Romantic love is something we all at least know about even if we’ve never felt it before. It seems so simple, but it’s not; love is complex. People have been writing poems, stories, and songs about love for generations. Love can be so intense that you’re lead to believe that it’s stable and permanent. But love is not set in stone, so how does one fall out of love exactly?
One evening, I was sitting in my room when my mom opened my door unannounced to ask me to eavesdrop on my brother a couple of rooms down from mine. He was in his room while on the phone, and it sounded like an argument with his girlfriend.
It was clear that she was breaking up with him over the phone. I heard my older brother cry behind his white bedroom door. He’s only ever slipped a tear out during an emotional scene in a movie, so it was a shock to me.
She had lost feelings for him. All of their dates, the letters and gifts they shared, the polaroids they took, the painting they made together, and all their memories were washed away from her mind.
But what changes after all that time in a relationship? How could a person lose feelings for their significant other while in a relationship? Why do people fall out of love in the first place?
As a kid, I grew up watching Disney princess movies and happy over the fairytale happy endings the princesses all had, wanting something like that for myself. Nowadays, I watch movies and TV shows with romance involved (whether it be the whole plot or in some scenes); it is hard to find any media entertainment that doesn’t have romantic love involved in it.
Most of the songs I listen to are about love and heartbreak. I could say with certainty that 90% of the songs on my playlist are about romantic love.
I typically daydream about romantic situations, but I have never been in love. I guess that is what makes me so curious about it, am I right? I am sure I am not alone in feeling like this. And if you have already been in love before, you want to fall in love again, is that right?
Though I want to experience love eventually, I am scared of it, and I am sure others feel the same. Let me explain: I am anxious about love because I do not want to get hurt. I do not want to fall for someone and share so much about myself for my relationship to end badly. I do not want to spend so much of my energy and time just for that person to not meet the same initiative I give. Being hurt and heartbroken is scary. And that is why I wanted to know why people fall out of love, and in turn, I also learned how romantic relationships, and love, can be preserved.
Before even speaking about how people fall out of love, I have to explain why people fall in love. People fall in love for different reasons, but it is mainly about: the personality of the other person, the proximity to them, the relatabilities you share with them, and sometimes it can be the similarities you both share. Those factors to falling in love are not the same per person, and those qualities aren’t always the reasons why we fall in love, but those are the main factors to falling in love.
Falling in love with someone based on their personality is a no-brainer but proximity is an unusual and probably a new factor that you’ve never heard of. Proximity commonly means the physical location and distance of someone from you. If you see this person frequently and happen to live near them, you’ll have a greater chance of falling in love with them compared to them being far away from you. You could go to the same school, live in the same city, or work at the same company. I know long-distance relationships are a thing, and I’m not trying to say that couples that are in long-distance relationships aren’t in love, but love tends to bloom from being close.
Another big part of falling in love is being compatible, not in the sense of similarities, but instead relatabilities. In the article titled Why Do We Fall in Love with Someone? published on the website upjourney.com on February 26, 2021, and written by a collective group called The Editors, they explain that relatibilities is about the way we communicate with one another and our overall vibe, and it is not about the way we look or even the things we like.
We also have a greater chance of falling in love with mysterious people. The reason why is because meeting someone mysterious will increase your dopamine levels, and that feeling could cause you to fall in love with them. But when you spend more time with that person, the mystery that once surrounded them fades, and possibly your love for them will too.
There are also two types of falling in love: quickly and slowly.
Falling in love quickly leads to a shorter and unstable relationship, and that situation is based on projecting the qualities we like onto someone even if they don’t have those qualities. These relationships are high in the emotional and sexual sense.
Falling in love slowly is considered following your head if falling in love quickly is considered following your heart. When you fall in love slowly, you learn about a person gradually over time and sprout meaningful feelings for them. There’s no rush of pleasure or false ideals about the person because you know how they truly are, and you love their qualities. Your love is purely towards that one person.
In the web article titled Here’s What Happens To Your Brain When You Fall Out Of Love, written by Kris Di on March 5, 2021, and published on the website iheartintelligence.com, Di summarizes the biology in the brain and body when one starts to fall in love and when they fall out of love.
Di begins by describing what happens to the body when you fall in love. “… [N]orepinephrine boosts your adrenaline production, which, in turn, makes your heart beat faster, you get sweaty palms, and the increased dopamine release can make you feel overly-excited,” (Di, 2021).
Di then mentions Dr. Zorica Filipovic-Jewel, MD, a divorce psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry. Dr. Filipovic-Jewel states that the oxytocin levels in our body go up when we get physical affection like hugs and kisses.
