Sex and the City on the brain.

I've been watching too much Sex and the City over the past few weeks and now whenever I think to blog my thoughts have a Carrie Bradshaw-esque moaning sincerity about them. This time, though, I'm going to roll with it.
Carrie and her three best friends are constantly in search of "the one", although for Samantha her quest seems to be centred around sexual positions. Charlotte is bored of dating and has the biggest nesting instinct known to mankind - eventually she does gets married but falls out of love when the man "can't get it up". Understandable in my opinion. She seemed to fall out of love at a rate of noughts and so I thought:
How do people fall out of love? 
I was almost in love once before I met my boy. Coming from a background where I'd been conditioned not to believe in love or trust men it's no surprise that I never fell all the way in my first serious relationship, but I was close. Still, breaking up with him was one of the hardest things I ever had to do and my feelings for him didn't truly leave me until months down the line, and even now I care for him deeply although we hardly speak. It's easier to look back on our time together in retrospect with the knowledge that I didn't let 'true' love pass me by, but I really believed we loved each other at the time. And I know many people that have made the same mistake.
The whole falling in love thing is easy with the right person. But falling out of love nowadays seems just as easy in a culture that encourages speed-dating, power-dating and just dating dating dating. When we have so many options in front of us how do we know who to choose? And how do we stick at it long enough to truly know what love is without getting bored within the first month? Sure, it could be the completely wrong person but other times we are just throwing the word "love" around the way women do "diet" after christmas. And in a time when sex on the first date is the norm how do we separate infatuation from love, and how do we know love when it actually bites us on the ass?
I don't know if it's possible to fall out of love, but I trust that it will not be a regular occurence if it ever happens to me; and I know it will be one of the hardest experiences of my life.
Maybe it's impossible to fall out of love, and we just have no idea what love is? Maybe the wrong definition of the word has led us to mistrust it altogether. Maybe we've forgotten how to do it properly.


So this festive period try and have a little faith in the coming year. And watch Love Actually.