Love may sneak upon us, but it must be nurtured to grow

In response to my Sunday column of Jan. 29, a reader writes:

I agree that knowing the non-negotiables, and really understanding what that means, can help a person understand their position in a relationship (whether for good or bad). I will disagree with one thing you said. You poetically stated that "We don’t get to decide when we fall in love. Or with whom." While I understand the sentiment, it suggests an inability of the person to have responsibility over a significant portion of their lives. Love is fully based in our freedom to choose, and specifically to choose to give love to another. Love is, after all, a giving to another, and that doesn’t happen without our free will. Sure, we can be overwhelmed with emotion, swept away by the experience of being with someone new, but we have to be open to it, and we have to choose to embrace it. Nobody can be made to love against their will, so yes, we can absolutely choose when we will fall in love by choosing to be open to falling in love, and we can choose who we fall in love with by choosing to embrace the experience. In fact, we must do so freely for the love to be real at all. Don’t get me wrong, I like the poetry of the phrase, but if we really claim that we cannot choose, then how can we be radically responsible for our love? — J.Z., Las Vegas

Great letter, J.Z. Ironically, you "wave" at the only point I wanted to make when you agree that we can be "overwhelmed with emotion." I’m thinking we don’t disagree here. More that my poetry (as you call it) probably sacrificed clarity and specificity for, well, for poetry. Let me try again.

I submit that there is a distinction to be made between falling in love and embracing/choosing love. I was making a point about the former. You have done a terrific job, I think, of describing the latter.

When I say that we don’t get to decide when we fall in love, or with whom, I emphasize the experience of falling in love. Falling in love is a gestalt — that is, a spontaneous movement of the human soul that happens independent of sheer will.

We don’t decide to fall in love. Falling in love is a happening. It can happen when you’re hoping for it and when you’re not even looking for it. Good friends can be good friends for months and even years, and then suddenly go wide-eyed to discover that they are in love. Men and women who are actually quite content in their marriages can suddenly find themselves confronted with a significant emotional bond with someone else. The bond is inexplicable. Surprising. Even disturbing and unwanted. But nonetheless real.

We don’t decide the who and when of falling in love. You can’t will it because there is no muscle to flex. It happens. For that matter, you can’t decide to fall out of love either. If you find yourself in love with someone in an inappropriate or untenable context, you can certainly decide not to act on the emotion. But you can’t decide to have the feeling, nor can you merely decide to end the feeling. The only way to stop being in love is starve it to death — that is, to arrange your life so as to essentially ignore it until it erodes, atrophies and dies of natural causes.

But you are absolutely right in insisting that, once in love, we have a radical responsibility for what happens next. We can act on it. Embrace it, as you say. Behave in ways that are loving. Or not. Yes, we can decide to be open to the possibility, or decide to be closed to the possibility. But, I say again, tons of folks who swore they were lock-tight closed to the idea of love sometimes find themselves nonetheless in love.

We don’t decide to fall in love. But once in love, we do decide what to do next. We are free, as you say, to embrace it or relinquish it and walk away. I’m continuously amazed, frankly, at the frequency with which people fall in love and then decide not to choose it, embrace it or realize its potential.

And then it was your turn for poetry, good man: For love to be real, it must be free. Yes. The embrace. The giving. But not the feeling.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns also appear on Sundays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Contact him at 227-4165 or skalas@reviewjournal.com.