More on falling in love
Irene's commenters are giving her a really hard time over her statements regarding falling in love. On Sept. 20, she wrote:
I've always been very careful in all my interactions with people of the opposite sex.…I want to choose the person I fall in love with.
She received comments like "I don't think love is that structured" and "I've learned from experience that you can't choose whom you are attracted to" and "sometimes I get the vibe that you're overly cautious."
So on Friday she revisited the theme and made a few more (I think) insightful observations, including:
If…one can will to continue loving, then I think one can definitely will to love in the first place. I'm praying that I'll be able to continue guarding my heart until I meet the man whom God says is for me to love. Then I'll let go and allow myself to "fall in love". And I pray I'll stay committed to remain "in love" with him till death do us part.
Now she has received comments like:
Love is a choice? If you are talking about loving the poor and the needy, or that irritable neighbour, friend, colleague, yes perhaps. But of the more intimate, romantically inclined, share my life with you type? I beg to differ.
Goodness, girl. You don't control your heart. Your heart controls you. In fact your heart is more you than you.
I think probably the commenters are misunderstanding Irene's ideas about falling in love. They speak as though she expects to flip a love-switch in her head at some point and have that be that. I doubt that's what she means.
Here's what I know to be true: As long as you're in contact with other people, you're in danger of falling in love. You have to guard your heart around people you don't want to develop romantic feelings for. I used to place strict boundaries on my relationships with non-Christian women. Now I do the same thing for all women other than my wife. I'm not sure one can choose to fall in love, but I do know that one can choose not to, and I think that's what Irene's saying.
I've had several experiences that illustrate this. I wrote last week about a time I accidentally experienced a barrage of romantic feelings for a girl I didn't want to love. In that same post, I wrote about how I fell in love with Mrs. Happy (or you can check out our love story).
I had a girlfriend once that I thought was perfect for me. We dated, and I fully intended to fall in love with her. I spent time with her. I shared experiences with her. I did nice things for her. And I never developed any real romantic feelings for her. No matter how much I wanted butterflies in my stomach and no matter how much I wanted to want to marry her, those feelings just never came. We dated for six months and broke up.
Before that, I knew a girl I probably could have fallen in love with had I allowed myself to. She was intelligent, fun, funny, and pretty, and she shared many of my interests, having read and enjoyed many of the same books and watched and enjoyed many of the same TV shows and movies as I. She even professed romantic feelings for me (something that had never happened to me before). But she was not a Christian, and her core beliefs and moral outlook were fundamentally different from mine. So we hung out with a group of friends, but never dated or spent any significant amount of time alone.
So here's my conclusion. •You can allow feelings to develop, but you can't force them. •You can choose when and for whom to allow such development, but you can't control who will develop feelings for you. •Feelings can knock you on your rear when you least expect it, so you need to be always on your guard until you're ready to allow them to grow. •You can absolutely choose when and whom to marry, and you can choose to love and serve that person for the rest of your life.
