Can we fall in love again?
And what exactly do we even mean when we say "love"?
On a day-to-day basis, your relationship is fine; you have no real complaints about each other. Okay, your sex life is a little routine and your partner seldom makes you feel special.
But then the grind of work, bringing up children, and servicing the mortgage means that you have less time together than you’d like. In fact, when you stop and think, really think, you find yourself asking: shouldn’t there be more than this?
You are not alone. In the early part of my career as a marital therapist, couples sought counselling for life crises and situations infused with drama: infidelity, constant rows, dealing with blended families and financial meltdown.
Things changed, however. The second part of my career has seen a huge rise in the number of couples seeking help because one half has fallen out of love with the other. For these couples, their relationship has somehow drifted from passionate to companionable into crisis.
Where to start if you feel like you feel nothing…
The first stumbling block to falling back in love again is language. How to explain your feelings without hurting your partner or making them so defensive that they switch off?
My clients generally come to me with the phrase I used for the title of one of my most popular books: ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you’.
But this begs the question: what is love? One small word has to cover everything from that crazy ‘walking on air’ feeling when you first meet, through to the settled love of couples who have been through numerous crises together and know they can truly count on each other.
Even more confusing, we use ‘love’ to describe our feelings for our children, parents and friends. Actually, in my opinion, we are dealing with three different phenomena; understanding each of them unlocks the secret of staying in love forever.
Experimental psychologist Dorothy Tennov interviewed 500 people in depth about their experience of falling in love. Both men and women, from all cultures, described the experience in the same way: you can’t stop thinking about your beloved, an aching in the heart, a total inability to be interested in anyone else, and all everyday problems retreat into the background.
In the first heady months, everything about a love interest is special. Take Terry, a thirty-two year old systems manager: ‘Anything that she liked, I liked; anything that belonged to her acquired a certain magic. Her handbag, her notebook, her pencil. I abhor the sight of toothmarks on a pencil; they disgust me. But not HER toothmarks. Hers were sacred; her wonderful mouth had been there.’
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Not only are the most ordinary events and qualities enthused with a romantic glow but two-thirds of men, and three-quarters of women, could identify their partner’s character defects or bad habits yet still did not perceive them as an impediment.
‘Yes I knew he gambled, I knew he sometimes drank too much and I knew he did not read a book from one year to the next,” says Geraldine, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher, remembering the first eight months of her relationship.
“I knew it, but I didn’t incorporate it into the overall image. I dwelt on his wavy hair, the way he looked at me, the thought of him driving me to work in the morning.’
These feelings are very different from those experienced by long-term established couples for whom wavy hair does not trump coming home drunk, and the pencil covered in toothmarks would probably end up in the bin.
Love vs limerence
To differentiate between the crazy ‘love is blind’ phase and more established love, Tennov coined the word “Limerence.” From the vantage of a settled relationship, it is easy to forget the downside of limerence: the anxiety about whether they will call, the nervousness in their presence and all the hopeless mooning about.
In fact, 42% of Tennov’s respondents were severely depressed about a love affair and 17% reported suicidal thoughts. However, limerence does not last forever.
Tennov discovered that from the moment limerence crystallises, the clock starts running and that it normally lasts for somewhere between eighteen months and three years.
When social biologists from Cornell University tracked the brain chemicals associated with falling in love - dopamine, phenylothylamine and oxytocin-their period of intense attraction exactly matched the anecdotal findings from Tennov’s volunteers.
From limerence to loving attachment
What happens after limerence wears off? Some people call this ‘mature love’ which sounds boring, so again we need another term. I call this loving attachment. It is not as flashy as limerence but just as beautiful.
It is cuddling up to a warm body on a cold or stormy night, coming home to find they’ve cooked a huge lasagne that will last the family a week, or sending a text for no other reason than you’re thinking of each other.
The big difference between limerence and loving attachment is that while limerence can survive on very little (sometimes the other person does not even know that you exist) if loving attachment is not fed, you will begin to detach from the relationship.
However, the myths of love- like ‘I’ll love you no matter what’- and a lack of understanding about limerence makes us believe that once we have paired off, we can relax and let ‘love’ smooth over any difficulties.
In effect, our partner’s needs can come after our work, our children, our hobbies, our parents and somehow thrive on what is left over. Nothing is further from the truth. Loving attachment is seldom unconditional.
So what feeds loving attachment?
Listening (with your full attention), sharing (feelings, stories from your day, chores) generosity (time as well as gifts), and going the extra mile (the little things that are truly hard for your partner like putting up with a prickly father-in-law).
