Nothing is wrong with falling in love. It is one of life’s greatest and most transcendent experiences — in which you feel utterly lifted out of yourself and as close to union with another person as many of us ever feel. The potential difficulty is not with the experience of falling in love; it’s with what you may do with it.

Falling in love is a set of usually very powerful feelings. It is the nature of all feelings to come and go — even feelings, like infatuation and falling in love, that you might like to hang on to forever. Feelings are like clouds. They appear, grow, decline, dissolve — into other feelings. Neither feelings nor clouds hold steady. Left to themselves, feelings always change.

No problem if you know that feelings are transitory. However, if you make decisions — especially big ones, like getting married — on the basis of feelings alone — not good. Especially if you hang on to those “loving you so much” feelings as your expectation of how it is supposed to be with you and your partner — especially not good.

In my counseling practice, I have more than once heard one partner say to the other, “I still love you, but I am no longer in love with you” — and then proceed to make “not in love with you” the reason to leave the marriage. I have even heard that said (and done) when the couple had children.

Falling in love is a free gift, meaning that you don’t have to pay for it. It may, in fact, be Nature’s way of getting the sexes together and, thus, continuing the race.

While falling in love is a free gift, standing in love is not. It has to be earned — not unpleasantly necessarily, but earned nevertheless. Once the falling in love feelings have past, you keep love alive through action — through behaving lovingly to your partner.

The transition from falling in love to standing in love involves moving from a primary reliance on feelings to a primary reliance on action. Now you have to do love, not just feel it. We explore that transition in the next post.

Question: Do you remember when you had to behave lovingly in order to keep the feelings alive? Tell us about it.