We Fall in Love With the Feeling

​I sat there watching them in that alcove in Venice before I asked permission to take their photo. They told me they were recently engaged.

They looked like they were part of a movie set. So intimate, the lighting just right, their elegant clothes, the way they leaned into each other as if the world had agreed, just for a moment, to hold everything still. A couple who had arrived. Not just in magical Venice, but at a feeling, a knowing. This is it.

Later, my friends and I joked about it. The kind of joking that tries to puncture something a little too perfect before it starts to feel like it might matter. "Don't do it," we wanted to call out across the canal, half laughing, as if love were something you could intervene in before it takes hold.

But underneath the humour was something less comfortable. A recognition I didn't fully want to name: that what we were reacting to wasn't just them. It was something they were activating in us.

And I found myself wondering: why do we fall in love with how it feels, rather than what it is?

In the beginning, the feeling is the experience. You notice everything. The way they speak. The way they look at you. The small details that, later, become almost invisible. Nothing has been repeated enough times to fade into the background.

And in a place like Venice, attention feels effortless. Life slows down. There's nowhere else you need to be. The connection feels complete, almost self-sustaining.

We fall in love under conditions almost designed for attention, and then try to sustain that same intensity under entirely different ones. When it changes, it's easy to feel like something has been lost.
But what we often miss is this: it's not always love that disappears. It's the attention that once made love feel so vivid.

What we mourn, more than we admit, is not the end of love. It's the end of effortless noticing.

In the beginning, attention arrives on its own. It is carried by novelty, by curiosity, by the simple fact that you are still learning someone. You don't have to try. You're just looking.

Over time, that changes. Not because love is gone, but because the conditions that fed it are. The novelty settles. The distance closes. The lack of imagination fills in.

So I watched them in their alcove and thought: the real question isn't whether love lasts.

It's whether we can keep turning toward each other once circumstances stop doing it for us. Whether we can choose to notice, again and again, a glance held a beat too long, a hand reached for without thinking, a moment made slightly more deliberate, on an ordinary Tuesday.

Because Venice will not follow them home. And neither will this version of themselves.

But attention, if it is chosen, might.
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