I love You, But I’m Not In Love with You!

Before we start the article, I would like to wish you a wonderful new year and decade.

How many of you before, heard the statement “I love you, but I’m not in love with you?“. Does it mean the relationship is over? Can you fall back in love with your partner? What should you do when you hear these words?

I know it’s painful. I can feel your pain, and because of that, let me answer the last question. The first thing you should do when your partner says, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you” is to ACCEPT he or she is feeling that way.

Don’t Fear, don’t beg, don’t panic. It’s time for you to respect your partner’s feelings/decisions and remove yourself from the equation. It’s time for you to take care of yourself after the emotional blowup and regain your clarity.

Now, let’s divide the sentence into two parts and understand the real meaning of it.

1. I love you: Means your partner have deep feelings for you and feel close and at home when you are near.

2. But I’m not in love with you: suggest there is something wrong with the relationship and the love you have for your partner is not enough. But the truth is, what they are experiencing is the wear off of limerence. 

What is limerence? Limerence is the normality of borderline crazy behavior in the first stages of love. It is the thunderbolt or in french the coup de foudre that you experience when you first saw your partner. When limerence wears off, some people fear they are falling out of love. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: That’s why romantics can be addicted to the high of this stage of “being in love” and spend their wholes lives moving on from one relationship to the next one, hoping that “special someone” will be “the one“.

All this modern trend that partners should be friends, as well as lovers, is another pressure to couples. In fact, romantic relationships need real friction, need difference, because it’s the difference that provides the love interest and growth. When there is the pressure for you to be everything to each other, there is little room for being who you are.
At this point, you hear complaints like “I started to feel that I couldn’t be myself” or “I was trapped by what people expected from me”.

So what happens after limerence wears off? Loving attachment arises. Loving attachment is real love, or in other words, to sustain your relationship and overcome obstacles, you need to work and feed your connection. Limerence makes you believe once you have found your partner, you can relax, and love will rescue from troubles or misunderstandings.

What feeds loving attachment:
1. Listening;
2. Sharing feelings;
3. Generosity: it can be save time for your partner or give him/her a gift;
4. Body Contact: put your hand in your partner’s leg while he/she drive;
5. Supporting: buying into their dreams or give them emotional support;
6. Share sense of humor: use private jokes or silly names;
7. The extra mile: We appreciate the gestures that are really tough for our partner.

What happens when you neglect the loving attachment with your partner? It happens what we call affectionate attachment that makes you feel not in love anymore.

For a long term-relationship we need to find enough similarities with our partner to make a connection, and enough differences to stop the relationship stagnating.

“it is the friction of rubbing off each other’s rough edges that provides the spark of passion”.

After the explanation, the question is: does it means the relationship is over? Can we fall back in love with your partner?

My answer is YES you can fall back in love with your partner, and falling out of love does not mean the relationship is over.

I want to clarify that most partners who had fallen out of love had recently had a life-changing experiences like: the death of a loved one, graduation, job changes, or unemployment. And also not addressing issues properly to find solutions and grow together in love.

Before close my article, I want once again highlight the importance of respect to your partner’s feelings as you must respect yours. Accept every word, process every word that was said, and give yourself time to heal. Don’t try to fix. If your partner wants the breakup, give it to them, and remove yourself from their lives. Because, as I said, don’t beg, don’t panic and don’t fear the outcome.
If you didn’t have a toxic relationship if you feel inside your heart after the healing and with the clarity that you want to create a new relationship with your partner because you love him/her, go for it.

When we want to experience real love, we have to have tools in our hands to help us to overcome the hardships of daily life. It’s easy to disconnect from the ones we love and call it quits when there is so much to explore and learn. Falling out of love is a real feeling but also means a new opportunity to discover who we are and our partners are. It is also one opportunity for both parties to see where they failed, and understand that our inner children need to be healed.

Without the perception of what is a relationship and what it implies, we will jump from one relationship to another. We will lose women and men that were the perfect match for us, not because they were perfect but because they challenged us every day to get out of our comfort zone.

My final advice is, heal yourself and seek professional people to help you work in yourself. Friends and family are good, but understand they will take your side, rarely make you see what’s going on or have one exempt opinion to make you think, and most importantly, feel.

Sending you my love, and see you soon

Alexandra