How to feel love for your partner as the first day again

Bringing back the illusion of falling in love has to do with changing the use of the attentional focus.

Many people who have been immersed in a relationship for a long time, reach a point where they feel how the illusion of the beginnings of love is fading away. they feel how that illusion of the beginnings of falling in love is fading away..

It is not something abnormal, nor a phenomenon that speaks badly of the quality of the affective bond; simply, it is something that happens frequently as the months and years go by. That feeling of adventure and of discovering a new way of looking at life fades, even if we cannot identify a specific problem with that engagement or marriage.

Now then... is it possible to feel again that love for our partner that we experienced during the first stage of the relationship?? Although by definition every moment in life is unique, in many cases, there are ways to bring romance back with a vengeance. Let's see how to do our part to achieve it.

When the illusion of the early days of romance is gone.

When a relationship begins, the experience that is lived is strongly related to the illusion and the feeling that there are great moments and the feeling that there are great moments waiting for us. This implies certain doses of stress, but it is usually a healthy stress, present in its right measure to keep us on edge, pending on how this courtship will develop.

In addition, learning little by little about the person we love is also exciting in itself, especially since we also learn things about ourselves through their point of view (which are often positive, given the "optimistic" and idealizing biases typical of those who have recently fallen in love).

The emotional comfort zone

Now, although at the beginning of the relationship everything is discovery, little by little the couple's relationship settles into habits and routines that give it stability.

This not only has the effect of consolidating the relationship and giving it a space in which to maintain itself on a day-to-day basis (for example, through rituals such as always having breakfast and dinner together); it also has an indirect, but determining effect on our ways of feeling and thinking. Specifically, a kind of comfort zone is created related to everything that has to do with that couple relationship.

Thus, the price of making the love relationship stabilize and have material means to prosper (through shared habits and common material resources) is to see how these exciting situations disappear and, with them, a part of the satisfaction felt in the courtship or marriage..

The cause of this tends to be varied, but it is believed to have to do with two basic factors: the simple passage of time and the repetition of habits and "mental routes" from which one thinks about the couple and the role one plays in it. In this last element we can intervene, to make us see the first one from another perspective.

From falling in love to routine

It should be kept in mind that couple relationships are fundamentally the union of three elements: memories, and styles of interaction between two peoplethat is to say, habits lived in common. When we consciously or unconsciously evaluate our couple relationships, we do so on the basis of the memories we have of it (both the oldest and the most recent, from the same day) and in them the common habits play a very important role, since they vertebrate that narrative.

With the passage of time, by force, the simple probability causes the appearance of several unpleasant, anxiety-generating or simply uncomfortable experiences that we will live together with the other person.

In addition, many of them need not be the fault of our partner, but are part of external phenomena: a domestic problem with the household facilities, a family crisis with the parents, etc. However, although neither partner is responsible for these situations, those memories will remain there and will irremediably affect our way of perceiving the relationship.

Problems sleeping in the marriage bed, a bad relationship with an in-law, the need to manage household expenses... these are elements that are part of everyday life but that, even if we do not realize it, we associate with the memories labeled as "love and love life as a couple". memories labeled as "love and love life as a couple", in general. These memories will not only consist of weekend outings to get to know each other better, or romantic walks along the pier: they will also include cleaning the bathroom, stress crises that the other person has experienced because of too much work, and so on. Everyday life destroys any fairy tale.

Getting the love in a couple back to the way it was in the beginning

Several researchers have proposed the idea that since our memories and our unconscious learnings of what life as a couple is really like affect the way we experience love, one way to invigorate love is to reinforce the presence of positive memories that we can associate with that love relationship.

As our memory is very malleable, we can make those pleasant experiences more and more those pleasant experiences more and more important by simply evoking those memories and simply by evoking those memories and, of course, doing our part to make those specific memories abundant and emotionally charged; that means we must move on and enrich our lives as a couple. In this way, when we think about the couple's relationship, in the end our attention will go only to those exciting moments that really capture the raison d'être of that courtship or marriage.