How to score a baseball game? How to take a decent photo without relying on the auto setting? How to make his family's famous gumbo recipe? Ask him to show you what he knows.
Sometimes, our biggest problems with our partners stem from the stories we invent in our heads, says Lerner. Instead of stomping around angry because you assume that your spouse never wants to go out or that he or she doesn't appreciate the things you do around the house — ask how he or she actually feels.
An easy cure for your resentment is to stop assuming the worst, and the only way to feel better is to actually talk it out.
Sure, you celebrate the Big One every year, but why not devise other reasons to mark the passing of your lives together? Reenact your first date by making the same sort of food you ate at the restaurant or rent the movie that you saw together in the theater. Make the first of the month "picnic on the family room floor" night. Have "half" anniversaries by celebrating the date six months before your actual anniversary.
By giving ordinary days special significance, you'll give each other reason to stop time and reflect on the life you're building together. Are quick texts and post-work check-ins your most common modes of communication? Shake up the way you connect by doing things differently: Send the kind of long, chatty email you send to a girlfriend. Interrupt evening reading to have a chat.
In other words, talk for the sake of talking. It will help you remember that along with everything else, your spouse is also your best friend who you really like to talk to. Bedroom routine a little too, well, routine? Your sex life will get a boost because you'll get exactly what you want, but the added element of how and when it happens will make it even hotter.
Simply browsing shots from your history together will help you remember why you fell in love with your partner in the first place. But if you want to take it a step further, examine your "relationship archives" together and reminisce about the memories, large and small, that you've created over the years, whether it's the dozens of photos that you took during your first few weeks as parents or the random candids that you've forgotten about.
Going down memory lane can help you You do not need another date night that involves discussing the kids from the minute you walk out the door until the minute you pay the sitter. You do not need another date night that involves periodic check-ins with your work email. What you do need is to make plans to have the kiddos cared for, and then meet your significant other at a great bar there's something about arriving there alone that is so much sexier than heading out together and let loose like you did when you were dating.
So your spouse isn't romantic. Your partner doesn't say thank you and isn't affectionate. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. BraunS via Getty Images. Here are some basic love laws that will help you reignite your feelings of love and attraction for your partner:. We carry a strong cultural misconception that love is something that happens to you. In other words, it's your partner's job to "make" you feel alive, loved, and happy.
While we do need a loving partner in order to share love, you and only you are responsible for your feelings of aliveness and joy. And here's the great and empowering secret that our cultural mythology keeps hidden: The best way to feel love is to give it.
I'm not talking about a codependent relationship where your good feelings are dependent on making someone else happy. I'm talking about a real and true love that arises from a genuine desire to bring joy to your partner and offer support in the ways that feel loving to him or her. When you can reverse the conditioned mindset that love is something you get to the idea that love is something you give , miracles happen. At any moment, we can focus on what we don't love about our partners and what's missing in the relationship OR what we love and appreciate.
When you proactively move toward gratitude and engage in loving actions like writing and sending gratitude lists or letters to your partner, you carve out the pathways to your heart that will infuse you with loving feelings.
Because we've all been hurt by love rejected, shamed, judged, abandoned , we know the risk we take when we open ourselves to loving again. Sometimes these hurts have occurred in past relationships with parents, siblings, or exes, and sometimes you've been hurt by your current partner. Either way, it takes enormous courage to open your heart once you've been hurt. Yet it's the only way of sustaining real love. Once you can start to identify the ways that you shut down and protect, thereby barricading your heart behind an ironclad wall, the faster you'll be able to soften that wall and move toward your partner once again.
There is great power in realizing that we don't have to wait for anyone else to change in order to feel love but that this longing can be met by our own actions.
When you know the love laws and commit to putting the loving actions that open your heart into practice, you can sustain a lifetime of a loving, honest, satisfying relationship. It's not always easy or fast work, but it's work that is well worth the effort. For, in the end, all we really want is to feel love and be loved.
Meet your partner after work and hit the gym together. Take a Friday off and escape on a weekend getaway. The smallest sidestep from a typical routine can be enough to remind you both just how much fun life is together. You need to truly listen to your partner.
Asking something so simple can have a very powerful effect. For example, unbeknownst to you, your partner may be physically drained. Similarly, they can be suffering from anxiety or depression, which could be hindering the relationship.
Showing your support for their mental health is one of the best ways to bring back the spark in a relationship. Physical affection is so important to a strong relationship.
It produces oxytocin, the neuropeptide, that promote feelings of bonding, trust, and devotion in the brain. If you have to, add it to the calendar. Get a babysitter to take the kids out of the house and spend a night in together. Although, that would certainly be exciting.
Think about how special it was when you were dating your partner. Just going out for ice cream was fun. Look for ways to bring those feelings back. Doing good feels good. Doing good together can help you see a side of your partner you never knew, or forgot existed.
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