🕯️ The Alchemy of Choosing: To Love Is to Decide, Not Feel

✍️ by Maren Voss-Holloway

There is a quiet heresy that runs through our culture’s understanding of love. We have been taught—through cinema, through social media, through the soft narratives we tell ourselves at 2 a.m.—that falling in love is an event. A lightning strike. A chemical cascade so total and so involuntary that it requires no labor from us. We are struck, we fall, and what happens after is merely the long twilight of something that already happened in the first three seconds.

But this story has a problem: it makes us passive. It turns lovers into witnesses to their own union rather than architects of it. And if love is only something that happens to you, then when the initial electricity fades—and it always does—what are you left with? A memory of a feeling? An echo of an event you did not choose and cannot sustain?

I have spent years in philosophy departments and bookstores, trying to answer questions about what it means to be human. And I keep returning to one insight that feels almost too simple to be true: love is not a noun. It is a verb. More precisely, love is a decision—renewed daily, renewed hourly, renewed in the small and unglamorous moments where no one is watching and nothing dramatic is happening. To fall in love is only the first draft. The rest of the work is choosing to stay in the story.

I. The Myth of the Fall

Let’s be honest about what "falling" actually implies. A fall is a loss of control. When you fall, you are not authoring your trajectory; gravity is. You are subject to forces larger than yourself. And yes—there is something real and beautiful about that initial surrender. The way someone can walk into a room and suddenly the air changes, the way a stranger’s laughter rearranges your internal geography, the way your nervous system decides on their behalf that this one, this life—these are genuine experiences. You cannot manufacture them. You cannot will yourself to feel what you have not yet felt.

But here is the philosophical tension: if love begins as something involuntary, it can only be sustained by something voluntary. The fall gives you reason to stay. It does not do the staying for you. And this distinction—between the event and the act of continuing—is where most relationships quietly succeed or quietly dissolve. Not in a single dramatic rupture, but in the thousand small mornings where one person simply decides, again, that they want to be here. That they find this other person interesting. That they are willing to sit across the table, listen to a story they heard last Tuesday, and mean it.

This is not a lesser form of love than the fall. It is, in fact, a more honest one—because it acknowledges that love requires work, and that work is not betrayal but devotion made visible.

II. The Frame We Build Together

Here’s something I find genuinely interesting: we tend to imagine freedom as the absence of constraints. In romantic life, this translates into a kind of anxiety—we worry that choosing someone means giving up possibilities, that commitment is a cage, that saying "I choose you" also says "I no longer need to explore who else might be out there."

But consider what a frame actually does. A window frame does not imprison the view; it makes the view coherent. It says: this is what I am looking at, and I am choosing to look at it with full attention rather than scanning the entire horizon in a distracted blur. Marriage, partnership, long-term commitment—these are frames. And the paradox is that the frame does not reduce freedom; it concentrates it. When you have chosen your world, you get to be in it fully. You stop negotiating with yourself about whether this life is "enough," and instead start asking what it can become.

This is where philosophy meets the kitchen table. The question is no longer "Do I feel a spark right now?" but "What do I want to build, and am I willing to put my hands in the dirt of it?" These are not competing questions. They are sequential. The spark comes first—or maybe later; love doesn’t always respect chronology. But the building follows. And the building is where most of the actual work lives.

III. Love as a Practice, Not a State

In philosophy, we distinguish between theoria (contemplation) and praxis (action). We tend to treat love as if it’s the former—something you feel or witness or experience. But practically, love is praxis. It is showing up for the person who is having a bad day in a way that requires no audience. It is remembering how they take their coffee on days when they’re not performing joy. It is the slow accumulation of small knowledge about another human being—what calms them, what irritates them, where their self-doubt lives, what makes their eyes light up—and then acting on that knowledge in ways that are never grand enough for a social media post.

There’s a philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who argued that ethics begins not with abstract principles but with the face-to-face encounter: the moment you look at another person and recognize them as irreducibly other than yourself, infinitely more complex than your assumptions about them. Love, in this view, is an ethical practice. It is the ongoing refusal to reduce your partner to a role or a function or a narrative that makes life easier for you. It is saying: you are not my story’s supporting character; you have your own plot, and I am choosing to walk alongside it rather than directing it.

This sounds abstract until you’ve been in a long relationship for five years and caught yourself about to say something condescending—Oh, you’re just being silly now—and instead said: Tell me more. What’s actually going on for you? That small shift from assumption to curiosity is love in action. It requires no poetry. Just attention and willingness.

IV. The Courage of the Second Draft

Here’s what I find most quietly heroic about loving someone over time: it requires a kind of courage that doesn’t get celebrated anywhere. When you fall in love, you are brave in the way an adventurer is brave—leaping before checking the ground. But when you stay in love for years, you’re brave in a different way. You’ve seen the other person at their least flattering moments. You know how they handle boredom, frustration, grief. You’ve witnessed versions of them that wouldn’t survive a first date. And yet you look at all of it and say: yes. I choose this specific human being, with all of these particular textures.

That is not a passive acceptance. That is an active, ongoing affirmation. It means you are not in love because the feeling is strong; you are in love because you have decided that this person’s life matters to yours, and you intend to keep making it matter. On the days when it’s easy? Of course. But also on the days when they’re distant, or difficult, or going through a season of their own that has nothing to do with you—and you choose patience not because you feel generous, but because you’ve decided that generosity is part of how this relationship works.

This is the courage I want to name for this article: the courage to keep choosing someone when no one is watching and the feeling isn’t performing. It’s the quietest bravery there is. And it’s also, I think, the most durable.

V. A Closing Meditation

There is a line from Rainer Maria Rilke that I return to often: "Love requires that you unmake yourself." Not destroy—unmake. Take apart the assumptions about who you are in relation to this person. Let them be more complex than your first impression allowed. Let yourself be seen in ways you don’t find charming. Keep choosing, not because it’s easy, but because you’ve decided that this life is one you want to build, and building requires showing up on the unglamorous days too.

So here’s my quiet argument for anyone reading this: don’t wait for the fall. Don’t treat love as a weather event you can only witness. You are already in it. The feeling will come when it comes—and sometimes it arrives years after you’ve already made your decision to stay. That’s not a failure of romance. That’s the whole point.

You chose. And now you get to keep choosing. And that is where love actually lives: not in the first spark, but in the thousand small mornings where you look across the table and say, without needing anyone else to hear it—yes. Again. I choose this.

And if you want a title for that quiet, enduring act? I would call it the alchemy of choosing—because what looks like ordinary devotion is actually something rare: two people deciding, over time, that each other’s existence is worth the work of paying attention to it. And in a world that often rewards us for moving on and upgrading and optimizing, that kind of staying feels almost rebellious.

And maybe it should feel that way. Because in the end, love isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you do. Again and again. Quietly. Faithfully. With open eyes.