Sometimes we fall out of love, which in itself is not something we can entirely avoid. Some sparks come back, but they don’t all work that way and that’s fine.
While this kind of thing can be painful if one of the two parties involved hasn’t fallen out of love like the other has, it is a part of life and we have to accept that. You cannot force someone to stay with you when they aren’t in love with you anymore, that in itself is just selfish. When your partner falls out of love with you, or you fall out of love with your partner, that doesn’t necessarily mean anyone has done something wrong.
While proper healthy relationships can last a lifetime if there is anything toxic going on in the relationship falling out of love is not a bad thing. When it comes to breaking down the reasons why people fall out of love, things aren’t as easy as we might want them to be. Sometimes there really isn’t a reason and sometimes there are tons of reasons. People change and grow, sometimes that means we grow apart rather than more towards one another.
Whether you’re arguing all the time, hiding things, not being emotionally present, or so forth really just varies and depending on the situation at hand. You could do everything right and your partner still fall out of love. That being said, when someone does fall out of love, things in their brains change. No, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch, but it is more in your mind than you might realize off hand.
Bustle wrote as follows on the topic:
When being with your partner stops feelings good, the reward centers of the brain that release dopamine and cause pleasure to stop being stimulated. According to Franssen, this causes your brain to rewire and no longer see your partner as a pathway to happiness.
But when love no longer stimulates the reward centers of the brain by releasing dopamine and causing pleasure, the brain begins to rewire itself. It then stops seeing your partner as a pathway to happiness.
“The brain in love finds the nucleus accumbens (a key reward center) linked to the frontal cortex to generate positive feelings, and has a reduced connection to the amygdala (the fear center),” Franssen says. “Those connections reverse in the process of falling out of love. An individual finds the relationship no longer feels good, and that their social judgment changes.”
This is about the time when the rose-colored glasses come off. You really start to notice all the flaws in your partner, and it can make you see their quirks as more irritating than endearing. In fact, a 2018 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that people who saw their partners and exes in a negative way were more likely to fall out of love faster.
“If you find that you are suddenly out of love, it probably has been a long slow process that you weren’t paying close attention to until you had reason to look,” Franssen says. “Sex might reinvigorate oxytocin and potentially reignite a spark, but it isn’t enough on its own.”
What do you think about all of this? Have you experienced this before? I, personally, have had people fall out of love with me before and while it hurt, I made it through the heartache just fine and now I am where I need to be.