I can't make you love me, if you don't

The title of today's column is taken from one of the greatest love songs ever and sung by Bonnie Raitt. It's something that a lot of people never think about and most people simply don't believe but it's true.

I tell my students this every single semester in the love and family section of my sociology classes and more than once in my Sociology of Love and Relationships class and I'm absolutely certain it goes right over the top of most of their heads.

But the facts speak for themselves. We can't make someone else love us and we can't make ourselves love somebody else; no matter how much we want to, no matter how hard we try. One of the things common in relationships that have gone sour is that one person falls out of love and the other one doesn't. So the person getting kicked to the curb promises to change anything and everything about their lives if the other one will just love them again. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work because being in love is not necessarily about what a person does, it's about who they are.

Now there's an exception to this rule too, just like there is to all rules. Sometimes they really do still love you but pretend they don't because of their own life situations. Maybe you're too risky, or being with you would create more problems than solutions, at least in their own minds at the time. Perhaps they've been shamed or made to feel guilty about their relationship with you to the point that they break it off, even though their love for you remains. You might never find out that they still love you the way they always did. Or maybe you will. Time is the most precious commodity we have and sometimes it works in our favor and sometimes it doesn't. Most of us who have loved and lost remember that one special relationship we had when the other person took the easy way out and left us behind, even though we knew they still loved us.

Falling in love with someone has nothing at all to do with rational and logical thought processes. When you fall in love, you don't fall in love with a person based on a list, you fall in love because they hit you at your very core. That's why we make so many mistakes and that's also why our divorce rate is the highest in the world. We don't fall in love because of objective things like finances, social standing, prestige, integrity and so on. We fall in love because that person reaches into our chest and grabs hold of our heart.

Sometimes that's good but just as often it's not. You've often heard about the heart overruling the head and in circumstances of love, that's what almost always happens.

We may even KNOW that the person we've fallen in love with is not a good choice. We may know that, in the long run, it's going to cause us more heartache than joy. But even when we rationally and logically know those things, we can't stop loving the other person because we made a connection with them that can never be broken, regardless of what happens in the future. And if things go south and out of our control, we hurt and ache like we never have before and of all the aches we endure and encounter in this life, the ache that hurts the most and hurts the longest is heartache.

We all know that life in general is a crapshoot and falling in love with someone is the biggest crapshoot of all because we can't control the other person's emotions, we can't make them fall in love with us or stay in love with us, we can't really do anything at all except to love them with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might and hope that's enough.

When it isn't, it's the most forlorn, painful and hopeless feeling we will ever experience.