Falling in love — I think John Keats describes it nicely, “you have absorbed me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.” What Keats has described is what psychologists call the dissolving of ego-boundaries. Meaning, when we were babies we couldn’t comprehend that we were separate from the word, so when we were hungry, the world was hungry, when we cried, the world was crying. Falling in love is similar in the sense that we give up our individuality and “merge” with our beloved. That feeling of unified consciousness is the force of breaking down of one’s ego boundaries.

The act of falling in love is not love, because love is effortful, whereas falling in love is effortless. Long-term love is differentiated as a permanently self-enlarging experience — the extension of one’s limits or boundaries, not the collapsing of them. To love is to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. The definition of “soul-mate” can be just a person who helps you work on your soul.

Real love is effortful, an act of will, an intention and an action. Our love becomes real only through exertion — for someone else or for ourselves, do we walk the walk and go the extra mile? Love is as love does, “verb, it’s what you do!” (Do you guys remember that commercial?) All to say, love is far from effortless.

Dr. Scott Peck in “The Road Less Traveled” uses “ecstatic lovingness” to describe falling in love, and that we fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously are sexually motivated, (sigh). It’s not not to say that we no longer love the person we fell in love with, it’s just that real love often occurs in a context in which the feeling of love is lacking, when we act loving despite the fact we don’t feel like loving.

“The experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough.” — Peck. Unanimously, the response is the same, with time romance reaches its expiration date, and real love is found to be a permanently self-enlarging experience.