How Can People Stay “In Love” Throughout Their Marriage?

Most people who get married believe that they will stay in love forever … that nature will just take its course and spouses will continue to feel the wonderful love that they felt through the courtship and early marriage. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Most people, in most marriages, find that they have times of feeling more in love than others and there are definitely times when they may not feel much love at all. It is also true that it is very easy to find yourself attracted to someone else … I mean, that is human nature to notice and appreciate others.

Those who recognize the “normal” gees and haws of marriage are more easily able to get past them quickly. Staying in love, seeing the positives in your partner and your marriage and focusing on them more than the bad helps keep the loving thoughts alive. Acting in loving ways with intimacy and fun, talking in nurturing and caring ways, all help as well. Here are some of our ideas about what you can do to help keep the love in your marriage.

Recognize that staying in love does not happen automatically. You cannot put it on autopilot. Keeping it has to be a priority in your marriage. It should not take a lot of work, but will require some effort.

Find a time or two during each day to think about your spouse, maybe look at a picture, and remember why you love him or her.

At the end of every day, talk together about three things that you really like and appreciate about each other and about the relationship.

Have regular rituals together where you celebrate your relationship and each other. These rituals may include lighting a candle and sharing a cup of tea every night after the children are in bed, a weekly date night, Sunday morning breakfast in bed. Rituals help to hold couples together.

Talk together about the future on a regular basis … both about the near future such as the weekend or a home project, a vacation that you want to take, etc. and also about far into the future as you think about retirement and growing old together.

Have a mind-set for yourself and a pact with your spouse that you want to stay in love and that all problems have a solution. Some may take a while to solve and some may require a professional “consultant” but together, you can figure anything out.

Falling In and Out of Love

The way that most people get to our blog these days is through searching out words such as “no longer in love,” “why do people fall out of love” “why do people stop trying” and other variations on this dilemma. We also meet with many couples where one or both of the partners are struggling with recapturing old feelings of love. What a painful time for both people … and it presents such a struggle.

Trying to recapture those feelings of love can be like insomnia … the harder that you try to fall asleep … the more awake you feel. The harder that you try to fall back in love, the more you may notice times of not feeling in love. The more that you try to push those thoughts and feelings of distance out of your mind, the more present that they seem.

The more someone struggles with these feelings, the harder it becomes for the spouse because she, or he, feels that distance and the natural inclination is to try to pull their partner closer. Then the pursuit begins and couples engage in a dance that involves one trying to get closer and the closer that one tries, the more that their spouse pulls back as he or she feels pressure.

Bill and Sandy struggled with this when their children were very young and both were working a lot of hours. It seemed that there was no time to devote to their relationship and they felt distance develop. Both were also tired a lot of the time and their conversations frequently turned to nagging and complaining about the common couple issues of housework, child care, money and sex.

Many of their problems were never resolved but they also continued to surface and slowly but surely their goodwill and friendship eroded. Neither of them wanted to give up on the marriage, mainly because of the children, but both agreed that they had lost feelings of passion and love for each other. When one of them wanted to try, the other had little interest and they just became more stuck and more unhappy.

Bill was the one to finally decide that he needed to do whatever it took to change things in the marriage; however, even with the many changes that he made, it took Sandy months to notice or acknowledge them. He found the courage and patience to persist; however, and made the many changes that he knew she wanted. He focused on rebuilding their friendship, not pressuring her, just being open to her much slower progress.

Both are in a much better place today … and can look back on this time as one that might affect many couples at their stage of life. They are very glad for themselves, as well as their children, that they were able to hang in and turn things around.

Do you have stories to tell about your change of feelings … or of your spouse? Please share them with us.

Love Is A Choice

Have you seen the widely circulated email about making the choice to have a good or bad day? It starts out like this:

“John is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, 'If I were any better, I would be twins!' He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, John was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

“Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up and asked him, 'I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?'

“He replied, 'Each morning I wake up and say to myself, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or ... you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or ... I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or ... I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.

“'Yeah, right, it's not that easy,' I protested.

“'Yes, it is,' he said. 'Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It's your choice how you live your life.'”

