Can someone completely fall out of love?

Falling out of love can be a very scary feeling. It might feel like having noticeably less interest in your partner and feeling less excited about spending time with them, even though you still care about them. That might sound like it means you're not with the right person or like your relationship is going downhill, but the truth is, having that "falling out of love" feeling is completely normal. Let's talk about why people fall out of love and what that really means.

What falling out of love means for your relationship.

"I just wasn't in love anymore." "I love you, but I'm not in love with you." We hear these statements as common reasons one person left a relationship. We take this to mean that the heart-pounding, exhilarating feelings that characterize the first stage of a relationship have faded. The eternal beloved who, just days or weeks before made life worth living, is now a regular, flawed, sometimes annoying human being. But falling out of love doesn't mean your relationship is over. While the first round of falling in love may be characterized by strong feelings of love, a desire to spend a lot of time together, butterflies, and even a feeling of ecstatic bliss, the subsequent rounds are usually much less exciting.

If we knew to expect the eventual fall from grace that occurs with every couple in a committed relationship, we wouldn't feel so shocked when it happens. But because we're inundated with the Hollywood ideal of "happily ever after," we subconsciously believe, even if we rationally know better, that the in-love feelings should last forever.

The good news is that, once you fall out of love, you can begin the satisfying work of learning how to sustain real love, which in a healthy marriage or long-term partnership, grows over time. (And yes, you can even get that crush feeling on your spouse again with time.)

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What to do when you've fallen out of love.

Here are some basic love laws that will help you reignite your feelings of love and attraction for your partner:

1. Know that love is what you give.

We carry a strong cultural misconception that love is something that happens to you. In other words, it's your partner's job to "make" you feel alive, loved, and happy. While we do need a loving partner in order to share love, you and only you are responsible for your feelings of aliveness and joy.

And here's the great and empowering secret that our cultural mythology keeps hidden: The best way to feel love is to give it. I'm not talking about a codependent relationship where your good feelings are dependent on making someone else happy.

I'm talking about a real and true love that arises from a genuine desire to bring joy to your partner and offer support in the ways that feel loving to him or her. When you can reverse the conditioned mindset that love is something you get to the idea that love is something you give, miracles happen.

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2. Cultivate gratitude.

At any moment, we can focus on what we don't love about our partners and what's missing in the relationship OR what we love and appreciate. When you proactively move toward gratitude and engage in loving actions like writing and sending gratitude lists or letters to your partner, you carve out the pathways to your heart that will infuse you with loving feelings.

3. Name your walls.

Because we've all been hurt by love (rejected, shamed, judged, abandoned), we know the risk we take when we open ourselves to loving again. Sometimes these hurts have occurred in past relationships with parents, siblings, or exes, and sometimes you've been hurt by your current partner. Either way, it takes enormous courage to open your heart once you've been hurt. Yet it's the only way of sustaining real love. Once you can start to identify the ways that you shut down and protect, thereby barricading your heart behind an ironclad wall, the faster you'll be able to soften that wall and move toward your partner once again.

There is great power in realizing that we don't have to wait for anyone else to change in order to feel love but that this longing can be met by our own actions. When you know the love laws and commit to putting the loving actions that open your heart into practice, you can sustain a lifetime of a loving, honest, satisfying relationship. It's not always easy or fast work, but it's work that is well worth the effort. For, in the end, all we really want is to feel love and be loved.

Take time to understand the signs of falling out of love. Then, when you're ready, here's how to stop falling out of love and fall back in love with your partner.

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