I don’t love you.

Recently, I went through a breakup. I am still going through what I have come to recognize as the anger-sadness-humor (of the dark variety) cycle, and I have been reflecting. This morning, I woke up and my first thought was:

Why don’t we say “I don’t love you”?

It takes immense courage and vulnerability to allow ourselves to love and then to say “I love you”. Yet once we start, we say it constantly—in passing moments, in tender moments, in happy moments, in sad moments. Sometimes it gets to the point where we say “I love you” without thinking about saying it, without thinking about what it means, without thinking about whether we still mean it.

But love isn’t just feeling a certain way. Love is also actively doing and intentionally choosing. It requires work—hard work.

And in many relationships, it eventually fades because we stop putting in the work.

And then it takes all the more courage and vulnerability to express, “I don’t love you”. I think it’s because the risk is higher in the latter case because we may already be hurting, and by expressing this, we risk also hurting the other person, resulting in two hurt persons. However, in the former case, we haven’t yet been hurt, and the only hurt we risk in saying “I love you” is them not reciprocating, resulting in only one hurt person. I came up with this as I was composing this paragraph. It seems to make sense mathematically.

But love isn’t math, and it isn’t mathematical, though one could argue that sometimes it involves calculated moves.

To say “I don’t love you” is incredibly difficult and mutually hurtful. It takes acknowledging that:

1. The feelings that grew to be so strong, that resulted in love, have faded into doubt. We begin to wonder if it’s just us, or if it’s just our partner, or if it’s both of us.
2. We continue to make efforts because we’ve already put so much work into this love, and doesn’t love require continual effort and hard work anyway?
3. We were taught by society—movies, especially—to not give up on love. Of course it’s worth trying to make it work (see #2), but when the doubt has been looming so conspicuously, when you feel a void inside you, and especially when saying “I love you” doesn’t feel right anymore, it probably is time to give up.
4. Knowing that we’ve tried our best and given it our all, it is okay to give up. It’s going to take incredible courage to name the feeling (or lack thereof): I don’t love you anymore.
5. Through this, we learn more about what we want, and more importantly, we learn more about what we don’t want—in both our partners and ourselves.
6. And then we start all over again.

“I don’t love you.” It hurts to say, and it hurts to hear.

But any relationship is a two-way road. If even one of us is not invested, the relationship isn’t whole anymore. If neither of us is invested, then why are we here? We’re just two bodies passing each other by, meaninglessly or obligingly muttering “I love you” when really, I don’t.