Love can also be a choice. You can wake up in the morning and choose to think about the bad things about your partner and everything that you do not like about him or her or you can choose to think about the good things about your partner, the things that you like and want to continue.

You can choose to think about the problems in your relationship as ones that may be fairly normal and ones that the two of you must work together to solve. You can choose to recognize some of the differences as normal ones that many couples face.

You can choose to let go of some of the small things as differences that you have to accept about your spouse or you can choose to let them build up until you are monumentally unhappy. You can choose to evaluate differences and decide which ones need to be talked about and worked through and which ones need to be just accepted as differences between you.

Couples in long-term healthy relationships say that they have seen each stress as something that they have to get through together rather than as something that might end their marriage. The view and attitude that you have colors your feelings. You have a choice in how you view your relationship.

Is Divorce Contagious?

We have often remarked that, when clients refer their friends, the dilemmas are often similar. We are not sure what makes that happen; however, we do know that connections with other people influence ideas and experiences.

When you are connected to someone who is unhappy in their marriage, and that is a focus of some of the conversation, it can be easier to notice what is wrong with your own marriage. As people make decisions about their marriage, it may give others the idea that they can do the same. Some said that they found the courage to divorce after seeing their friends manage that difficult step and survive. Others have said that they wanted to stay away from friends who divorced because they feared that it would make it easier for them to give up trying to change things in their own relationships.

In a 2002 Swedish study, Yvonne Aberg, a sociologist at Stockholm University, found that as the proportion of recently divorced co-workers increased, so did the chances that other married workers would divorce. Aberg also found that men and women were 75 percent more likely to divorce during this period if they worked in an office consisting mainly of people of the opposite sex and of the same age. In addition, the more single people working in an office, the higher the divorce rate.

Surrounding your own relationship with others who believe that problems exist and are meant to be worked out can enhance your marriage. Spending time with others who are mature and committed spouses channels activities and conversation into ideas of healthy coupling. Talking with friends and family about the good things in your relationship and, if you need some advice, framing it in a way that imparts the message that you want some ideas for how to solve a problem, not just complain about what is wrong, also supports finding ways to have and maintain a healthy marriage.

Why Do People “Fall Out of Love”?

The Top Ten Reasons for Why People Fall Out of Love …
… and not necessarily in this order.

1. Conflict. A high level of conflict or a lack of resolving conflict begins the distance and isolation cascade.
2. Too much disrespect or contempt. Even gestures such as eye-rolling or “correcting” a spouse erode loving feelings in a relationship.
3. Someone else. When you “love” someone else, it is easy to believe that you do not and can no longer love the one you are with.
4. Taking the marriage for granted and not finding ways to keep it vital and interesting. It is easy to forget the importance of finding time for and nurturing your relationship and your partner.
5. Thinking that those feelings are gone begets more of the same. The more that you think about a lack of feelings of love, the more you feel a lack of feelings of love. What you look for is what you get.
6. Busyness. Couples with young children have the highest divorce rates because their lives are so focused on children and careers.
7. Serious problems such as alcoholism, workaholism, etc. Love can only hang around for so long when a spouse is over-involved with work or struggles with serious addiction (gambling, shopping, etc.) or alcoholism.
8. Not making the shift from “I” to “We”. Couples must find a way to elevate the relationship in their priority list, not letting go of self-care, but recognizing that they need to look for opportunities to support the health of their relationship.
9. Depression. Sometimes when people are depressed, they think that it is because of their marriage and a change in partners will lift the depression. The spouse of a depressed person may also give up, believing that the living environment is too difficult.
10. Influences from family and friends. Family and friends, who often hear only one side of the story, may encourage ending a marriage. When there is a “divorce culture” among friends, and it may seem that the others are happier and the “grass is greener”, it makes it harder to do the work that needs to be done to turn a marriage around.

We will talk about these ideas in later posts, along with some tips for how to turn things around. We would be interested in your thoughts and stories about what worked for you.

Tip of the Week, April 14, 2008

In one study of couples going through divorce, growing apart and distant was given as the main reason for the divorce in 80% of the cases. A high level of conflict was given as the reason in 40% of the cases. When couples distance … and often lose interest in discussing or disagreeing, there is a greater likelihood of divorce.