What Does 'Falling in Love' Mean, Exactly?

When I think back to my formative years in American culture, I remember how “falling in love” was always cast as one of the defining moments that would mark my future adulthood. There were always two notions that accompanied this moment’s defining nature: its inevitability, and an abrupt loss of control. Everyone falls in love at some point, and when they do, everything they thought they knew changes forever. You thought you wanted X? You’re so childish — you really wanted Y all along, you just needed the “right” person to show you the way.

At 38 years old, I’ve never fallen in love in the culturally celebrated sense. From where I stand, I have two options. Option one is sentencing myself to Purgatory on Earth — in other words, I’m technically alive, but not really living. This is what the resident asshole in your orbit calls “Having No Life.” My meaning-making ceiling is about 20 floors lower than those who have fallen in love, and there is nothing I can do about it except become partnered. I can consult the internet or even pay a dating coach to get blockbuster revelations like “you’re just overthinking things.”

Option two: I can “over” think it. I can think belief systems that want me to live a lesser version of life into oblivion. I can think thoughts like “if you like life’s major inflection points imbued with as little critical thinking as possible, ask your doctor if falling in love is right for you.” I can question the significance of falling in love itself and wonder very loudly why it has such a vaunted place in society. Let’s explore that, shall we?

I’ve had the privilege of knowing many women throughout my life, some of whom I’d developed romantic feelings for, mainly in the form of harmless crushes that didn’t really consume much of my time. There have been a few instances where those feelings became stronger, and that person more a part of my thoughts. Tellingly, each of those instances has overlapped with a time when something else in my personal or professional life was seriously out of balance. Even more tellingly, as I got through those difficult times, those feelings eased significantly.

I could have easily said of these instances “wow, I’m falling in love,” and part of me may have even felt that way at the time. But the part of me I trust the most, the part that sits calmly and watches the hour-to-hour fluctuations in my mental and emotional state, knew better. It told me that I was course-correcting for the pain, fear, and confusion I was feeling in other parts of my life. It told me “she’s not the answer to the problems you’re facing.” And that wisest part of me has been right every time.

All this makes me consider how our default setting is to celebrate when people fall in love, but that we don’t often ask why people fall in love. Sure, we get the stock answer of how the brain’s feel-good chemicals flow freely when you’re into someone romantically. And we’re also faced with the relentless ideology of marriage-is-about-sacrifice-for-another, as recited in standard marriage vows most of us can recall from memory as easily as the Pledge of Allegiance, if you’re wondering about the power of that ideology.

However, ask many people who are or have been romantically partnered, and a very mixed picture emerges. These are the people who have discovered that there is no “you” in couple and that you can’t spell marriage without “I” and “me.” After day-to-day life burns off the excess dopamine and crushes the ideology like a mouse under an elephant’s foot, what one or both parties in such couples discover is that they attempted to take shelter from the grind that comes with being a human being in the most socially encouraged way possible — by falling into the arms of a partner. They discover that they now face literally years of work as an unpaid therapist or as a second parent to someone who can’t or won’t do half the things required of functioning adulthood.

You might be thinking, “man, that’s bleak,” and yeah, it is. But it seems like all of us are no more than two degrees of separation from these couples. Either we know them directly, or we know people who know people whose relationships look like this.

However, the bleakness comes from more than just acknowledging the reality. The more significant factor, I believe, is that speaking openly about the reality disabuses us of the fairytale that one other person exists to be our North Star. Many people are still all-in on this fairytale and get very touchy when the notion of coupling as an absolute good is questioned in any way.

I have no such touchiness about my beliefs. I know there are very happy, healthy couples out there. I also know that love can be complicated, and that couples that would win the Borrowed Functioning Olympics can still wind up in long, loving relationships. I also know that it gets even more complicated, and that some people have nearly martyred themselves for their relationships because for various reasons their self-worth has become a tangled knot of I’m The One Who Keeps It All From Crashing Down.

But all that has nothing to do with me. The standards and beliefs of others have nothing to do with me. The imaginations of others have nothing to do with me. Being freed in this way has allowed me to conclude that falling in love means…really, not much of anything.

I don’t doubt I’ll have romantic and sexual feelings for women throughout the rest of my life. When that happens, I also don’t doubt the response of that wisest part of me: “…And?? So, you have some strong feelings. Do they have anything to do with the sprawling empire of a single life you’ve built for yourself and what you want from your future? Are you going to let them blow apart the carefully placed circuit breakers for prudent decision-making you’ve spent years crafting to get where you are today? Please, by all means, make a huge life decision while your brain bounces around at peak irrationality (the wisest part of me is also becoming more of a bitch as it ages.)

Any love I have in my life will not be a product of “falling.” Which, and I can’t let this go, is just a strange turn of phrase to begin with. The only comparable thing I can think of to the abrupt, out-of-left-field nature of “falling in love” is falling into a sinkhole, the kind that happens in Florida now and then and that swallows a road or a couple of houses. Cheers to relationships that don’t begin as synonyms for “sudden, catastrophic earth movement.”

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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