Love is a Decision
Have you ever heard the phrase “Love is a Decision?” If this is true and it’s that easy, why are so many marriages struggling? Why can’t we just decide to love our partner?
They say that when you fall in love with someone, you have excitement wash over you where you just can’t stop thinking about the other person. You feel weak in the knees, butterflies in the stomach or your heart skips a beat. The feeling is indescribable. No matter what you do, you have no control over this feeling of ephoria. We’ve all felt it at one time in our lives.
Some people claim that love is a decision. That to love someone is a “choice,” something you can, and do, control. So why now after all these years, are we struggling with our relationship. Where did that feeling go and why can’t we get it back if all it takes is making a decision?
In all my work with clients, I’ve come to realize that people are not talking about the same “love”, but rather, two different forces: being “in love” and “loving”. The biggest difference between the two is that one can exist without the other, while one of them cannot. You can be in love with a person, and loving them will automatically come with the package, but you don’t have to necessarily be in love with them in order to love them.
To love is to choose to love. We love our parents because they gave birth to us and raised us and will forever be there for us. We love our friends because they are there for us in the good times and bad. We love our boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse because they are there for us, a constant we have become comfortable with. Someone we have shared our life with and maybe even built a family together with.
It is my belief that every person has a unique threshold for what we believe being “in love” means. This threshold varies for each of us based on how intensely one is able to fall for someone. So how do we know if we are in love?
To love someone is to support their passions; to be in love with them is not only to back their passions, but also to admire them to the point that their hunger for them motivates you to be just as hungry for yours.
To love someone is to share all of your thoughts with them; to be in love with someone is to share all of your thoughts with them, and when you’re not with them, to see them in every place you go, think of them with every person you meet and feel them in every scent you smell.
To love someone is to feel warmer in their embrace; to be in love with someone is to feel warmer in their embrace and subsequently desire to please them any chance you get because you have just as much a fervor to physically express yourself with them as you do emotionally.
So the question remains… do you love or are you in love?
