On January 13, 1994, ...If I Ever Fall in Love was certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), for shipments of two million copies in the United States.

Rolling Stone gave the album three-and-a-half out of five stars and complimented its "crisp, precise harmonies that imply explosive vocal power but display few pyrotechnics", adding that "Shai joins the spiritual yearnings of Take Six with the secular pull of Boyz II Men".

[7] David Browne of Entertainment Weekly found its hip hop and new jack swing-oriented songs "fussy [and] unconvincing", but praised the group's crooning and stated, "They wrap their voices like a thick shag carpet around the choruses of the album's languorous, starry-eyed ballads".

[4] However, in his consumer guide for The Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B− rating and named it "dud of the month",[3] indicating "a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought".

[8] Christgau found the group's singing "indifferent" and panned them as having "no class and no sense of humor; they're too smarmy and too slow", adding that "They epitomize the difference between seduction and betrayal--between shared lie and imposed illusion, rascal and bounder, rogue and complete asshole.