How to fall in love with Your partner again

If you’ve been in a long-term relationship and you find yourself doubting your love for your partner, one of the questions you might have asked yourself is whether you can learn to love them again or it’s the end of the road. Your reluctance to make a decision isn’t a bad thing, building self-awareness and looking at ways to repair the relationship can help you know with greater certainty what’s the best for you both.

Love changes. Typically anywhere between six months to two years marks the end of the honeymoon phase (in some cases it can last longer), which is when the infatuation wears off and you start seeing the authentic person you share your life with, flaws and all.

Whether your doubts surfaced as the honeymoon phase is over or you’ve grown apart, there are a few things you can do to turn this around and to reignite the passion you feel you lost.

Understand the difference between love, infatuation, and lust

Lust is purely physical. It’s being attracted to a person, craving their touch, wanting to feel them and have a sexual intercourse with them. You aren’t really interested in who they are, what they like, their aspirations or future plans. You want them physically, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. Love on the other hand contains care for the other person, even during the honeymoon phase, which is imbued with infatuation—a similar phenomenon to lust.

As the strong emotions for your partner start to fade, if you’re in a secure relationship, infatuation is most likely to morph into attachment, care for your partner, and intimacy. It basically develops into a deeper connection, when you truly see the other person with their quirks and flaws and decide to live with them regardless.

Now, if you’re associating butterflies and passion with love, you might assume that you have fallen out of love and that the person you’re with is “not the one”. That could be an indication that you’re addicted to the honeymoon phase or are more driven by lust.

Once you understand what you mean by love, you can move on to deciding whether you want to start another honeymoon phase cycle with a new partner, stick with lust, or deepen your love through commitment and disciplined action. If you choose the latter, I have a few tips.

Focus on the positive

It sounds trite but it’s an important principle and guidance for your overall well-being and your marital life. Due to negativity bias, we tend to remember bad things more readily than the good ones, and if we make a mistake, we better be ready to imbue the next few days with kindness and positivity if we want to recover an equilibrium. Gottman found that a 5:1 ratio is optimal.

To give you an example, if you hurt your wife’s feelings, saying sorry or buying her a bouquet of flowers won’t cut it, that would be 1:1 ratio. It’s not enough.

Whilst perceiving and focussing on the negative comes easily and automatically, we can train ourselves to focus on what has been good about the relationship, what we love about our partner, and thereby rewrite our story.

Couples who tend to remember the positive experiences from their life and see the challenges and struggles as evidence for the robustness of their relationship tend to be more satisfied in their marriage, whereas couples that berate each other, regret the past, and ruminate over what their partner did or didn’t do tend to feel less connected.

It comes down to a conscious choice: do you want to cherish your relationship and create a mature loving environment, even if that takes effort or do you want something else?

If you’re reading this, I assume that you are actively seeking ways to save your marriage and to make it as satisfying as possible. Focussing on the positive will help you do just that!

There are many ways you can do that together:

1. Schedule bi-monthly date nights, where you remember and use that time to reminisce over fun times together.
2. Choose an afternoon a month when you look through old photos and talk about what was fun and exciting about those moments. (Make sure you don’t bring up hurts and issues, if something important comes up, schedule a time to discuss it later.)
3. Create relationship cherishing rituals, like hugging each other every morning and every evening, or ending the day by saying what you’re grateful for and ways your partner contributes to your life.

This will all help you rewrite your marital story and it will help create a feeling of deeper love.

Plan your future together

Whether you’re in your twenties or your seventies, future plans are important for your marriage. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life it’s easy to forget about the future. You might find it difficult to plan your weekend, let alone think about the next few years to come, but your marital satisfaction will increase if you make time for future planning.

Firstly, if you plan things, they are more likely to happen. You might start with something simple, like plan to go to a museum you’ve wanted to visit for a while, but got put off. Then, plan a holiday together a few months in advance. These are intermediary plans, but once this feels easier and you integrate the anticipation of doing things together days, weeks, months before the event, you can go on to plan years in advance.

If one of you is usually responsible for planning and taking charge, make sure you both commit to doing this differently, this should be a joint exercise. You might learn a lot about yourselves, your partner, and grow in the process.

Reignite passion

You might have been impatiently waiting for this section, after all you want to fall in love with your partner instead of focussing on the positive or making plans.

Long-term relationships often lead to deeply caring for each other, feeling attached and friendly with your partner but somehow the passion is missing. There’s a simple explanation for it: we need both connection and autonomy. When the latter is lost or isn’t nurtured enough we end up with a friend who we don’t feel much physical attraction towards.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways for you to build autonomy in your marriage. Up to this point, I’ve been talking about what you can do together to feel closer to each other, now I’ll focus on what you need to do alone.

1. Start by reacquainting yourself with how pleasure feels in the body. If you’ve been feeling lukewarm about sexuality and your libido has been quite low, you will benefit from this exercise. Take any small object and start playing with it in your hands, focussing on how it feels against your skin. What does it feel to find pleasure in this simple activity? Take a few minutes to do it, and continue it for a few days or even weeks. This is a wonderful and simple way to feel pleasure in the body. You may then proceed with bringing that touch to other parts of your body.
2. Use the pleasure you’ve been practicing and bring it into your sexual life.
3. Spend time separately: go on a holiday alone, sleep in the guest room at times, continue meeting your friends, go on with your hobbies.

Putting some physical space between the two of you helps you both regain a sense of autonomy and it makes the other person more exciting. That can create passion.

Conclusion

It’s possible to fall in love with your partner again, it might not be as passionate as when you first met them, you might not become as infatuated with them, but that’s actually not a bad thing. You do have a history together and that’s incredibly enriching.

Passion needs space and autonomy, whereas love needs connection and intimacy. You can have it all, even if the level of these feelings might be somewhat tuned down. And to some extent, you might already have it all, you just haven’t taken the time to look.