The Heartbreaking Process of Falling out of Love

Falling out of love refers to that frightening vertigo that results from realizing that the person we love isn’t who we thought they were. Alfred Hitchcock portrayed this feeling all too well in his film Vertigo (1958).

Falling out of love is when the pedestal where we kept the other person falls to pieces. The worst part about it is that we can’t do anything to stop it, it just happens before our eyes. It’s that process that starts when we finally see reality.

When we’re faced with this situation, we sometimes prefer to flee or keep our loved one trapped in the wonders of our imagination. One thing’s for certain: we’re in control of our imagination and we’re able to create whatever we want with it. We create other people with our imagination, people who we know aren’t real. Love is a product of our fantasies, of what we’d like it to be…

Falling out of love is difficult because, more often than not, there’s resistance on our part. We don’t want to accept reality but there’s nothing that can keep the pain away from us when we do. We no longer can turn our suffering into magic. It really is over for good.

The devastating feeling of falling out of love

Falling out of love is what happens when we realize that our partner is different from what we thought they were. It’s also what happens when your partner tells you they never felt the same about you, that it never was “real love” for them. It’s also that emptiness you feel when your partner begins to seem more like a stranger than your significant other.

When this happens, love no longer blinds us, we’re now aware of the truth. Reality paralyzes us. We finally see the other person as they really are, with no filters. We start to feel helpless and our life seems meaningless all of a sudden. Love leads to vertigo when it isn’t real.

We like to imagine what love should be like. Reality can seem unbearable sometimes and, despite being in a relationship, we may feel lonely and disappointed. We prefer to downplay the situation instead of facing that uncomfortable feeling of vertigo. We sugarcoat our pain and transform our unresolved problems into fantasies that, eventually, do nothing but harm us even more.

With these ideas of how we want others to be, we endure and idealize marriages and relationships that, at some point, will end up shattering us.

However, it’s important to realize that there are many people who are willing to love us in ways we can’t even imagine. There are people who would never leave us in the dark and that can make our reality seem better than our fantasies.

Real love can cause vertigo

We can’t deny that love needs mystery. We don’t always have to expose ourselves completely to our significant other. Self-expression is great but there’s nothing wrong with keeping things to ourselves from time to time.

There are love stories of all kinds. However, if you think that yours will correspond to the one you imagined, you’re wrong. Reality always strays from imagination.