Can you just stop loving someone?

In an online forum, a woman who stopped loving her boyfriend was scared that the same thing will happen to her in her new relationship.

She said “I was dating someone who I really liked for about six months and one day I woke up and felt basically nothing. The attraction was totally gone. It happened overnight without me expecting it. I still felt like he was a good, funny person but my romantic feelings for him totally left me.”

LIFEXTRA sought people’s views and opinions on this.

Abbas Ibrahim, a civil servant, in his response, said that someone can fall out of love when things are not going on well in a relationship. “This is especially when all efforts to salvage the relationship have been made with no success. If trust is totally lost in a relationship, falling out of love is the best option.”

Christi Ana, a student of Rivers State University, is also of the opinion that you can stop loving someone. She said “I live for the present, my happiness and my smile.  I don’t have time to dwell on expired or sour memories.”

Abdulbasit Suleiman, a poet, feels you can fall out of love because “Love is really like every other emotion you feel and it can wade off with time and proper replacement, especially when the love is not or no longer reciprocated.”

He explained that “Love is just like anger in its emotive strength, but unlike anger which works with stress, love works with mutuality.”

Bamigbola Silas, a computer engineer, differs in his view. He said “Love sometimes is eternal. No matter how you try to hate the person, love still wins.”

Amaike Amaka, a student, feels that happiness and compatibility complements love. She said “During the course of our courtship, if I discover that we are not compatible I can call off the relationship because it is better to be single and happy than to be miserably married.”

Mal Moussa, a Kaduna-based data analyst, feels that you can stop loving someone if the feeling is not reciprocated. “As for me, I can only stop loving someone if my love is not being reciprocated. To some extent, people think that you have stopped loving them because you stopped doing certain things you used to do. The married ones, especially, always complain of such. To me, it is not because you changed but because they failed to understand that maybe you are more engaged with issues that their love got you into.”

 Adekunle Angel Ibukun feels that a person can fall out of love either emotionally, materially, or spiritually. She said “Can I ever stop loving the person, Yes, in the sense that I found a better or the best love during my life journey; And No, in the sense that my soul is so tied to that someone, physically or spiritually.”

Erik Litts, while responding to a similar question in Quora online discussion forum, wrote that “I don’t think it’s possible to stop loving someone at the push of a button.  However, it is possible to have a variety of other emotions that are often mistaken for love stop on a dime.   Things like lust and infatuation are completely capable of disappearing as quickly and suddenly as they appear.”

He however added that “You can stop loving someone, but it usually takes quite a while if it was the real thing in the first place.”