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Relight the fire: how to fall back in love with your partner
Nurture Your Relationship
Our relationships have been sidelined, with excitement and novelty taking a backseat, due to our lives daily struggle.
The forgotten skill of nurturing and prioritizing your relationship is imperative. Example: Daily time together, communicating with each other lovingly and honestly.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Make small talk
You communicate a genuine interest when you inquire or listen to the small details that make up your partner’s day. It’s those insignificant moments that make up the reality of our lives.
Shared experiences
Words are not necessary for shared feelings to improve a relationship. Just doing something at the same time—riding bikes, watching a movie, or eating dessert, intensifies both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
Listen carefully
Use a technique called “active listening” - a form of listening in which you acknowledge that you understand what is being said.
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Key Ideas
Responding To Urgency
Stay-in-love couples are authentic, open, and self-reliant, but they also urgently need one another at times. They trust each other won’t take advantage of their availability but know that when urgency calls, their partner will rapidly respond. Their mutual goals are to resolve and to reconnect, leaving distress behind as soon as possible.
Dealing Constructively With Control
Stay-in-love partners know that the need to feel in control at times is natural and that it offers an opportunity for learning and helping each other. Partners have confidence in their own autonomy to not react defensively or take it personally.
Parenting Each Other
As relationships mature, many begin to feel less willing to give that kind of unconditional nurturing, and might not be as available.
Stay-in-love couples understand the importance of not letting those special “sweet spots” die. They know that their partner sometimes needs to feel that guaranteed comfort and safety, and are more than willing to act as the good parent when asked.
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Key Ideas
Solutions To Basic Communication Mistakes
- Criticism: complain without blame.
- Content: regularly express appreciation, gratitude, affection, and respect for your partner.
- Defensiveness: accept responsibility, even if only for part of the conflict.
- Stonewalling: stop any conflict discussion and call a timeout.
Couples Who Stayed Together
- When disconnected, they ache for reconciliation.
- avoid blaming each other in arguments or disputes,
- try to meet one another’s needs
- parent each other a little
- understand that the future and relationships are uncertain.
Potential External Threats
Be proactive about warding off threats to your relationship. Avoid lots of time apart, or unwise behavior such as hanging out with people you used to be on/off with.
You can’t guarantee fidelity, but you can do your best to make the relationship the container that you each value so highly, that going elsewhere isn’t desirable.