Song of Solomon 2:16
Here are four possible reasons for why God allowed you to fall in love with someone even though he knew this person would not love you back.
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1. God Allowed You to Fall in Love with Someone Because He Allows Us to Make Choices, and Love Is a Choice
“Falling in love” is a common way people talk about their feelings for someone. Personally, I’m not against using this phrase if all you mean is that you really like someone. But technically speaking, the term “falling in love” is not a great way to express the type of love God wants us to have. God wants us to choose love and not just fall into it.
The world always equates love with a feeling. It’s often something people talk about in a mystical way. This type of worldly “love” can come and go in unexplainable ways. One moment people fall in love, the next moment they fall out of love. But in the Bible, love is a choice.
Of course love still involves feelings. And there are different types of love. When God tells us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), that is a different type of love than when God says husbands should love their wives (Ephesians 5:25). God doesn’t expect us to have warm feelings for our enemies. But he does want us to choose to show them the love of Christ as a witness for the gospel. God wants a husband and wife, however, to not only choose to show gospel love but to also feel affection for each other (Ephesians 5:28-29).
But no matter what kind of love you are talking about in the Bible, choice is always in the equation. And so the reason God let you fall in love in the romantic sense with someone is because he allows us all to make good and bad choices with our hearts. We can’t pick and choose when we want free will. We either make choices that we need to take responsibility for or we don’t.
However, with every choice we make, God always provides grace to accomplish something good. When you realize that love is a choice, this can empower you to take control of your heart and to stop treating it passively. In other words, if you passively fell in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, God can give you the power to powerfully take your heart back and no longer love this person in that romantic way that is not being reciprocated.
It’s not a sin to offer your love to someone who rejects you. But it is unhealthy to keep offering it and wasting your life. In an instance like this, God is leading you to move on (Matthew 10:14).
2. God Allowed You to Fall in Love with Someone Who Doesn’t Love You Back to Mature Your Heart
God allows hard things to happen when that is the only way to learn a particularly important lesson. Of course he will teach us lessons in other ways that are less painful if we are willing to learn in those less painful ways; but oftentimes we will only learn through pain. If he knows we will only learn a lesson through one painful path, he will allow us to walk that painful path because he cares more about our long-term maturity than he does about our short-term pleasure. As C.S. Lewis put it:
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
A youthful heart can be a dangerous heart. It may sting and really hurt right now, but without this pain caused by you loving someone who doesn’t love you back, your heart may have stayed young and led you down very dark paths because of your internal naiveness. As Romans 5:3-5 states:
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
3. God Allowed You to Fall in Love with Someone Who Doesn’t Love You Back to Teach You that Love Is Worth the Risk
The worst thing you could do if you have loved someone who doesn’t love you back is to assume love is never worth the risk. We shouldn’t take unwise risks. We shouldn’t throw our hearts around and rush into loving someone we don’t know that well. We need to mature our hearts and love wisely with biblical boundaries. But love without risk is no love at all. True love will always cost you something.
Even when you do find that person who loves you back in the same way that you love them, there will be pain. No two imperfect humans will always say the right thing, always take the best action, and always respond the correct way. If you think love will look like that, you are looking for God’s love, not a love between two humans. You should seek God’s love first because we all need that perfect love. But love between two fallen people is also glorifying to God. But it’s messy.
One way or the other, God will teach you this lesson at some point in your life. But don’t learn the wrong truth. Many people say, “This hurts too bad. I’m never going to love again.” That’s the wrong message. God is teaching you something very different. God is teaching you something more like, “This hurts so bad. But I will choose to love again anyways because love is worth it.” As 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 teaches us:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
4. God Allowed You to Fall in Love with Someone So You Will Know What True Love Will Feel Like When It Does Happen
What is “true love.” In the romantic sense, I believe true love must be mutual love. While you can fall in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, you can’t find true love with someone who doesn’t love you back.
Therefore, one reasons God may have let you go through something like this was to teach you how to identify true love when it does eventually happen to you. As Song of Solomon 2:16 states, “My beloved is mine, and I am his . . .” True love is always mutual love.
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