Dear Pedro:

You are very welcome, I appreciate your gratitude. Here are my thoughts this morning:

1. Regarding your fear of “Love Suddenly Gone” (title of your thread), this “huge fear of not feeling a love for her again”- in nature, animals feel fear when they perceive danger. For example, when a deer notices a mountain lion approaching, the deer feels fear and runs away. The danger is: to be eaten by the mountain lion. It is the same with humans, naturally we feel fear when we perceive, or believe that we are in danger.

Anxiety is fear about something that is not real-and-present danger. A mountain lion approaching a deer is real and present danger. So  is this pandemic- a physical and economical real and present danger.

But not feeling love for your girlfriend- there is no real and present danger there. This is why your fear of not loving her is part of an anxiety condition.

Try therefore to relax best you can. If you don’t feel love for her today, and tomorrow and .. ever, what terrible thing will happen? .. What is the danger???

Your feelings themselves (and lack of feelings) are not dangerous, so try to make peace with your feelings. Try to make peace with not feeling love for her and try to make peace with your fear, as well as with all your feelings, whatever they are, at anytime, anyplace.

2. There is no moral requirement that you feel love for her. It doesn’t make you a bad person for not feeling love for her. No one is taken to a court of law and charged with a crime of not feeling love for anyone. You don’t owe her to feel love for her. You see, you don’t choose your feelings, none of us choose our feelings- we feel what we do, we don’t feel what we don’t, it just happens. We choose our behaviors, not our feelings.

3. Your girlfriend  (who may be your ex girlfriend), at times she felt upset at you (a feeling) and hardly spoke to you (a behavior). You asked her if she was upset and she lied to you and told you that she was not upset with you. But her behavior showed that she was upset: for a whole two months she kept a distance from you, not telling you anything about how she felt. Maybe she still is at times dishonest about how she feels, maybe you know inside that she may get upset with you at any time and stop  talking to you. Maybe this .. weak but ongoing fear of not-knowing the next time she gets upset is what killed that feeling of love in your heart.

4. The pandemic is a situation that is adding to the fears we already had before the pandemic. Fear is an emotion that is more powerful than love: when there is too much fear in our hearts, the Fear sorts of kicks out the Love out of our hearts.

5.  You asked: “Will it be better if I leave this house?”- as I understand it, she is living with you, your parents and brother. Why is she living with all of you and not in her parents’ house???

Take your time, Pedro (no rushing), and let me know what you think of 1-5 above.

anita