I was thinking about this question after watching a movie where in one of the character’s states “You can’t control who you fall in love with… it’s just one of those things that happen…” blah, blah, blah, etc. etc.
In the aforementioned movie the character in question falls in love with and sleeps with her best friends husband. When publicly admitting the affair the character expressed the above opinion.
My take on the matter is that while you may not be able to successfully choose to fall in love with a person you can deliberately choose to not fall in love with a particular person and be successful. In other words, given 100 people I don’t think it’s reasonable to think I could pick any one of them and fall in love with them just by trying. At the same time I think that I could successfully and consciously refuse to fall in love with someone regardless of how attractive I perceive them to be or how compatible their personality is with mine.
I think the most effective way of preventing oneself from developing feelings for an “off limits person” (an off limits person being defined in this case as a person who is involved in a mutually monogamous relationship with another person regardless of whether or not they’re actually married) is to simply keep your interactions and thoughts regarding the other person at an appropriately platonic level. To simply keep them at “arms length”.
Even if one were to fall in love with an “off limits” person I think it in no way justifies inappropriate behavior (i.e. cheating on your spouse or having them cheat on their spouse due to their relationship with you). IMHO the honorable and right thing to do would be to break up/divorce your current SO (or for the other person to do so if they’re the one in the monogamous relationship) prior to acting on those feelings.
So how about it… how much control do we have over our emotions, specifically, romantic love?
Grim