According to Lewis, that seems to depend on the kind of Love. About Affection, Lewis says that it "almost slinks or seeps through our lives" (34). He also makes a claim about how you don't notice Affection beginning; by the time you notice that it is there, it has been there for quite some time, slowly building within you. He speaks about affection, calling it a Feeling. Affection is definitely something that happens to a person; you begin to feel Affection for a person because they become familiar to you. You feel Affection for the people that you are near, not because you choose to, but because they occupy a place in your life that you take for granted and slowly grow on you.
Friendship, in Lewis' opinion is a different story. Lewis compares Affection to Friendship by saying that you do not choose those that you have Affection for, you do choose your friends. But even by Lewis' standards of Friendship, this doesn't seem quite right. Lewis describes Friendship as the relationship that appears when two Companions discover something deeper that they have in common. But does this deeper common interest really imply that you made a choice? You didn't really choose to have an interest in that specific thing and you definitely didn't choose that specific person to have a shared interest in it, so did you choose that friend? In a sense you do choose to spend more time with this new friend than with the rest of your companions, but this isn't what Lewis describes as Friendship. The choice is made to keep the relationship with the friend strong, not to feel the Love of Friendship for that person. Friendship also has a component that Lewis doesn't mention. What of the "unlikely friends"? These people become friends not because of a shared interest, but because of circumstances. Would Lewis consider their shared circumstances a shared interest? We are both interested in getting out of this situation, and thus we have a shared interest that makes us friends? Maybe. But you still didn't choose to be put in that situation with that person. You may become friends with someone that you never would have chosen in different circumstances and because of this it is hard to say that you really do choose your friends and thus choose which people to bestow Friendship upon.
I think, however, that the sermon about choosing Love was directed more at Eros than any other form of Love. It was about how you choose to love the person that you are married to and that the choices you make to prolong your marriage are decisions to love that person. I don't think that this really describes what it means to Love another person. Just like in Friendship, in Eros there are decisions that need to be made to keep a relationship strong, but that isn't Love in itself. Eros, according to Lewis "makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman." (94). Eros is a feeling that creates a desire for one other person. That person is not necessarily the one that you would have chosen if you could truly choose. Romance movies and novels both show the way that people view love. They show that sometimes you can love someone in the wrong situation, the wrong place at the wrong time, that while you might truly wish to love the person who loves you, you just don't. This is what Lewis means when he talks about Love causing adultery and other sins. In this situation the person does not love his or her spouse and loves another, thus Love drives him or her away from the spouse and to the lover. I believe that the language we use for love "I fell in love" is fairly accurate. Love can catch you by surprise. You can fall in love with someone who you never would have chosen.
So while I believe that "keeping Love alive" or keeping relationships strong does involve choices, it isn't Love in itself. I believe that you can desire to Love a person and that sometimes Love does develop out of this, but I also think I can safely say that not every Love is a choice. You do not choose the people that you feel Affection for and Friendship and Eros do not seem to rely as heavily on choices as some people think.
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