Love is a Choice!

Recently a friend of our son's posted on Facebook a very interesting story of 25 year old Taylor Myers who had written about a high school class she had taken - Relationships for Life - where she had learned that people fall out of love for the same reason they fall in love. The teacher preceded to talk to them about how feelings come and go. 

She writes ....

"After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again."

We loved seeing this article because we know how true it is.  We make choices everyday about how we interact with those in our lives who we profess to love.  We make choices about being kind, or not.  We make choices to accept them as they are, or not. We make choices about how to spend our time and with whom.  We make choices every day and those choices direct our lives and our relationships.  

Having chosen each other for over 34 years now, we know that the over the moon feeling of falling in love has had it's day.  But the deep, richness of this love that springs from the choice for one another, day by day, is truly precious.

So thank you Taylor Myers.  Here is the link to the full article.

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