Marriages are struggling today but I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone. Much of our failure in marriage comes from believing myths about what love truly is. When a couple meets and falls in love, the energy, the chemistry, the passion is real and palpable. Over time things begin to crowd in like careers and kids. The emotion can fade or disappear altogether, leading to the fateful words, “I just don’t love you anymore.” But even that statement is built on a myth of what love truly is.

Myth #1: Love is an emotion. If you simply type in the word “love” in Google, you’ll get the world’s definition, “an intense feeling of deep affection.” In the eyes of the world, love is something that you feel. Love is an emotion. The problem with emotions is that they are unpredictable and sometimes uncontrollable. If you equate love with the feelings associated with passion or romance then you’ll constantly be searching for your next emotional fix. Colossians 3:14 tells us that love is a choice. It’s the most emotional choice you’ll ever experience in this world, but at it’s core love is not an emotion. It’s a choice.

Myth #2: Love is something that happens to you. We buy into this myth constantly when we use the phrase “fall in love.” That phrase of falling in love is passive, meaning it’s something out of our control, like we were walking along one day and failed to see the giant pit of love in front of us. We fell into it and had no control. The problem with this myth of love is that if you can’t control when you fall into love you can’t control when you fall out of love. Go back to Colossians 3:14 when Paul tells Christians to “put on love” as a virtue. He’s telling them to make a choice, to be intentional to show love. Love is not passive, love is not something that happens to you. Love is a choice.

So when you tell your spouse, “I just don’t love you anymore,” what you’re really saying is “I am making a choice, and I am choosing not to show you love anymore.” If that sounds harsh, it’s because it is, and these myths about love are destroying too many marriages.