Is your relationship boring and dull?
Do you long for the days when you felt thrilled and excited to be with your partner?
Maybe it just seems inevitable. After all, once two people have been a couple for a period of time, the spark and passion are going to fade, right?
Well, maybe.
There are changes that happen over the course of a love relationship or marriage. As you become accustomed to being one another, there’s a certain routine that you both fall into. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Knowing that you can count on your partner to share your everyday life moments can be a wonderful feeling. It fosters trust and a sense of well-being to have a person you’ll come home to at the end of each workday. It helps you feel supported to have someone in your life who will be there for you when challenges arise and who will celebrate with you when achievements are made.
This isn’t always the way it is in a long-term relationship, but hopefully for you it is that way most of the time.
Yet, even if your partner is mostly a loving presence in your life, you might be bored. You may be missing the excitement you used to feel when you first dated and fell in love with one another.
Unfortunately, boredom contributes to distance and dissatisfaction. If allowed to grow, it can even lead to infidelity and breakup.
The good news is boredom isn’t a foregone conclusion in a long-term relationship. Alongside the trust and knowledge that your partner is there for you can be a strong and passionate spark that keeps on growing over the years.
Using memory is a great way to keep spark alive and thriving. We’ll get to this memory trick and how it can benefit your relationship in a moment, but first, a caution.
One way you DON’T want to use memory…
Jen has resolved to be okay with a dull marriage. She loves her dependable husband, but she longs for the old days– before kids and careers– when they’d spend long afternoons in bed together and they made love and talked for hours about everything. Some days, Jen pulls out the box of love letters her husband sent her at the beginning of their relationship. It’s kind of a turn-on when Jen reads the letters…until she thinks about how long it’s been since he’s written or said anything like that to her.
These nostalgic moments usually leave Jen feeling sad and depressed.
There’s nothing wrong with calling to mind the fun and passion you may have felt when you two first got together. Where many people, like Jen, get into trouble is when they take the memory and make what’s happening now somehow wrong or deficient in comparison.
If you regularly mourn the fact that your relationship is different than it was in the past, know that you’re preventing spark and connection.
The past is in the past. It already happened. You and your partner are not the same people you were when you first met and this isn’t necessarily a negative thing! In fact, the time you’ve spent together getting to know one another and (hopefully) growing as individuals and a couple has been valuable.
Our advice is to enjoy your memories of the past, but don’t compare the present to it. Don’t spend your precious time and energy focused on the past.
The memory trick is to DO this…
Remember what you love and appreciate about your partner.
This might include some things that happened long ago and it’s also going to include plenty of things that are alive within your partner right now.
When life gets busy and stressful, it can be easy to lose sight of the things that you do really like and find interesting about your partner. Your ability to feel and appreciate the richness of your relationship is compromised when you’re caught up in the way your partner slurps his coffee or the way she forgot to pick up the dry cleaning.
Don’t let those annoyances and irritations stand in the way of you remembering that there’s more to your partner– and your relationship– than that.
Yes, it’s important to clear up confusion and resolve disagreements so that resentments don’t build. But, be sure to also remember to see the big picture.
Intentionally look for the ways that your partner does make you smile. Think about how attractive he or she still is to you. Allow yourself to feel the flutter in your stomach when you two share a long and deep kiss.
This memory trick lets you tap into the passion and spark that are still there waiting to be recognized and grown even more.