Have you ever been in a relationship or marriage where things started off great and then one day you wake up and realize that it’s gone stale?
You realize that the love is gone (or faded away), the passion is non-existent and you’re living more like roommates than lovers and you want more…
The big question in moments like these is…
What happened to your love and how can you recapture something special again?
We’ve seen it over the years as we have conversations with our coaching clients to help them recapture love and desire for each other that has faded.
It’s sort of like a car Otto had a few years back.
The car still looked good on the outside but one day he realized that it just wasn’t running right so he took it to our mechanic.
The mechanic said it was a problem with the blah, blah, blah (aka the part of the engine we have no clue about) and to make the car run right again, it would cost the equivalent of a year’s salary of Otto’s first job after high school.
We paid to have the car fixed and then traded it in on a new one not long after that but it got us thinking about how
similar this situation is to most love relationships.
Most people wake up one day and realize their relationship isn’t what they want and it isn’t what it used to be…
And they have what we call an “Oh %&#@” moment.
But if you really go to the source of the problem, the challenges in your relationship didn’t just start happening today.
They started the day you stopped doing the things that made both of you feel special, important, alive and totally in love with each other.
They started when you began believing more negative than positive things about your relationship.
A woman we’ll call Joan said to us once…
“If you’re in love, you don’t have to pay attention to the relationship. Love should take care of itself.”
And this was one of many beliefs she held that resulted in a divorce, being alone and heartbroken.
You see—the truth is…
Love doesn’t grow by itself.
It’s just like a beautiful flower garden…
The flower garden doesn’t get to be the talk of the town by accident.
It requires some serious TLC.
You have to care for the garden by watering, pruning and paying attention to the flowers you want to grow if you want your it to become more beautiful.
And that’s how you grow and recapture love.
Here are 4 ways we use to recapture love and keep it strong every day…
1. You water, cultivate and pay attention to it and treat it with the care that you’d have to give to anything else that you want to be beautiful, vibrant and alive.
In other words, you make the relationship important in your life and you show up in ways that feed it instead of neglect or ignore it.
2. You choose words that are loving even when you’re speaking your truth.
Your “truth” doesn’t have to be said from a tight, challenging place inside you. It can be said with love in a way your partner can hear it.
–>Free Video gives you Magic Words to say it right every time–>
3. You choose actions that bring you closer together instead of pushing you further apart.
A simple action can be saying “hello” to your partner when you come together each evening and giving your attention, even briefly to the other person. This says “you’re important” and “our relationship is important.”
4. You choose beliefs that make you more open to love instead of ones that shut your heart down to each other and to love.
Instead of instantly thinking your partner is “wrong” when he or she has a different idea from you, open to maybe seeing the situation in a different way. Differences don’t have to deteriorate into the “blame game” and tear down your love. You can adopt the attitude of curiosity and find out more about why your partner feels that way.
It’s certainly possible to recapture love when a relationship grows lifeless and stale. It just takes letting go of old ways that haven’t worked in the past and seeing something new in the other person and in your relationship.