Falling in love

My heading above must index one of the most discussed topics there is but I have come across a commentary on it that seems original to me. So I am putting the opening part of it up below. The author is one lucky lady. She seems to be a real-life version of what Johnny Cash was talking about in his extremely romantic "Ring of fire" song. I will add a personal note at the foot of the post below

Jenny Mundy-Castle

“That was when,” Michael reflects as we sit in front of a semi-roaring campfire, his back propped against a large gray rock, “I realized there was no act of falling in love. By the time I knew I’d fallen there, I’d already been there for months.”

My head sinks deeper into his lap as I stare at the black, black sky, orange sparks like infinitesimal fireworks leaping into that depth. “So you just sort of, found yourself there? Like it was a place?”

He’s been showing me love, teaching me what it means, though I’m not yet certain if he understands the extent of this lesson, this need of mine.

“Exactly,” he continues. “People use that verb, ‘falling,’ when they talk about love, but I was so drawn to your words, your character, and didn’t know why. I kept it from myself, almost like protecting myself from this massive thing I’d never have let happen if I caught myself falling.”

I close my eyes and think back to the first time he wrote those words, I love you. I lived seven thousand miles away and we were both embroiled in messy divorces and there was no present, certainly no future, all we had was this crazy situation, this fact of where we’d clearly, irrevocably, found ourselves: in love. “I think it was like that for me, too,” I say.

Since that time in front of that campfire in the mountains of Northern Idaho, seven years have passed and millions of tiny moments that are also stories; moments that have shown me more about the nature of love as I now understand it, because this is what the man I’m about to marry has taught me.

https://medium.com/the-memoirist/the-man-im-about-to-marry-showed-me-these-three-things-fb4f969ce723

The idea that falling in love is a gradual process is what struck me about the story above. There is loving and there is falling in love, with the latter being a more intense process. And that process usually seems to be portrayed as sudden.

I think my own recent experience followed the outline above. Zoe and I are not an obvious match but we appealed to one-another from our first meeting -- at the very beginning of this year. But it was certainly not love at first sight. We kept seeing one another frequently and our appreciation of one another grew over time.

There were a lot of issues between us that we needed to sort out but we had a lot of good and fun times too. But we eventually got the issues sorted out more or less and I knew for some time that I had come to love Zoe. Very recently, however, I realized that I was actually in love with her. I think of her all the time. And that makes me very happy. Fortunately, she reciprocates my feelings. Pretty good going for two people in their 70s!