Falling in love is like having a new gadget with a lot of hidden compartments to discover. Staying in love, yeah, that’s another story. If you worry your relationship has begun gathering dust at the bottom of the bin, there’s hope. Let’s discuss some rules to bring back the lost spark in your married life.
If you’ve been together for a couple of months or decades, it’s important to take steps to keep a spark in your married life. Some consistency can be good in married life, but variation from the daily routine is necessary to make it more enjoyable. If you are in a monogamous relationship, the variety must come from within your partnership.
Although it would be great for you two to get away to some exotic island where you might spend days sipping coconut-flavored drinks on the sand, you both want to have some way of electrifying your relationship during your regular days. We spoke to psychiatrists and relationship experts who agree it’s completely normal for long-term love or marriage to feel like it’s flaming out. And also to question whether or not the time has come to cut ties. Better yet, they’ve given us advice about how to bring the Spark back to your married life.
Here are five great ways to get some spark back into your married life that just doesn’t take a lot of time or money but can be pretty effective when you apply it.
1. Keep The Thrills
One of the greatest mistakes couples make is that their long-term maintenance depends on romance – date nights at romantic candle-lit restaurants and soft music, trying to remember what it was like when things were new.
Bringing the thrill back to the relationship means bringing back true thrills. You want to do something that will get your heart racing, kick your adrenal glands into overdrive, and get your central nervous system activated. Humans are really bad at actually understanding the source of our feelings. This is a tendency known as misallocation of enthusiasm. We feel the physical results of a rise in heart rate, nervousness, cold sweat, shaky limbs – first and then backfill the reason behind them. The physiological sensation of fear is the same as the feeling of being crushed by someone – the same feeling that you’re trying to recover for your sweetheart. In addition, there is a strong connection between stimulation of the central nervous system and sexual excitement—meaning that activities that excite you are going to excite you if you know what I say, and I hope you do.
2. Challenge Yourselves
Part of the excitement of new relationship energies is the excitement of learning to know each other. There are still new and intriguing layers to explore when you’re only starting out as a couple. Part of a long-term relationship means that over time, you’ve come to know your partner at an incredibly deep level, almost as well as you know yourself. As a result, it can seem like there’s nothing new; you know each other so well that you can virtually read each other’s thoughts and minds and predict their reactions with 100% certainty.
So how are you going to overcome this degree of comfort and get back the feeling of meeting her for the first time?
Working together as a team to overcome trials forces you to connect in different ways and opens both of you up to fresh sides to each other that you don’t really see if you’ve seen them at all, not to mention helping each of you reach deeper depths within yourself. So if you practice together to beat a zombie race, enter a swing dance competition, or form a bowling league. Working together to conquer difficulty (even though it’s not real) helps to add novelty and satisfaction to your married life, getting the two of you closer together.
3. Take a break
Perhaps the secret of bringing the Spark back is to take a break from one another.
Now before you start wondering what’s allowed while you’re on a “break,” This doesn’t mean that you’re putting your married life on hold, nor does it actually mean that you’re spending time being forced away from each other. Although getting alone time – even separate holidays – can be important to maintain a happy married life, what I’m talking about is an interruption.
Interruption, especially to revive and retain the Spark of Passion in your life, can be a powerful technique. By taking a break from each other, you are breaking the expected pattern routine. It causes a reset of desires – making things feel more intense while also putting your brain on the edge as it waits for the expected conclusion.
4. Spend some quality time together
Sorry, but the usual date-and-a-movie dinner night isn’t going to cut it off. Novelty is key here, so you and your partner must spend time sharing new experiences, whether it’s low-key (trying a new restaurant) or something more exciting (traveling to a foreign country). According to a New York Times report, new experiences stimulate the brain’s reward system, filling the brain with dopamine and norepinephrine3—the same chemicals responsible for the euphoric peaks in early romance.
5. Be respectful
John Gottman is a pioneer in studies on the longevity of marriages. In fact, in a longitudinal analysis, he was able to predict with 93% accuracy that couples would eventually get divorced. He named what he referred to as the four horsemen. They are predictors of relationship problems—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. The fast antidote to these is to be respectful. Rather than criticize, connect freely without criticism. Instead of contempt, express disappointment with no eye rolls or passive-aggressive comments. Ditch defensiveness; it’s important to take suggestions so that you and your relationship can develop. And instead of a stonewall, listen to your partner and have a meaningful conversation when things aren’t running as well as you’d like. Learn to express your disappointments with respect.
The Bottom Line
Be positive, above all. Relationships, like life, they’ve got ups and downs. If you’re on a downward slope right now, have faith: things will get better. Put some time, attention, and love in your married life. Focus on being the best partner you will ever be. Get any help if you need it. And see what’s good about your partner and your married life.
