“I don’t love you anymore.” Suddenly your heart starts to race and a feeling of intense heat washes over your body. Your breath gets shorter and faster, your hands start to tremble, your stomach is churning, you try to hold it together so he won’t see how badly he’s hurting you but your voice is shaking and your eyes are getting sore from holding back tears. Your heart sinks into a pit in your stomach and you nod as the tears prevail in your war against them and they spill in a silent stream down your cheeks. “I don’t love you anymore.” You wonder how he can say that, you wonder how those words don’t sting his tongue like acid. You have nothing to say, what is there to say? What are you supposed to do when your eyes have become blind to everyone else and your heart has learned to beat to the rhythm of his “I love you”? “I don’t love you anymore.” Well that’s impossible. If he doesn’t love you now then he never did, because the only way to not love is to never have loved. You suppose that he never loved you at all then.
How do you fall out of love? You don’t.
You say you’re fine, he says it too, but you know that you’re lying and you can’t tell if he is–you somehow can no longer read him even though he once said you knew him better than he knew himself. It’s been three months and you still feel empty because there’s a giant void in your heart where you used to keep him and no matter how surrounded by people you might be, you are lonely, you feel like you are missing something, because when he left he took a part of you with him and you think that without it—without him—you can never be whole again. You start smoking cigarettes because you thrive off of the feeling that you’re destroying yourself from the inside out and you think that if he doesn’t love you then that means you are not someone who is worth loving. You find yourself behind the wheel of your car that you taught him to drive in, listening to the song that he once determined “yours” on repeat because you think if you cry to it enough maybe it’ll lose its sentiment but it never does. You pound your head against the dashboard, wondering if your tears will blur your vision enough to make you crash and wondering if you’ll die and partially hoping that you do just so you don’t have to live without him anymore.
How do you fall out of love? You destroy yourself.
As time continues to pass, your memory starts to neglect the good times and dwell on the bad because it’s easier to only remember him as an immature compulsive liar who walked out on you rather than your best friend and your other half and the supposed love of your life who things “just didn’t work out” with. Your friends ask if you ever did love him and you say “yes, but only because I was blind to his flaws” although you silently admit to yourself that lately you’ve just been in denial about his virtues. You obsess over how horrible he was and how much you hate him because you think that if you repeat it enough you might start to believe it.
How do you fall out of love? You fall into hate.
Over a 1am bottle of vodka you finally break and your fingers slip to dial his number. You tell him that you could never hate him because you still love him, and of course he reminds you that he doesn’t anymore. You guess you were hoping he had changed his mind, you guess you were hoping he had been lying this whole time and that maybe he was just as broken as you. You beg him for advice; you want to know how he moved on and stopped loving you so that you can finally do the same. He tells you to stop calling him and you say “I’m sorry” and he thinks you mean for bothering him so late but what you really mean is that you’re sorry for loving him, for ever having loved him. He blocks you on social media and you think “good riddance” even though the void where his profile used to be feels like a hollowness in your very soul. You delete his number from your phone symbolically, even though you still have it memorized.
How do you fall out of love? You erase him.
As you continue to remind yourself that you’re “over it” and that the phone call and late nights you still spend crying about him were all just flukes, you find yourself filling his side of the bed with a plethora of nameless faceless suitors who make you blush and giggle like he did. You never feel that same rush of adrenaline when they kiss you and their eyes just don’t seem to sparkle like his did but they give him a smaller space in your romantic history and for a short while they make the empty half of your double-bed less cold. When they call you back you lose interest and tell them you’re “not ready for anything serious” but when they cut you off first, you are devastated. You become consumed with your numerous “heartbreaks” because they hurt a lot less than remembering what it was like to wake up next to him with disheveled hair and tired eyes and the way that you didn’t mind when he kissed you with morning breath.
How do you fall out of love? You find distractions.
After about nine months of minimizing your worth you finally decide that you are worth loving, even if he doesn’t think so anymore. You start going to the gym because you realize that the endorphins feel a lot better than the alcohol, and you quit smoking so you can blow through that two-mile run without coughing and wheezing. You surround yourself with people who make you laugh and you start singing in the car again and your straight-A report card seems to smile back at you. Late at night you find yourself indulging in writing letters you’ll never send and poems you’ll never share and a novel with a cheerful protagonist who reminds you of yourself as reassurance that you will get through. Sometimes you still cry yourself to sleep but you feel proud that you’re learning to dry your own tears.
How do you fall out of love? You fall in love with yourself instead.
A year has passed and you tell yourself you’ve moved on and forgotten him but the fact that you have to constantly remind yourself of this is a clear sign that you haven’t. Your little brother says he misses him and you smile and say “I’m over it” but what you mean is “you have no idea what missing him feels like.” You find yourself lost in a 40,000-word memoir that describes how “over it” you are¬¬–a premise that, in itself, should be enough to convince yourself that the whole thing is a lie. You claim that you’ve cleared him out of your life but there’s still an old shoebox in your closet of everything he ever gave you from the promise ring to the love letters to the stuffed penguin he won you at the town fair, and sometimes you still take it down and look at it to remind yourself that there was once a time when he loved you back even if he doesn’t anymore.
How do you fall out of love? You pretend you’ve already done it.
More time has passed and you begin to see things more clearly and you realize that you were both in the wrong; he was no angel but neither were you, and you were young and your expectations were unrealistic and you really weren’t right for each other anyway, and you know that you really shouldn’t be thinking about him anymore. But you want to make sure he remembers the past in the same way that you do and you want to remind him of everything you had that was so great and you want to make sure he doesn’t forget how good things were before they got bad. You start scripting an apology for your contribution to the wreckage that was your relationship and you want to make amends because even though you’ve moved on now too you still love him deep down and you can’t stand the thought of him ever resenting you.
How do you fall out of love? You acknowledge reality.
But as you consider contacting him again you take a moment to yourself to remember those good times, like when he used to let you blast country music in the car even though he hated it, when he started eating sushi because you loved that Japanese restaurant, when he skipped the Halloween party he had been looking forward to so he could take care of you while you were sick, when he drove across town to bring you iced tea because you had a bad day, and when he would always do anything to make you happy. You smile as you remember these things and you realize that you knew him so well, and that no matter what he says now he really did love you back then, so maybe the lie wasn’t the years of “I love you” but the recent “I don’t love you anymore,” and maybe he needs to say that and maybe he needs to hate you so he’ll forget that he does love you, because–just like you–he doesn’t want to anymore. You think that maybe you shouldn’t have assumed he meant it when he said he was over it and maybe he’s hurting just as much as you are and maybe this is what he has to do to sleep again now that you no longer text him goodnight. You take a deep breath and remember all the sacrifices he used to make for you and you realize that maybe it’s your turn to make one for him. So you stop rehearsing your reconciliation and you think that you’ll take the bullet if he needs to villainize you, and that it’s because you love him that you’ll let him hate you if he needs to.
How do you fall out of love? Well, you don’t, but one way or another you learn to live with it.
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