Wendy Grace
Love Notes
Myself and my husband are together 15 years and managed to keep our ‘spark’ alive well beyond the honeymoon stage but in the past few years things have changed without us really realising that our attraction has faded.
One of the key issues here is the really distorted reality of attraction that movies, music and books create around attraction. Not only are passionate embraces where couples can’t ever seem to keep their hands off one another unrealistic, but they represent a truly hollow understanding of an authentic spark. It is based on a false assumption of attraction being limited to simply the physical and sexual. I would imagine in your 15 years together you both have changed both physically, and in many other ways, but in tandem with that your love has grown deeper and stronger.
Benchmarking your attraction on those initial wild sparks is not doing your love or your marriage justice. So you need to redefine attraction as being so much more than the physical, it’s about the memory of him holding your first child, of the eyes that will never change and the smile that is the same now as it was on the day your first met.
You need to focus on reconnecting with mind, body and soul – not just the body. It’s about remembering everything that connects you rather than just how you both look in the mirror now. Often when we feel a lack of attraction the root cause can actually be insecurities in ourselves and how we have changed. Are you comfortable in yourself and in your own skin? How much time have you recently taken to nurture that romance.
Another element that requires time is your relationship with God both separately and together, have you actually asked God to help you?
I will go back beating on my drum of the importance of having a weekly date night, where you don’t talk shop (work, kids managing the home) you just enjoy each other’s company – to relight the spark on your next date night share three of your happiest memories with one another and share three things that you are thankful to one another for. Spend the time focusing on what you love about each other rather than what you think is missing.
The reality is for all of us we will change, physically, there will be greys and wrinkles and probably a few more pounds around your waist. If you’re attached to purely the superficial then of course the spark will fade, so you need to focus on authentic attraction. I recommend doing the ‘love languages’ quiz online as a good starting point to reconnecting with one another. Passion is something that you can truly cultivate and just because you are together a long time doesn’t mean you can’t discover or rediscover one another in new and intimate ways.