Also, your serotonin levels go down when your relationship starts which leads to higher anxiety, obsessive thoughts of your partner, and the feeling of butterflies in your stomach. Don’t worry though because Di says that “[those feelings] normaliz[e] with time and makes you feel at ease with your relationship as the anxiety fades away,” (Di, 2021).
Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and human behavior researcher, gave a TEDTalk titled “Why We Love, Why We Cheat” in February 2006. She explains on the biological level what love is.
Firstly, Fisher explains what romantic love does to a person. The one that we fall in love with is the only one we pay attention to in a crowd. They are exceptional to us, and so is everything they do or the things they own. Fisher comes up with an example to illustrate this, bringing up how in a parking lot full of cars, we see the automobile belonging to the one we are in love with as different from all of the rest. Fisher states that the reason why this happens to people is because of the high activity of dopamine in the brain.
When your relationship is going well with the one you are in love with you experience intense feelings of happiness. But when things are going badly with them, you experience intense feelings of despair. A dependence starts to build for that person you love.
People who are in love also tend to feel possessive. These feelings of possessiveness are potent, especially in a sexual sense, so much so that you can’t handle the thought of the one you love to sleep with other people. Fisher explains that we are possessive because our evolution and biology made us that way so two can come together and create a family.
A new and noteworthy trend that is common in modern societies Fisher brings to light is that people would only marry if they were in love with the other person. Even if the person they were set to marry had all of their ideal characteristics, 86% of men and 91% of women said love was the key factor and wouldn’t marry without it.
Fisher had conducted a research study with other colleagues in which they put 32 people who were intensely in love inside MRI machines to see their brain activity. Through the experiment, they wanted to find out which areas in the brain are involved with feelings of infatuation. Half of the study participants had their crush love them back, and the other half did not. Fisher asked the participants a series of questions for the study.
Pictures of the participants’ crushes, alongside a random photo, would be shown to the study participants while in the MRI machine. The study conductors found that a part of the brain that only activates during a rush of cocaine was active in the participants when seeing their crushes. Fisher took away from this study that romantic love is a drive, not an emotion.
Love is made up of three brain systems: the sex drive, romantic love, and attachment. Fisher speculates that the sexual drive evolved in humans so that we could look for a partner in a wide range of people, romantic love evolved so that we could focus on one person to mate with to conserve our time and energy, and the attachment brain system evolved so that we could stay with a person long-term to build a family.
The three brain systems don’t connect all of the time, but they can associate. Fisher explains how they connect by using an example of how one can feel romantic love towards a casual sex partner which is because, in orgasm, you release a spike of dopamine. Dopamine is associated with the romantic love brain system, and that’s how you can catch romantic feelings for someone you sleep with. Also in orgasms, oxytocin and vasopressin are other chemicals that are released alongside dopamine. Oxytocin and vasopressin are associated with the attachment brain system. That is how lust, love, and attachment intertwine with one another.
Fisher elaborates on how these brain systems don’t connect. It is possible to feel an attachment with one person, romantic love for another person, and sexual attraction to an unrelated person all at the same time. That means that we can love more than one person.
In an article published by UC Berkeley Scientific Journal in 2009 by Maansi Shah titled Falling Out of Love?, Shah describes what romantic love feels like and how those relationships generally end because of assumptions the couple has of “losing” their infatuation, but in reality, the psychological needs of the couple were not met. Shah brings up case studies and how our unconscious affects the way we love.
The unconscious mind is a topic Shah brings up, and we all know at least a little bit of it from the work Sigmund Freud has done. The unconscious mind is where our darkest thoughts and feelings are, and it is found in the prefrontal cortex, which is the front part of the brain where our forehead is, according to a study conducted by cognitive neuroscientists.
There is a model that Shah uses to simplify Erik Erikson’s, a psychoanalyst’s, model of the eight stages of life. There are eight stages in total, but Shah only summarizes the four that a person experiences in their childhood that are important in their future relationships: trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus doubt, initiative versus guilt, inferiority versus competency. If a child’s “needs” aren’t met for any of these stages, they develop some sort of insecurity that stays with them into adulthood.
For trust versus mistrust, a baby needs food and a home, or they will become mistrustful of the world. For autonomy versus doubt, a child needs a lenient parent when starting to gain some responsibility, or else the kid will become anxious and insecure. For initiative versus guilt, a child needs a parent who supports their imaginative mind, or else the kid will gain a “low self-worth”. For inferiority versus competency, a child needs to become more social and learn social skills, or else the kid will have a low self-competence.