Some of these might sound obvious but think back over the past twenty-four hours: what did you do that supported loving attachment? What did you do that undermined it?
When I asked Anna and Justin - who had been married for twelve years - they were amazed at how little time they spent together and how preoccupied they had been.“I was far too busy cooking dinner to look at Justin when he told me about this deal at work,” admitted Anna, “it was complicated so I sort of zoned out.”
Meanwhile, Justin confessed: “I just rushed past her on the stairs yesterday without even stopping for a peck on the cheek.”
Although loving attachment takes work, the good news is that unlike limerence it CAN last forever.
Affectionate regard
The third kind of love covers the affection we feel for our children and parents. While loving attachment dies if not reciprocated, this love survives no matter what. In fact, it is a sad truism that many children abused by their parents can still want a relationship with them and generally even the parents of mass murderers passionately defend their sons. I call this bond ‘affectionate regard’, because no matter how often our children disappoint or exasperate us, the affection for them endures.
The same is not true for our partners. Confusing affectionate regard and loving attachment makes us take our partners for granted and lose the underpinning passion. In fact when someone says ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you’ they probably mean ‘I have affectionate regard for you but I’ve lost my loving attachment’.
In the worst cases, there is an additional layer: I miss the loving attachment so much that I now feel nostalgic for the excitement of limerence.
Can we recapture limerence?
So is it possible to recapture limerence? Certainly the crazy, obsessive, possessed side of limerence is history -and maybe that is just as well - but the intense joy, head in the clouds, supreme delight, can return. This is most commonly as flashbacks, however, rather than the all-engrossing biological attraction of the first few years.
Often these moments come after a crisis. Anna experienced one after she had had an affair:
“It had been a horrible time and I’d hated myself so much that I had to confess,” she explained. “Justin was devastated and that got me crying again. I couldn’t stand it and went upstairs but just sat on the edge of the bath staring into space. Half an hour later, Justin brought me a glass of brandy. Even thoughI’d hurt him, he looked at me with such tenderness and concern. He didn’t say anything but I could feel the space between us getting smaller. The silence got bigger and I was overwhelmed with love. There would be lots more pain, and lots of work, but it was not hopeless.He sat on the edge of the bath and we snogged like a couple of teenagers.”
A golden moment of limerence can happen under less dramatic circumstances: returning from a business trip, making up after an argument or from setting aside time to be alone together. Interestingly, older long-term couples (twenty plus years together) experience the most frequent bursts of limerence.
When they first met their feelings were driven by the fantasy of a possible shared life, now they are supported by the reality of all those years together. Understanding the complexity of what we mean when we talk about love is the first step towards recapturing what makes our relationship special.
Yes, it takes effort but then nothing truly valuable comes easy.
Practical tips to boost loving attachment
Accept that you have a problem: about a fifth of my ‘I love you but’ clients have suffered for five years plus. The longer that you leave it, the worse it gets.
Forget the candlelit meals and expensive holidays away together. Big gestures don’t work because they make us think that one push will sort everything out. It is much better to create lots of small habits-like eating together in the evening -which can easily be repeated and will make a long-term difference.
Look at each other more: Harvard scientists discovered that when couples in love talk, they spend seventy-five percent of the time looking at each other. With some married couples, it can drop as low as thirty percent.
Keep a loving attachment diary. Look back at what you did, what fed and what starved love.
Be generous. If you’re fed up with your partner, you will naturally treat them worse. Guess what? They will sink to your level and your relationship becomes trapped in a negative downward spiral. If you them better, they will treat you better in return.
Give positive feedback. We are often better at communicating our negative feelings than our positive ones, which can leave our partner feeling they can’t do anything right.
Stop side-stepping arguments. The most common cause of falling out of love is swallowing conflict. We tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter and switch off our angry feelings, and soon everything shuts down. In reality, a row is intimacy at its most intense - you have to be close to have an argument
April news from me
Therapist Robert Glover is the author of No More Mr Nice Guy - my recent podcast episode with him on why people-pleasing doesn’t please anybody has been really popular. You can listen here.
Have you downloaded my new free resource on How to Have Difficult Conversations yet? I’ve had lots of positive feedback. You’ll find it here.
As always, if it feels like the right time to start marital therapy, send an email to Tricia (tricia@andrewgmarshall.com) for a virtual or in-person appointment with one of my team of therapists in London, or with me here in Berlin.
With love,
Andrew