Can Love Be Ephemeral?

I had a client text me the other day after reading the post “Is Sex Superficial?” I don't know if his questions were prompted by the post itself or the discussion in the comments on Facebook afterwards. He had 2 questions 1. Can love be ephemeral and 2. Are folks like candles where sometimes they light other people (in regards to love).

I'm going to try to answer both. Of course, this is only in my opinion and in my experience with myself and hundreds of clients that I work with.

 I told him that in simple terms the answers would be yes and yes, but that I needed to write out a long answer so I would make it a blog post.

Can love sometimes be ephemeral? Yes, I think it can. Why? Because we are humans living in human form. We are imperfect, we are confused, and we’re not living from our souls most of the time. What we perceive to be love and what we call being “in Love” is usually that romantic love feeling and the majority of experts would say that it's temporary. I'm no expert, but I agree.

However, in my experience if you truly love someone, the feelings may go away, the butterflies may go away, and the excitement may go away, but in the end, you wouldn't deliberately hurt them for the purpose of hurting them.   If someone breaks up with you, or you break up with them, and then you make it your mission to cause them pain, then you never loved them.

This gets complicated and sometimes deep enough that people don't want to hear it, but I say this all the time:  I think all souls love each other at a soul level, that is why in the most tragic of situations you will almost always see strangers risking themselves to help and to save others.  I also believe that is how the wrong attachments can sometimes show up. Sometimes we have a moment where two souls are awake at the same time and they recognize each other, they call it love at first sight or they simply say they can’t explain it, but they know it is meaningful.  I believe them.  I just don’t believe that means you should necessarily commit your life to them.

Romantic love is a temporary, but beautiful thing that I think people often ruin their lives chasing.  (right, Aries?) I do think that if we experience that romantic love for a minute, we should enjoy it and stay in the moment. At the same time, ask yourself if you can do the work to make it permanent.

On the other hand, I 100% believe we can and should choose our partners on sooooo many other criteria besides feelings. I have tried to write that post 100x and failed. I still intend to record it before the year is over. Stay tuned.

For the sake of this post, I'm going to just answer the question in relation to our human condition. I think it is very possible for someone to love you and then leave you. I think it's possible that they can hurt you, but have actually truly loved you. We're all human. We all have the potential to make mistakes and hurt each other.

I don't believe that just because a relationship ends it means it was never really love. I think we can tell ourselves that in order to make ourselves feel better sometimes or to be able to be angry at the other party. But the truth is, very often we are just humans doing the best that we can. Sometimes we are shitty people living an unexamined life and that may lead you to my series on "Why do I stay?"

If someone does something to deliberately cause you pain for the purpose of causing you pain.   that person Does. Not. Love. You.

Please read that again. 

Can love be ephemeral? In human form, yes.

I'm going to address question 2 in part 2 of this. 

Please let me know your opinions. (You always do!)