Shah references a book by Eckhart Tolle titled A New Earth, in which he explains a theory of what true love is. True love is when you meet someone who can help make up for an unmet need in your childhood. For example, if you have low self-esteem, you’ll look for someone who’ll encourage you, and that will raise your self-esteem. The same can be said for the other stages in Erikson’s model. Once someone meets a person who helps fulfill a need, that couple will feel as if they’ve fallen in love.
Shah explains that couples break up with each other on the grounds of falling out of love by saying that they weren’t actually in love at all, or little issues became a bigger problem that somehow eclipsed the good. The central cause of couples seemingly falling out of love is because of the minute differences, or even “bad” traits that the romantic couple has that blow up to a proportion that no matter what good things they do, the little bit of unacceptability is all the other can see.
Your partner’s flaws will become magnified, and you’ll become more frustrated with them because you’re focusing on their flaws. Seeing your partner in a bad light also leads to falling out of love with your partner and breaking up with them. Also, focusing on your partner’s flaws instead of appreciating the relationship and noticing their good side will lead to being frustrated with your partner over little things and arguing. The affinity will soon turn sour.
According to Dr. Gary Chapman, a marriage specialist, the feeling of being in love doesn’t last forever. It’s a minimum of 4 months and up to 2 years. But infatuation will feel different over time than it does in the beginning. Love will change from feelings of nervousness and anxiety to a sense of calm and comfort.
When you lose feelings for the one you’re with or once loved, the chemicals in your brain that would release when being near them aren’t being produced anymore. Kris Di mentions Dr. Catherine Frannsen, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and director of neuro studies at Longwood University, who further explains what happens in the brain. “The brain in love finds the nucleus accumbens (a major reward center) linked to the frontal cortex to generate positive feelings, and has a reduced connection to the amygdala (the fear center). Those connections reverse in the process of falling out of love. An individual finds the relationship no longer feels good, and that their social judgement changes.” (Dr. Frannsen).
Dr. Frannsen brings up how falling out of love isn’t something sudden or something that happens overnight, “it’s a long slow process that you weren’t paying close attention to…”. According to Dr. Frannsen, falling out of love is, “-a process of forgetting habits and connections, of altering hormones and neurotransmitters, and of changing behaviors.” She continues that “[s]ex might reinvigorate oxytocin and potentially reignite a spark, but it isn’t enough on its own,”.
In an article written by Power of Positivity titled 10 Signs Your Partner Is Falling Out of Love (And Not Telling You), published on July 31, 2018, on powerofpositivity.com, the article lists 10 things to look out for in your partner which are signs that they are falling out of love with you. Mainly, the article states that a partner that isn’t emotionally there for you, doesn’t care about you, has lost respect for you, isn’t willing to work things out with you, and/or won’t properly communicate has lost their love for you.
Like Dr. Frannsen had said, even though sexual activity is high in a couple, that doesn’t necessarily mean they love each other. The couple must be emotionally there for each other and show it in simple ways like asking how their day was and prioritize spending time with their partner.
We fall out of love because of miscommunication issues and not compromising. Talking with your partner to describe to them what the problem is straightforward without an argument is essential. There should be a mutual compromise between the couple so there can be time for the couple to spend time apart from each other. Doing things that are important for them, and also time together for crucial tasks.
Falling out of love means that the chemicals that once released in our brain just by being near this person have stopped being produced, which is a sign that the brain is rewiring itself. Your partner is no longer a source of happiness for you.
WORKS CITED
Di, K. (2021, March 05). Here’s what happens to your brain when you fall out of love. Retrieved from https://iheartintelligence.com/heres-what-happens-to-your-brain-when-you-fall-out-of-love/
Fisher, H. (Director), & TED2006, T. (Producer). (2006, February). Why We Love, Why We Cheat [Video file]. Retrieved April 29, 2021, from https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_why_we_love_why_we_cheat?language=en
PowerofPositivity. (2020, July 20). 10 signs your partner is going away from you (and hiding it). Retrieved from https://www.powerofpositivity.com/your-partner-is-falling-out-of-love/
Shah, M. (2009). Falling Out of Love? Berkeley Scientific Journal, 12(2), 1–5. Retrieved April 25, 2021, from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58v0q3qr
The Editors, et al. “Why Do We Fall in Love with Someone?.” 26 Feb. 2021. Web. 09 Apr. 2021, from https://upjourney.com/why-do-we-fall-in-love-with-someone
