“Happily ever after.”

Every girl knows that phrase. We’ve heard it since we were toddlers watching Disney princess movies and reading fairy tale picture books before bed. All our lives, we’ve dreamed of finding that Special Someone and sharing the rest of our lives with them.

But as we grow up, life grows infinitely more complicated. We become acquainted with the harsh realities of betrayal, cheating, breakups, and divorce. These things permeate the lives of people around us, and sometimes they even engulf our own lives in their dark shadow. In the “real world,” heartbreak seems to be the norm, and our dreams of finding forever love seem foolish. In our disillusionment, we often ask ourselves, “Does love ever last?”

I’m here to tell you that it does. But that answer is not as simple as you might think.

The problem is that most people don’t understand what it really means to love someone. When we say “I love you,” what we mean is “I really like you” or “you make me happy” or “I feel special when I’m with you.” These are all good things, but they don’t equal love. They are based on our emotions—on the way the other person makes us feel. They are all ways of saying “I am attracted to you.” While attraction and emotion are nice (and are usually part of a loving relationship), we run into a major problem when we confuse them with love. Our attraction and our feelings are all about us—how we feel, what we want, and what the other person is doing for us.

In contrast, genuine love is all about selflessness. It’s about putting another person in front of ourselves. It’s about sacrifice—a willingness to give of ourselves before our partner and to give away without demanding anything in return. Does that sound easy to do? Absolutely not!!! Love is difficult. Really difficult. It demands a lot more than most people are willing to give. It’s so much easier to have a relationship built on bedazzled attraction and intense emotions than on the nitty-gritty work of practicing selflessness. The first kind of relationship seems much more fun—and in the beginning, it probably is. But relationships that lack selfless love as their foundation are not built to last.

Here’s the thing—no relationship is always filled with rainbows and butterflies. At some point, every couple is going to reach a moment where they aren’t feeling in love anymore. When we first start dating someone, they seem just about perfect, but the more deeply we get to know them, the more we see of their flaws and their shortcomings. Things get messy. Everyone has their own baggage and their own dark secrets, and everyone makes mistakes. Working through those things together can be an enormous challenge. At some point, we wonder if it’s really worth our effort. After all, they aren’t filling us with those pre-date flutters or flirty giggles anymore. We’re no longer seeing stars when they walk into the room. The fun times have been replaced with harsh reality. Why don’t we just give up? In relationships without true love, there is no good answer to that question, because our reasons for staying with our partner have always been centered around ourselves.

But genuine love is a choice. It is not determined by our moods or our emotions. Instead, it is a commitment to stick with someone regardless of how we feel at the moment. It is waking up every morning and choosing to stay. It is acknowledging that we could leave, that we could find someone else to make us feel happy and special and wanted, but that we don’t want to leave because we have found someone worth spending forever with. It is a choice to see things through.

You see, love doesn’t just happen to us. We shape it and determine its course by the choices we make. We don’t have control over our immediate emotions, but love is so much more than just feelings. It includes them, but it also transcends them. It is a process of choosing the person we love, over and over again—even when we don’t feel like it—because we know that the more we choose them, the deeper our love will grow. And here’s the great news—the hard, discouraging times don’t last forever. When they pass, we begin to feel in love again, and our attraction is even stronger than before because we know that it is grounded in something solid and profound.

When we ask, “Does love really last forever?” we’re really asking the wrong question. The true question is, “Can love really last forever?” And the answer to that question is yes! But lasting love isn’t going to happen on its own. It takes sacrifice, commitment, and hard work. It takes walking together through times of darkness and doubt. It takes two people choosing to always choose each other. When those things happen, then we witness something beautiful. We witness “happily ever after.”