And sometimes love disappears.
People are always struck with astonishment when it happens to them. It makes no difference that it has already happened billions of times throughout history, and has happened to us personally somewhere between three and seven times, depending on age.
One way or another, the fading of the feeling of love strikes us with pain and disbelief.
And in our pain, we approach the partner who turned their back and their heart on us, and try to do two things that almost never succeed: to understand why, and to repair.
Because the connection between love and reasons is a complicated one.
Love appears for certain reasons, presumably, and it disappears for reasons. Whole generations of thinkers have presumed to decode those reasons, and as of the writing of these lines, all of them have failed at the task.
Why? Partly because there are a great many reasons and internal and external factors, and it is hard to isolate one decisive factor in the appearance or disappearance of love. And partly because a great many of those reasons are unconscious.
It is very hard for humanity to come to terms with the fact that so central and influential a feeling in our lives is unreasoned, and so we turn to idiotic explanations — the presence or absence of a click, or chemistry, heaven help us — and offer simplistic recipes for saving souls.
I am too small to know the answer. But if a separation has descended on your head, I have a relevant message.
You cannot persuade another person to love you. Simply not.
But, you know what, the reverse is not true. In fact, the complementary sentence is one of the most provocative things I have written:
You can persuade yourself to love another person.
Not by force, and not by pretending. By attention. Love follows attention far more reliably than attention follows love, and almost nobody is told this, because it sounds unromantic and it happens to be true.
Which means the useful question after a separation is never why he stopped. It is what you were doing with your attention in the eighteen months before he did — and whether you would do it differently, for someone, again.