For young people, falling in love can feel like it changes everything, all at once. The bracing mix of romance, lust and the crazy certainty of a fairy tale ending can feel utterly intoxicating.
When minutes, hours, days or weeks later one comes back to terra firma, depending on how mutual and deeply felt the tumbling into love has been, one of the first signs that the spell is over is likely the surfacing of your (and your lover's) laundry list of needed improvements in your oh-so-recently Perfect Match.
If the two of you have indeed been able to begin to build trust in and respect for one another during the Hearts and Flowers period, you have a chance of maintaining and building on your intoxicated start. But if the Fairy Tale is more Castles-in-the-Sky than shoulders-to-the-wheel, the post-party hangover can come back to slam you on the way out. Then the Loved One not only isn't perfect, they have betrayed you by not being the One. When we're little, we don't get to hear the stories of "...and they lived happily as good friends ever after."
It was only when I'd fallen for the umpteenth time that I came to and saw that I may have been falling or even plunging into fantasy land, but there was no divine push. That delicious suspension of disbelief, the series of delightful discoveries of having so much in common, the private jokes, the shared peeves... it's all such fun... that is, until one begins to attach oneself to a dream.
I remember as a youth reading Ghandi's autobiography and being at first mystified that he would agree to an arranged marriage, get hitched without being in love, and then learn to love his spouse. How sad, I thought. A marriage without romance. It took me at least another twenty years to learn how partnership, devotion, and dedication to who we really are can form a firm foundation for a loving marriage.
Although unscripted, my realization that my ex-lovers could just as well be my best friends, and that I'd only be ready for true love when I'd learned that I could live without it, was nonetheless a vital one in my growing up.
As reward for these hard-won truths, I got the opportunity to both abandon my caution, feeling the falling AND create something new with my grown-up lover. He was 47 years old and knew himself pretty well, even as I at 37, having been around the block, had shed my twinkly blinders and put on my perspectacles. Learning over time -- twenty-eight years in this case -- to participate in a marriage and to still be in love has been and is being my Half Dome of life challenges.
Looking back, I'm glad I got to fall in love so much and in so many ways. The complete YES of letting go of doubt, of plunging, of pure abandon has been humbling and exhilarating. Doing it over and again, I've come to see falling in love as an aptitude rather than a liability. Now I'm an elder. Now I can fall for strangers, for my students, for creatures great and small, for cities and landscapes, for stories and for poems, all without giving up clear vision.
I see the children out in the sunlight, playing on the big, grassy lawn. Holding hands and spinning in a circle. And I say, "Motorboat, motorboat, go so fast! Motorboat, motorboat, step on the gas!"
Falling together is so much fun.