Can you control who you fall in love with?

Great Debates
1

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

2

I’ve often said you can’t help who you fall in love with. Why am I so attracted to Asian men (and why did it happen so suddenly)? Why did I fall in love with a man who lives 4,000 miles away from me? I rather like the fact that these questions can’t be answered - life has to have some mystery, after all… :wink:

As far as not falling in love with someone, I suppose it depends. If you just met the person and know nothing about them, that’s easy. If you met them and you feel a spark but know they are off limits, you can limit your exposure to them before your feelings take off. If you’ve already gotten to know them, well, at that point it might be too late - it’s the getting to know someone that makes you fall in love with them, after all. So, truly, there are a lot of factors involved, so it depends.

As far as cheating on your spouse, if you’ve made the commitment, then that’s wrong, of course.

Esprix

3

I am certain that it is not possible to “make yourself” fall in love with any arbitrary person. The evidence for this, while anecdotal, seems overwhelming.

I think it is certainly possible to keep yourself from falling in love with someone if you can limit your exposure to that person and if you recognize the need to control the possibility before the emotional connection grows strong.

In all cases, you can control what you do after/if you fall in love.[sup]1[/sup]

[sup]1[/sup][sub]By you, of course, I mean someone else. My own failures in this regard are, if not tragic, at least tragi-comic. I think it will get better once I clear emotional puberty. If not, I’ll at least be able to draw on my IRA by then.[/sub]

4

I don’t think you can control who you fall in love with. Attraction is based on a whole pile of things, and other than not meeting them, you click with someone without planning to.

However, you have a duty to control your actions. Not being able to control your emotions doesn’t get you off the hook for stuff you can and should control.

5

Simple answer to the OP: no, you cannot control whom you fall in love with.

More involved answer: yes, you can, but then again, not really. I see it like this, and I can obviously only give you instances of my own life experiences and tales form friends and whatnot, so I’ll have no cites or anything. FYI.

In the few instances I’ve found myself in love with someone, it’s been through no conscious thought of my own, other than “man, I really like this girl,” “wow, she really means a lot to me,” “hey, you know, I think I love her.” It takes time and, almost without exception, it has surprised me. It’s like one day I look up and… I realized that I felt so strongly for this woman that I could think of no other word than love.

At 28, I’ve told very few women that I love then, I reserve it vigorously. Having heard so many people say “you know I love you, but…” or “love you to death…” or some such silliness, I found very early on that even saying the words was something I was reticent to do. The majority (read: 3 or 4) of the women I’ve told that I love are friends. I care deeply for them and would do anything in my power for them. Did I choose it? No. It simply is a fact of our relationship that stands on its own. The other women, the ones I was in a relationship with, that was a love that I found when I realized that I thought about them in the future tense, that is, I thought about being with them for a long time and sensed that the feelings I had for them went beyond simple caring.

Love means different thing to different people, but I would argue that people do not decide “I am going to love so-and-so” and then make it happen. I would argue that someone that does that is false and the “love” they claim is entirely manufactured (read: bogus.)

To keep from falling in love with someone, you could limit your exposure to them, thus limiting your ability to get to know them. The problem with this, IMO, is that by the time you might realize you shouldn’t spend too much time around them, you already have strong feelings for them.

One last point, and I’m not sure any of what I’ve written will make sense in the morning, but here goes…being in love with someone does not give you free reign to sleep with them or dictate that you must spend your life with them. IMO, being in love with someone means that you care so strongly for that person that you care as much or more for them than you do yourself. Their happiness is paramount to your own and their well-being is a concern of yours (and not in some "feed the hungry of the Third World well-being way, either.)

My $0.02 ½ .

6

I may be attracted, I may be smitten, I may be emotionally swept away and filled with light, I may be struck by the thunderbolt or enveloped by lust, but I control my actions. Emotions are not always real indicators of truth, but are they ever terrific. I wouldn’t trade the feeling of the fall into love for anything I can think of, but I can and do take responsiblity for my actions and my words. And I am so careful about not rampaging into the things I feel. Stop and consider reality. I may fall in love with my sister’s husband, but where is the honor in acting on it? Where is the love I have for her? What great and good thing can I have violating her marriage? If I love and he loves, then we need to honorably and very likely painfully take control, not lose control. It’s a lot easier to cheat and lie and sneak, but that doesn’t define love for me.
As for choosing to love----I think you can, but it is not like falling…it’s more like climbing. You can get there: but with a lot of work and not so fast.

7

Yeahhh… you can control how you act. Ergo, you can act as though you love someone. I’m not so sure love is something you fall into, so much as something you DO. It’s a VERB. Helpfully, it’s also a Person, but we won’t go there… :wink:

I do this every day. Many Christians do. It’s not a question of sincerity, just of trying to take a bit of control over the impulse engine - who said we have the right to perfect happiness, and who said we’d get it from another human being anyway? So I decide I want to be in love with my wife, even if I don’t find her attractive. I just DO it - act “as though” it were the case, because that’s where my commitments have put me. It’s amazing how quickly the rest of me falls into line when I honestly and wholeheartedly go that way. Self-control. Self-denial. Self-respect.

