"How love sometimes dies"

                                                   
IT’S supposed to be a romantic scene. Perhaps you are in a restaurant or a club, or just chilling out in front of the telly. Your partner reaches for you, you gaze into his eyes. Then nothing. At that moment, completely undeniably, you realize you’re no longer in love. “I was totally appalled when it happened to me,” said Venessa, 31, and a journalist. “I stared at Biyi, my lover of four years, and saw a stranger. Then I made an excuse and left the room. I just couldn’t face what was playing out in front of me. I went to bed early, convinced everything would be fine, but in the morning, I felt the same. Only Biyi was his usual cheerful self.

“What was going on? I looked again at Biyi, this man I fell in love with and happily moved in with. He certainly is still a good-looking man, I said to myself, if I’d just met him, say at a party, I’d think that’s a handsome man I could easily fall in love with. So why am I now feeling as if I want to put a huge distance between us?” Biyi, a line editor in a newspaper office couldn’t believe things either when Venessa told him how she felt.

“With insight”, continues Venessa, “what happened was inevitable. Biyi is very outgoing and that’s what attracted him to me in the first place. He made me laugh and took me out of myself. After I moved in with him, the laughs decreased and the doubts increased. He drinks, not a lot, but enough to make me uneasy. I’d tell myself after another row or broken glass that I was getting out. Then he’d apologise, and hug me, and our love would be back on track. It was so strange that the end didn’t come during a drunken brawl. The night in question in front of the telly, I just felt repulsed when he touched me, I remembered all the bad times and realized that things could never really work out for us. When he later realised how true it was he no longer turned me on, he let me go—with a lot of bitterness”.
Love-gone-sour

Love-gone-sour

So, why does love die so suddenly? When we fall out of love, say Leslie Cameron-Bandler in her book: Solutions, this belief shifts. Falling out of love doesn’t mean simply feeling temporarily bad about our partner. When we fall out of love, the very way our mind works is changed. She calls it going over the threshold. We might become dramatically disillusioned or simply bored. We might become disgusted by our partner or simply realized that this is not the relationship we originally bought into. It can happen instantly after a single traumatic occurrence or it can happen slowly and inexorably. No one involved, the destructive emotional spiral comes entirely from within tie relationship. And we know that nothing can ever be the same again.

But what happens after this dismal realization? There might be children or other financial and practical ties with our partner. Surely, we don’t simply walk out on all this, just because our feelings have changed? Of course we don’t. According to Cameron-Bandler, we go through a period of checking out whether what we suspect has really happened, a process she calls verification. Shade and Audu were married with a seven- year -old when Audu announced he had fallen out of love with her. He was in love with someone else and might even get married to her!

“It would be unfair if I said his outburst hit me like a bolt”, Shade said. “We both felt his dissatisfaction building and I was lucky he told me. The day in question, we were getting into bed one evening and, I said to him ‘if we have to stay awake all night, you’re going to tell me what’s wrong’. At first he tried to calm me, then he denied everything, but in the end, he dropped the bombshell.

“We still lived together after this, though both of us expected he would eventually leave to be with his heartthrob. Yet, once he’d stopped looking furtively over his shoulder, things changed. He relaxed and became a lot easier to get on with. I knew I still loved him, but decided to respect his wish to be with someone else. It wasn’t his fault that he fell out of love with me. Then he started staying home more and bringing back treats he knew I would enjoy. When he reached for me in the night, I was shocked. He asked for my forgiveness and we stayed up talking very practically. He wasn’t in love with the other woman, he sobbed. It was me he wanted all along. He was honest with me at first and this second time around his honesty was touching. I realized that being with him was something I still wanted, so we gave things a go and now have three children…”