Rules for Falling Out of Love

You fell in; here’s how to get back out

Falling in love is so easy that most of us don’t even set out to do it. One minute we’re tripping along in our lives, enjoying the intoxicating mix of attraction and affection. The next moment, we’ve fallen — and we can’t get up.

That’s the real Life Alert many of us would choose — the option to push a button and have someone stop us before we fall headlong into another love affair that could end in heartbreak. But there is no easy button and certainly no emergency option to reach for in those moments we fall. Love arrives even when we think we’ve taken all possible measures to protect ourselves from it.

The last time I fell in love was a surprise. Not a pleasant one, I might add. I had been in love before. It was a zero star experience as far as I could tell. It would feel great for a minute, but then, the hurt that followed would be crushing. So, when I realized I was falling in love, I dug in my heels. I pulled out all the stops to try to keep it from happening. Denial was short-lived. Ignoring it didn’t make it go away. Surrender was inevitable.

Heartbreak didn’t have to be. I’d have seen a counselor with him or worked on our differences. I would have stayed and loved as long as he let me. In the end, I had to move on and accept that I could not love enough for the both of us.

Falling out of love isn’t quite as easy as falling into it. What’s funny (and yet not funny at all) is that we want to throw ourselves headlong into the falling out of love experience. We eagerly await that feeling of freedom. We look for it and long for it. We hunt it down with single-minded focus. We get under to get over or find another coping mechanism that we think will do the trick.

But that’s not how it works. Grief, like love, comes without an invitation, and it doesn’t just leave when we ask it nicely. Instead, it stays for as long as it needs to — which is always much longer than we’d like.

But what if we could move the process along? What if there was a path we could follow that would make this a little easier? We need rules for falling out of love.

Rules for Falling Out of Love

1. Stop with the Excuses and Lean into Acceptance

If we really want to fall out of love, we need to stop spending all our time, energy, and emotional resources on trying to figure out why it ended. This line of inquiry can be helpful when we delve into self-discovery in order to become more self-aware. It’s completely unhelpful when we try to breakdown the whys and wherefores of someone else’s behavior. We don’t need to make excuses. We do need to accept it.

Acceptance was both the easiest and the hardest part of my breakup. I accepted that he was allowed not to love me. I accepted that he was free to leave and make a different choice. But my heart, my stubborn heart, couldn’t understand or accept that the love he’d once given was gone. My heart needed to be convinced long after my mind had accepted the truth.

I didn’t need reasons. I needed to accept the end — with all the grief that came with it. We cannot fully fall out of love as long as we’re in denial that the relationship is over.

2. Surrender to Grief’s Timeline

Falling out of love won’t happen because we’ve insisted on it and given the Universe a neat timetable of how long it should take. It’s laughable to think we can control grief and a waste of time to try. If we truly want to fall out of love, we need to surrender to grief’s timeline and let healing happen at its own pace.

My grief was raw and all-consuming, but if I’m honest, it began before the relationship ended. It began when I realized that it would end, and nothing I could do would stop it. I started grieving then, and when the end came, I thought I would be fine because I’d already anticipated it. I had rehearsed my pain in preparation. But nothing prepared me for losing the future I had so badly wanted, or the partner I was completed devoted to loving.

The grief in my heart was a wild, roaring thing, but on the outside, I was curiously calm. I went about my days with purpose, and I collapsed into bed at night, alone with an absence that made it hard to breathe. I fought the grief, particularly when I would be doing so well and then experienced a major setback.

The only way I had any hope of falling out of love was to surrender to grief — to its complexity and its timeline. It would stay until it was done. It would visit as it liked. I would have to learn to live with it.

3. Love Fiercely

In my quest to fall out of love, I came up with a rule quite by accident. I would love fiercely. I wouldn’t let the loss turn me into one of those people too afraid to love again. In fact, I was starving for love by the end of it all, and so I started declaring my love to friends. To family members. To my dog. To my readers. I surrounded myself with love, and it was one of the most powerful, healing experiences of my life.

I had friends before that relationship, but after it ended, my friendships grew stronger. In the time that I had on my hands while I was grieving, I cultivated stronger relationships. I reached out more to the people I cared about. I made new friends and made weekly lunch dates with them. Through all my grieving, I took some of the love in my heart and gave it to people who were happy to receive it.

It was curiously healing. I had been giving love away to someone who didn’t want it throughout the grieving process. To give love to someone who did? It was powerful.

It was also validating, in its own way. When relationships end, it can strike a blow to our sense of self-worth. That was certainly true for me. Building up friendships with people who appreciated my company was affirming. It was a reminder that many people choose to be in my life and accept the love I have to offer. It was a balm to the wound that the loss had created. It helped me fall more in love with myself.

4. Accept the Inconvenient Truth

Sometimes, we just need to accept an inconvenient truth — and not just about climate change either. Sometimes, we need to accept that we just aren’t going to fall out of love. It might not ever fully leave us. That doesn’t mean we don’t have the capacity to fully and completely love ourselves and others.

We sometimes have a childish idea that we cannot move on if we still love someone. It’s true that we can’t move on if we’re stuck in the past, clinging to relationships left behind. But I do think it’s possible to move on fully while carrying love in our hearts for people we connected with along the way. I believe it’s fully possible to love — and still choose to let go.

Loving and losing is painful. We might hope with everything in us that we’ll just fall out of love completely. And sometimes, we do. There are usually reasons. But other times? It’s just not possible.

I’ve decided there’s something extraordinarily precious about being able to love and to find the acceptance to let go when that love isn’t wanted or isn’t right for us. It might not feel beautiful — usually, it doesn’t — but it’s a self-loving act to refuse to wallow in grief and instead simply accept the love as just another part of ourselves.

Love: The Next Chapter

I’ve never been good at falling in love — or falling out of it either. I always went into love kicking and screaming, heels dug into the Earth to try to stop the slide toward the abyss. I protested too much, tried too hard to never fall. Still, I fell. For a little while there, it was glorious. Even though I knew the risks. Even though I never fully believed I would escape them.

Falling out of love has been just as hard. I became an expert at resistance, at the stubborn refusal to surrender an inch to grief. I fought my hardest to move forward before it was time. In the end, it took the time it was meant to take, and I just had to accept that it was going to be uncomfortable for a long time.

It may seem strange after all that to say that I’m happy, but I am. I’m even, curiously, hopeful. I know that I have a heart big enough to love again. As wild as I grieved, I know I have that same passion and feeling inside me to adore, to admire, and — yes, to love.

Maybe we don’t need rules for falling out of love. Or into it, for that matter. Maybe we need to accept that there are no rules. No “should”. No “normal”. There is only how we feel, and no amount of denial or running will change that.