. Our feelings of love may be unbounded, but our capacity to be loving is limited. Therefore, we must choose the person on whom to focus our capacity to love and toward whom to direct our will to love. We will come into contact with attractive people continuously. As I have often told my clients, we are married not dead. It is a conscious decision to not put our energy into pursuing them.
The implication of “love is not a feeling” for couples who undergo marital therapy is that, it doesn’t matter where the starting point is for you as a couple: “used to be in love but fallen out of love”, “never been in love”, “still have a little love”.
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