The falling in love thing goes away whether it was there in the first place or not. You DO have to work at it, and it’s hard, and it hurts: you always have to work at good things. It’s a climb, Cyn is right. It’s worth it, and it’s a lot better than being swept about by tides and ending up divorced or otherwise alone.

8

Having fallen madly in love with 2 of the most heinous, evil bitches on the planet, I would have to say…no.

9

I’m in the “no” camp. I click with other people for no particular reason. My wife is, on the surface, as opposite to me as a person can possibly be but we just got along great from day one (we’ve been together 10 years). No one would have thought to put us together.

You can’t control your feelings (well, you can to an extent but it’s generally a losing battle) but you can control your actions. Distance, if it’s available, helps.

10

" . . . you can deliberately choose to not fall in love with a particular person and be successful."

—HAHAHAHahahaha . . . . Meet me for drinks at the Algonquin sometime and I’ll tell you a thing or three that will curl your hair.

11

Do I sense a story? I think I do! So Eve… tell! My hair needs a bit of curl… :slight_smile:

Grim

12

I see it as both, myself. Great song I have somewhere called “Rising In Love.”

So you have to force yourself to love Jesus? :confused:

Um, were you in some kind of arranged marriage that you had to talk yourself into falling in love with your wife? {hearing strains of “Do You Love Me?” from “Fiddler On The Roof”}

Love is great, no doubt, but let’s not have pity for our single friends - ain’t nothing wrong with that. I, for one, am happy in whatever relationship state I happen to be in at the time (for the most part). The grass is always greener…

Esprix

13

Often I have to ‘force myself’ to behave like I love Him, yes. It’s much easier just to run off and leave Him in the garden with the soldiers. As it happens I have help (forgive me and I’ll explain below). Suffice to say, it’s not really a question of forcing myself, more of giving in to the right thing despite emotions.

Yes, I was. God works all things together, and so forth. But again, I don’t force or talk myself into it. You must understand I’m deeply, utterly enthralled by my wife, and everything she is. It does come “naturally”, but only as a result of good choices when it gets sticky. And as for the ‘help’ I mentioned above, I have a real advantage: already having been in love before we met! God is love. To be in Christ is to be in love. My feelings, my emotions, ain’t worth a curdy until I’m in some sense the master of them, not the other way around. Or t’put it another way, we were brought together because we had both realised we wouldn’t be happy with someone if we weren’t happy without, and that happiness, since you ask, we found in Him.

That’s a good point (see above). I concur, Captain. What are you, one o’these goldurned Christians or something?

{fervent angry denials unnecessary… :wink: )

A lot of this is backed up by Cognitive Behavioural Science, etc. I can cite if you like but I gotta split for now. Ask me if you want. Otherwise that’s the end of the Faith half-hour, and I’m sorry if I got in the way of the OP.

(none of the paranoid defensive posturing in this post has been validated by the Assemblies of God)

14

Uh, ok. I’m not going to pretend to understand, so I won’t attempt to argue.

Esprix

15

Can you control who you fall in love with? Well, in my personal experience yes on the one side and no on the other.

As far as choosing not to romantically love someone – My experience is that this can be done. I have twice been in situations where I was spending a lot of time with a wonderful man who was everything I could personally have hoped for . . . good-looking, smart, funny, the works. And we got along great. But in both cases the guy was obviously not for me – in one case because he was a good friend who never manifested an iota of romantic interest in me, and in the other because he was a coworker who was very taken (engaged and then married during the time we worked together). I could have easily fallen madly and deeply in love with either of them – but I didn’t, because there was no realistic prospect for a meaningful relationship. Did I sometimes think about how great things could have been between he and me (or he and me) if things were different? Sure. But I didn’t spend a lot of time doing so, because these were obviously hopeless cases, so I settled for being good friends.

As far as choosing to romantically love someone – My experience is that this cannot be done. I had a wonderful man fall in love with me, but I didn’t love him and I could not make myself love him, though I certainly tried. (He was great; why I didn’t love him, I don’t know. But I didn’t.) I think you can have great affection for a person and get along wonderfully . . . but when it comes to “falling in love” with a particular person – not just with the idea of being in love – I don’t think it can be forced.

That’s been my experience, anyway.

16

If we’ll forgive the semantic debate on what love really is, I think that: no, one cannot help who one falls in love with. One can only control what is done about that love, and perhaps it will fade away over time if no actions are taken (I haven’t found that to be the case, but I suppose it is possible) or if communication is ended, or at least severely curtailed.

I am an “ended” sort of fellow; once I get a girl in my head any communication with her only serves to fuel the fire, so to speak. If pursuing that feeling would cause problems then I end whatever relationship exists. If not, well, try and try again I suppose. So far I’ve eventually grown bored and given up, but the feeling surely never went away.

17

"Do I sense a story? I think I do! So Eve… tell! My hair needs a bit of curl… "

Oh, same old story everyone else here has, though the details may be a bit more hair-curling . . .

“The sun’s gone dim, and The moon’s gone black; For I loved him, and He didn’t love back.”

18

I fell in love many years ago and I never have been able to control her.