You know that passion you and your partner have at the beginning of your relationship? When every moment is about getting closer to each other and nothing is more important than seeing that person naked? How nothing else matters, not food or shelter or work?
Yeah, that intensity is kind of hard to maintain, especially after you marry or have children.
Even in the most idyllic relationship, it’s easy to become complacent.
No one can keep up the “new relationship” pace for long, but it doesn’t make you want to stop trying.
When you lose that initial passion, the romance doesn’t necessarily die a horrible death. Instead, the manic focus on the relationship gives way to a wider field of vision.
Which is all fine and good, but sometimes, you miss that all-consuming passion in your relationship.
I find that it’s harder to get to that single-minded state when I come home and the house is a wreck or I look into the kitchen and see a pile of dishes waiting for me. It’s not that my husband doesn’t do enough around the house. It’s just that daily life can be somewhat of a mood-killer in the romance department.
When my husband swoops me into his arms and carries me up the stairs, I don’t want to find myself thinking about the laundry next to the bed.
My husband and I constantly try to remind ourselves of that flirtatious feeling we had way back when. Our ideas for re-igniting our passion for each other range from evenly distributing chores to cutting out alcohol to sampling some herbal enhancers from our local health food store. We’re attempting to take up Pilates together in the hopes that exercise will help us shed some of the effects of everyday stress. We’re being more spontaneous and trying to enjoy being a couple.
I wish I could say that we both have the same insatiable need to be with each other as we did when we first got together, but that would be next to impossible. We don’t pounce on each other at the door anymore, but we make up for those early days in other ways.
He knows exactly which treat to get me when he goes to the grocery store, and I know what Netflix movie he’d wildly appreciate. We’re no longer as openly flirty as we were at the beginning of our relationship, but when we’re together, we’re comfortable in our own skin.
I miss the crazy passion of the beginning of our relationship, but the comfortable familiarity we now have seems to have its own appeal.
Even if we can’t go back to where we were, that may not be such a terrible thing.
Amber Copeland is a cynical optimist and a hopeless romantic. She’s a product of the 90s, rife with riot grrl angst and a sense that she should be part of the solution, not the problem.
Originally published on YourTango.
Featured Photo by Soroush Karimi on Unsplash.
