The love is there—it just might have ebbed to the fringes a bit.
It happens. Not just after a “honeymoon” phase, the literal honeymoon, the first child or the third, but possibly throughout it all. The feeling of love in a marriage can naturally wax and wane.
Here are seven ways to welcome it back to the heart of your relationship.
WAYS TO WELCOME LOVE
1. Do good together.
Doing good deeds feels good, or rewarding at least, and when you feel good inside yourself it’s easier to feel good inside your relationships. You know that feeling of deep fulfillment when you’ve done a “good deed,” helped someone else in a meaningful way, or benefitted your larger community? The experience can feel joyful. You may feel a sense of accomplishment, love, or even passionate excitement! Every one of those emotions is linked to love.
Creating those feelings together cues your brain to associate those loving emotions with your partner. Turns out, love in the general sense can extend to those who experience it with you.
Try volunteering together with intention: make the decision together to cook a meal for your neighbors or deliver one to someone who needs it; or plan a philanthropic act like donating money, time or supplies.
In smaller, spontaneous ways, this could look like helping a hungry person outside a grocery store get something to eat while you shop together. It could be volunteering your adjoining seats on a bus or plane, surprising someone with an anonymous gift, or buying a coffee for the person behind you the next time you get a drink together.
2. Enjoy your own life more fully.
In the same way that doing good together cues your brain to associate that satisfaction with your partner, fulfilling your own needs will fill you with a satisfaction that expends to your future interactions.
It is important for your life together to have your life apart.
While sacrificing something you love for your partner might seem loving—and at times even be necessary—depleting yourself will not lead to a more loving relationship. Filling yourself up with love by doing what you sincerely love and taking time for self-care on the other hand—that will bring love back into your marriage.
Related topic: "Love Is a Choice—the Best Marriage Advice."
3. Say it out loud.
This recent Instagram post from wellness advocate and yoga instructor Kathryn Budig gets at the heart of this idea:
How many times have you thought something nice about another person but not verbalized it? You might think it’s not relevant, unimportant, or that they already know so you don’t need to say it. How does it feel to have someone compliment you, even if you didn’t need to hear it or already knew it? It’s like hearing someone genuinely say “I love you,” even though you know they do.
You can do this as an experiment—make an active effort for the next week or month to verbalize your nice thoughts. (Best without actually telling your partner you’re doing this.) This practice can even create a positive-reinforcement spiral, where you become more aware of your positive thoughts and therefore start having more of them.
4. Share and compare experiences.
We, humans, are sensational creatures…in the very literal sense.
People—and their brains—are made to feel things, taste things, see, smell and hear. These sensations bring us back to ourselves in a visceral, human way. Much like love does.
To get back to that deep feeling of love, try tapping back into your other deep senses together. Sharing an experience—even though you will both inevitably feel it in your own, unique way—is powerfully bonding.
Think of things to do (essentially date nights) with your partner. Sit down to a dinner and eat mindfully together, do date night at a concert, try an invigorating outdoors experience like hiking or boating, go coffee or wine tasting or see a show. There’s a double benefit here—practicing mindfulness will get you back in touch with what you’re feeling if you’ve lost it. And sharing an experience together gives you a chance to bond, too. Even better, share your own sensational experience with each other afterward as a way of learning more about each other and imagining your partner’s perspective.
5. Revisit prior dreams and intentions.
Remember the first daydreams you shared with your partner? Where are they now? A lot changes along the way in relationships. In day-to-day life, stressors, your own individual issues and outside forces like family, careers and current events—it might be a challenge to even remember your early dreams, let alone realize them.
While dwelling on the past or judging yourself for not achieving a dream is not helpful. However, reconnecting with your original goals and values can reconnect you with the love that inspired them. This is not meant to make you feel guilty for not achieving anything!
Zoom out, looking at the big picture of your relationship together as a longer timeline than the daily minutia. Together, can you appreciate how far you’ve come? Can you remember why you became a couple in the first place? Maybe you’ll even put one of your early goals back on the top of your list and be re-inspired together.
6. Be tourists in your own lives.
One of the biggest issues with “losing that spark” is getting in a rut. We adapt to our lives to the point of missing the details, the little things that we notice acutely at the start of a romance. To get back to that practice of noticing the details, try a practice called defamiliarization. Essentially, be tourists in your own lives.
Your brain is smart. It knows it doesn’t have to re-learn the same information over and over again, so when your brain encounters things (or experiences, or people) repeatedly, it learns to recognize them, create memories around them and ultimately stop paying quite as much attention to them. In the case of working a computer program, that’s great; in the case of interacting with an ever-changing human being…not always so wonderful.
Cue your brain to tune back in by shaking things up.
When you change your environment by camping or simply walking a street that you normally drive, your brain experiences it differently and starts paying closer attention to the details again. Same goes for practices that might seem almost silly, like reorganizing your office, going to a different or new grocery store, or cooking a different meal. These small changes out of your norm shift you out of cruise control. Put your partner in the midst of these suddenly “new” situations and your brain will look at him/her with the same “new eyes.”
Defamiliarization is a practical tool to be deliberate in your actions that make the old new again, essentially reigniting that interest, excitement, and possibly that “Spark.”
7. Discover and explore your love languages.
Whether you believe in the 7 Love Languages or not, they’re an interesting relationship experiment. Reflecting on how you experience love will encourage both you and your partner to make love a more central part of your lives.
(If you're not sure what the love languages are, read and find yours here: The 5 Love Languages...Find Your Love Language)
The process is simple: take the love languages test, and then practice introducing the language into daily life. If your partner’s love language is “words of affirmation,” make a conscious effort to express yourself through words and possibly affirm them. If your partner scores high in “acts of service,” dedicate energy doing things for them (as little as handling a chore you don’t mind and you know they dislike). For “quality time,” set aside a moment to simply be with them, undistracted by your phone, work or other tasks.
Thinking about love may not be the same as feeling love, but it is a good step towards it. At the very least, it will give you both a chance to check in with yourself and each other.
