Falling in Love: Part Fifteen: Marc Gafni

Hitting Ground

The only problem with falling in love, or so it would seem, is that we are never able to keep falling: eventually we always hit the ground. Much like the initial core certainty of parental love, romantic love is often lost and needs to be recovered. That initial high — when we find ourselves soaring through air, empowered, enlivened, ecstatic — always wears off, and we realize we weren’t flying — but falling.

It can take days or weeks — for the fortunate a few months — but the dreaded morning always comes when both sides wake up ask themselves, “What was I thinking?” Gradually or suddenly, they realize that they are still alone. The old fears and phobias still remain; the emptiness has not been filled.

Since both sides are usually horrified by the thought that they may have made a terrible mistake, they often don’t admit it to each other. A cover-up game then begins: a game which can be very short or, tragically, last a lifetime. Worse still, the pain of losing love, the pain of thinking that I made a horrible mistake, the regret of, “If only I had made different choices, married Liz and not Joyce, Steve not Jeff,” can be a lonely torture. Sometimes love lost can be far more difficult to bear than love never had. The penny wisdom, “Better to have loved and lost,” refers to the death of a partner; it doesn’t refer to the common-place pain which strikes so many but is rarely acknowledged: that of falling out of love.

The question we need to answer then is if falling in love is a true erotic perception; then why can’t we hold it. And if indeed it always recedes then what good was it in the first place. Indeed it is almost like a divine tease that tantalizes us with fulfillment and then is cruelly yanked out of reach.

There are three reasons for this essential pattern of the spirit rooted in the sexual and expressed so powerfully in love and Eros.

and that – god willing -is what we will talk about tomorrow.

big love

marc gafni
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