REVIVAL
Relationship
By COURTNEY HELGOE
Denver Times columnist Doug Brown
wasn’t ready to give up his favorite sweatpants, but after
his wife, Annie, declared them a libido-killer, he agreed.
After all, when you commit to making love every single
day for 101 days, little things really do count.
Even before embarking on this challenge, the Browns,
both in their late 30s, considered themselves a happy
couple. But like many happily partnered people who have
been together awhile, they felt like their romance was
getting a little stale. Two feisty young daughters, two jobs
and 14 years of marriage had left them less focused on the
sizzle of their intimate connection — a situation to which
most people in long-term partnerships can readily relate.
Whether it’s stress, time pressure or just the effects
of always-there familiarity, most long-term partnerships
reach points where the romance could use a boost.
As it turned out, the Browns’ experiment delivered
far more than they bargained for. In Just Do It: How One
Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Life
for 101 Days (No Excuses!) (Crown, 2008), Doug Brown
explains how daily intimacy not only renewed their physical connection, it significantly deepened their emotional
one and increased their daily pleasure in living. It inspired
them to take yoga classes, go on more short vacations and
even commit to buying a house.
So what to do if your own connection feels flimsy
and your passion a bit predictable? A 101-day lovefest
might not be what you have in mind, but many experts
suggest that taking some initiative to renew your bond in
other ways can yield unexpected rewards. Here, relationship experts explain why romances tend to cool over time
and how you can help revive the energy and passion you’d
both like to enjoy for the long haul.
Why Things Cool
When a long-term relationship falls into a holding pattern,
a variety of factors may be at play. Some of the change is
Even the best relationships can get dulled by
time and drained by stress. Happily, there are
simple ways to renew your bond — no matter
how long you’ve been together.
simply chemical, explains scientist and anthropologist Helen
Fisher in her book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of
Romantic Love (Henry Holt, 2004).
During the rush of new romance, we’re high on dopamine, which the reward centers in the brain churn out in
response to novel stimuli. But as relationships stabilize
we’re more influenced by oxytocin and vasopressin. These
calming hormones deepen our bonds and increase our sense
of loyalty and security, but the sensations they produce can
feel flat compared with the who-needs-sleep-or-food dopamine high we felt in earlier days.
There are also the inevitable challenges that emerge
when a relationship survives its early flame phase: the reality of shared household responsibilities, work demands that
keep partners apart or exhausted, maybe the arrival of a new
baby, or negotiations around stepparenting. Having one or
both partners faced with a choice between intimacy and
much-needed sleep can also take romance down a notch.
Even when we’re getting along well, we can easily fall
into intimacy-defeating habits — like watching TV in bed,
or using up all our conversation time discussing shared
responsibilities or financial concerns, or failing to take as
much care with our grooming habits as we once did.
Indeed, the habits of togetherness can routinely lead to
more distant emotional patterns, says David Schnarch, PhD,
author of Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy
Alive in Committed Relationships (W. W. Norton, 1997).
Schnarch points out that, in many cases, the longer we stay
with our partners, the more we hesitate to “rock the boat”
with novel activities or self-revelation that might cost us our
partner’s devotion. We start feeling compelled to be predictable just to keep things stable.
The problem with this risk-averse approach, Schnarch
explains, is that we get caught in a cycle of “
self-presentation,” trying to be who we think our partner wants and
needs, rather than self-revelation, which is what was so
exciting about being in love in the first place — expos-
