Why we say fall in love: five verbs, five confessions

You said it out loud, or you read it somewhere, or you just thought it again in the shower. I fell in love with him. And suddenly it's the verb that stands out from the rest.

Why do you fall in love, exactly, the same way you fall off a roof, the same way you fall ill, when you tell the story as if it were the most beautiful thing that ever happened to you?

You can feel that the word isn't innocent. It admits something we tend to look away from: that love is less chosen than we like to believe. And you're right to feel it. Every language that talks about love has cobbled together a verb for roughly that, and none of them picked a neutral one. (Some preferred to keep an untranslatable noun instead. Portuguese has its saudade for the ache of missing someone you love, and no other language has ever managed to say it on its behalf.)

The verb we say without seeing it

Before it was a feeling, fall was a movement. The word comes from the Old English feallan, attested since at least the 9th century, with cousins all across Germanic: German fallen, Dutch vallen, Old Norse falla. The root fal- names a sudden downward motion, the body that doesn't catch itself.

The expression to fall in love isn't all that old. It appears in English around the 1520s, in the early sixteenth century, when fall had already started colonising a small family of involuntary states: fall asleep, fall ill, fall silent, fall pregnant. The Oxford English Dictionary files them all under one definition. To pass suddenly, by accident, into some condition.

Look at the company in which English placed love. You fall asleep, you fall ill, you fall silent, you fall in love. Every time, something happens to the body without anyone giving the order. The verb does the work of admitting that.

(We don't say rise in love, and that's anything but an accident. Rise would imply intention, a project, an ascent you decide to undertake. Love, in our language, is none of that.)

English settled the question quietly, and for a long time. Love, here, is not an act. It is an event.

And elsewhere? Not quite the same fall

Leave English for two minutes. Look at the same sentence in four neighbouring languages. None of them says exactly the same thing.

Tomber amoureux (French)

French is our cousin on the other side of the Channel, and French falls too. Tomber amoureux, literally to fall amorous, enters the language in 1696, in Jean-François Regnard's Le Joueur, staged at the Comédie-Française that December. Marivaux, a generation later, made the phrase famous in his drawing-room comedies, and many readers still wrongly credit him for it.

Before 1696, the French said devenir amoureux (to become amorous), or s'éprendre (to be seized), or brûler pour (to burn for). Each picked a different image. Then the verb of falling took over, and it has never let go.

A small note for North American readers. In Quebec, people still say tomber en amour (to fall in love, almost word for word from English), and many French speakers think it's a clumsy calque. It isn't. Tomber en amour existed in metropolitan French as early as the seventeenth century, in parallel with tomber amoureux. France dropped it in the nineteenth, Quebec kept it. When a Québécois tells you je suis tombé en amour avec toi, he's speaking an older French than the one spoken in Paris today.

Innamorarsi (Italian)

Here, the fall is gone. Innamorarsi is a verb that folds back onto its subject: in (into) + amore (love) + si (oneself). To put oneself into love. Like one puts oneself into motion, into a state of grace, into a fire. The action returns to the one who loves.

Italian doesn't tell the story of a fall. It tells the story of a slow ignition. And it pivots the movement onto the self. It is you who catches fire, not the world that drops on you.

The culture that gave us Petrarch, grand opera and the word passione speaks of love as a hearth you carry inside. When an Italian woman says mi sono innamorata di te, she isn't recounting an accident. She's recounting a blaze in which she is, strangely, both the stage and the spark.

Enamorarse (Spanish)

Spanish shares the structure of Italian, en + amor + se, and yet the image shifts. Not the Italian flame, more a kind of enchantment, a charm, a slow spell settling on the body. Enamorarse is to lodge oneself inside love as if inside a climate you absorb, a distant cousin of the Old French s'éprendre, which also named a seizure (you take, and you're taken, in the same gesture).

The culture of coplas, of boleros, of flamenco speaks of love as a hold that bypasses reason. You are enamorado the way you are bewitched. Neither a fall nor a fire. Something that takes you over. You enter it by degrees, and one day you're inside.

Sich verlieben (German)

And then there's German, which says the strangest thing of the five. Sich verlieben is lieben (to love) preceded by the prefix ver-, and the whole verb lives inside that prefix.

Ver- is a prefix of derailment. You'll find it in verlieren (to lose), verirren (to go astray), verschwinden (to disappear). It tells you that an action has wandered off its path, slipped, gone gently wrong.

Sich verlieben, taken literally, is to lose oneself into loving. Not the English fall, not the Italian ignition, not the Spanish enchantment. To step out of yourself through a door you hadn't seen. A romantic dark-eyed lucidity, one that knows the dazzle of a beginning is also, quietly, a form of getting lost.

That's probably why, in Goethe or Rilke, love always carries that quiet undertow of the abyss.

What our verb confesses

Line them up, under your breath. Fall. Tomber. Innamorarsi. Enamorarse. Sich verlieben. Five cultures, five verbs, five different filing cabinets for the same event.

English and French filed love with the accidents. You fall into it the way you fall ill. Italian filed it with the fires. You blaze from the inside. Spanish filed it with the spells. You let it take you. German filed it with the strayings. You lose yourself into it.

No version is more accurate than the others. It's a map of sensibilities, not a podium.

(That map is one that couples who love each other in two different languages walk silently every day. Each brings the other their own verb for the same thing, and learns, without quite noticing, to love inside someone else's grammar.)

But ours, the English version, says something very precise. When you say I fell in love with you, you also say, without making a show of it, I had no say in it. You're confessing that you didn't decide, that it happened to you, that there was no way to stop it.

It's not a declaration. It's a confession.

Roland Barthes, in A Lover's Discourse, files this very moment under ravissement, the rapture, the seizing, the being-carried-off. The sentence has the grammar of a weather event, not the grammar of a choice.

“

Love at first sight is hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image. What has seized me, as if by the hand, does not belong to me.

— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

(Approximate rendering, after Richard Howard's translation for Hill & Wang.)

And that's what makes the sentence so disarming to hear. When someone tells you they've fallen in love with you, they aren't promising anything. They're telling you about a thing that happened inside them, without their permission. It isn't a plan. It's a testimony.

(Which is also why I love you, much later, takes so much more courage than I fell in love with you. The first one commits. The second one just notes what happened.)

And it's in that shift, from confession to gesture, that you start to recognize true love. It stops announcing itself and starts showing up in what you choose to do.

That's probably why we keep the sentence, why we play it back over old photos, why we write it in letters tucked away in a shoe box. It's the most humble sentence you can ever say to another person. I couldn't help it.

The next time you tell someone you've fallen in love with them, look at them carefully. You've just confessed, in the same breath, that you didn't decide, that it happened, and that there was nothing you could have done to stop it.

Four neighbouring languages would say it differently. Yours, English, picked the fall. It might just be the most beautiful sentence you can ever say in a low voice.