I don't love my wife anymore

I am afraid, and I believe rightly so, of marriage. Love at first sight has been, for a while, something of peculiar interest to me. Though, finally, and for my own good I believe, I have come to the point where I no longer believe in such a thing as love at first sight. It is easy to love someone today, and tomorrow, but to love them everyday for the rest of our lives, that is something for which most of us are entirely incapable of as long as we continue to think that love is just a feeling, and nothing more. I agree with James Dobson that there is no way we can suddenly love someone we have just met. We can admire them, we can be spellbound by them perhaps, but we can never love them, truly love them, in the literal sense of the word. Love requires a kind of commitment that at times bids us to make sacrifices we never foresaw, and maybe that is why couples fall out of love, because if people can fall in love, it means they can also fall out of love. As long as we continue to misjudge, and misunderstand love, the divorce rate will go on rising.

Fiction perhaps expresses the idea of falling out of love more 'beautifully'. I tried it in my short story So This Is Love. In Garcia's Love in the Time of Cholera, Fermina Daza falls in love with Florentino Ariza, and then to our heart-rending disappointment falls out of love with him, only to fall in love with him again five decades later. Love! you protean thing.

Here's a passage from Jane Eyre, as Jane tries to explain to Mr. Rochester how he will go from loving to detesting her (I am not sure if it really is detesting, but I think so) and then perhaps he will like her again. Like her, not love her.

"For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,—a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,—like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master."

Or maybe Fermina Daza never loved Florentino Ariza a second time, she probably only liked him. We will never know.