Falling Out Of Love

There are countless stories about people falling in love. Veritable strangers happen to cross paths, and all the right connections are made and experiences are shared to cause them to see how perfect they are for each other and how much they want to spend the rest of their lives together. Of course, many of these stories also have characters whose love didn't last forever. Lovers fight and argue. They can grow to detest and despise one another. But the most common theme I have found in such stories of ex-lovers is the sentence, "I still love him/her." It's basically impossible for two people who fall in love to actually stop loving each other. Except that it's not true. People fall out of love on a daily basis. Ironically, they usually don't notice it. Love is all about desire. When you hate somebody to the point that you always think about how you want to make their life miserable, you're still obsessed; you still feel desire toward that person. It may be a negative feeling, but you can't stop wanting to be in that person's life. Falling out of love is about releasing that desire. And people go through it in a number of ways. Often, people simply find a new object of desire. It could be a new girlfriend/boyfriend. It could be a new hobby, or investing more time in current activities. It could simply be a change in thought process; the same way you can one day just stop being interested in a food you used to love, you can just stop being interested in a person you were once obsessed about. I find falling out of love an interesting experience to explore, because it is a bizarre blend of finality and not. In a certain sense, a love story is over when the people stop being in love (at least when they mutually are). And yet, nobody died or moved away or otherwise made it so they would never see each other again, so the story of these two people's lives isn't over.