Love is a Choice not a Feeling

Love is a verb, an action word. It is not based on feelings but on truth.

Karen Long said the following:

"You can't fall out of love. You can only choose to stop obeying the commands to love.

It is what I refer to as "world-speak" to say; "I've fallen out of love," or "My spouse has fallen out of love," or "I just don't love you that way anymore."

Scripture describes love very differently than the way we think of it. We think of it as an emotion whereas scripture describes it as an act of obedience. An emotion can and will inevitably fade. Thus the feeling of having "fallen out of love." But obedience, as a sign of your integrity for a covenant, remains until death. With His life and death, Jesus clearly demonstrated love as an act of obedience by taking up His cross and then dying on it. As He said, He was willing to put His Father's will before His own. He demonstrated unwavering integrity for His Father's Law and the covenant of love. This is love (and faith) according to God, Who is Love.

So, understanding the truth about love, I hope you can see it's not possible to fall out of love. It is possible on the other-hand to choose to stop obeying the commands to love or to have never obeyed them to begin with.

I will go so far as saying that in our marriages most of us never obeyed the commands to love to begin with. Instead we got married mostly as a result of “romantic attraction" (aka; limerence) and relied on the feelings of elation that came with it to carry the relationship for a time. But eventually, those feelings faded and by then it’s likely we already had children and we had begun to accumulate memories and moments as well as expectations for the future. So, wanting to be optimistic, we told ourselves this will somehow get better. But it didn't get better and soon it was no longer bearable for us or our spouse and a crisis could not be avoided.

In the beginning, when Adam and Eve "fell" their sin was that they stopped obeying the commands of God, Who is Love. As a result, they were banished from the presence of Love. Now the goal for all of us is to reconcile with God so we can return to Love. We do that through our obedience to the commands to love as we love God, our neighbors (those close to us) and ourselves."

And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love. - 2 John 1:6"