This Tumblr poem about relationships has struck a chord with a million people

When it comes to the many mysteries of romantic relationships, people seek answers in all kinds of places: friends, family, therapy, books, popular culture, even Google.

Yet it’s a post on the microblogging website Tumblr that’s provided clarity for a million people and counting. 

Taylor Myers, a poet from Ohio, was overwhelmed when a poem she wrote about the reality of falling out of love was liked and reblogged by more than 1,400,000 Tumblr users.

Writing about her “biggest fear” in a 2016 poem, she reflected on a theory she’d learned at age 17 during a Relationships for Life class, that left her feeling both saddened and scared.

“I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it,” the then-22-year-old wrote.

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In a subsequent piece of writing, Myers acknowledged she had been “extremely bitter and sad” when she wrote her original poem, and had omitted a second, more positive lesson she’d gleaned from the same class.

She recalled her teacher asking the students whether love was a feeling or a choice; the teenagers all declared it was the former.

“She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort,” Myers wrote.

“Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the ‘feeling of love’ had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation,” her poem read.

“The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

“The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.”

LISTEN: The Life Bites podcast explores the issue of divorce, and when it's clear a relationship is unsalvageable. (Post continues.)