Love Does Not Leave, It Goes Quiet

My parents stopped kissing in front of us when I was about twelve. I did not notice at first. It happened the way most erosions happen, so gradually that by the time you see the damage, you cannot point to when it started. They still said I love you. They still sat on the same couch. But there was a distance between them that had nothing to do with the cushions. I used to think they fell out of love. That is the phrase we use, right, fell out. Like love is a window you accidentally tumble through. Like it is something that happens to you. Passive. Blameless. But I watched my parents for another twenty years after that, and what I actually saw was not an absence of love. It was an absence of practice. The Gottman Institute's longitudinal research on couples found that emotional disengagement, not conflict, is the strongest predictor of divorce. Couples who fight can survive. Couples who stop trying cannot. The love does not evaporate. It just goes underground, like a river that still flows beneath a dry riverbed. The water is there. Nobody is digging.

The Verb That Pretends to Be a Noun

We talk about love as a state. I am in love. I fell in love. As though it is a location you arrive at and then simply occupy. Waldinger and Schulz, through their decades of work on the Harvard Study of Adult Development, found that the couples who reported the highest satisfaction were not the ones who described love as a feeling. They were the ones who described it as a series of ongoing choices, daily decisions to engage, to prioritize, to show up even when showing up was inconvenient. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Because when you treat love as a state, its absence feels like a verdict. We fell out of love. Translation: it is over and nobody is at fault. But when you treat love as a practice, its absence is just a lapse. We stopped practicing. Translation: we could start again. I think about the couples I know who are genuinely happy together, and the common thread is never that they are more compatible than anyone else. It is that they are more deliberate. They ask each other questions they already know the answer to, because the asking is the point. They sit together even when the silence is uncomfortable, because the sitting is the point. Kristin Neff's 2023 work on self-compassion found that people who approach their own emotional lives with intentional practice rather than passive observation report significantly higher relationship satisfaction. You cannot give away what you have not practiced on yourself.

What Practicing Looks Like at 7 AM

My parents, for what it is worth, came back. Not in a dramatic way. No second honeymoon, no tearful reconciliation over a candlelit dinner. My mother started leaving notes in my father's lunch bag. My father started asking about her day and then actually waiting for the answer. Small things. Boring things. The kind of things nobody writes songs about because they do not make for good lyrics. But I watched the distance between them close, slowly, over years. And it closed not because the love returned. The love had never left. It closed because they started doing the things that made the love visible again. The touching. The looking. The remembering. Love is not a fire that dies without fuel. It is a fire that goes to embers. And embers, given air and attention, can still catch. You did not fall out of anything. You stopped reaching. That is a harder truth than the falling metaphor, because it means the responsibility is yours. But it is also a kinder truth, because it means the door is not closed. It is just a door you stopped walking through.