Falling in love again – with the same person (DW#365)
When we are going through a period of "drought" in our relationships, it can feel sad and hopeless. The spark feels like it is just not there. Where there was tenderness and love, there is now distance and hurt.
When a relationship is in this stage, can it be saved? Can you rekindle the feelings that were once there?
Experts like Dr. Gottman believe that an easy and reliable way to stay in love or fall in love again is to maintain or rekindle the marital friendship. When you talk and act like friends, you know each other and you like each other. In other words, to know someone is to love them.
Dr. Gottman’s term for getting to know your partner’s world is called Building Love Maps.
One way to think of it is this: When you choose to spend your life with someone, you hand them a map to your inner world. Your inner world is, of course, quite complex including the memories of your past, the details of your present, your hopes for the future. It includes your deepest fears and your grandest dreams. But the map you hand your partner is just an outline, a sketch.
Over time, your task is to fill in the details. Gottman notes in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: "if you don’t start off with a deep knowledge of each other, it’s easy for your marriage to lose its way when your lives shift suddenly and dramatically."
So get to know your partner. Again.
There is, and always, will be, more that you don’t know about your partner than you do. People's inner lives are sacred and fascinating. And they change over time.
Couples who stay in love make knowing each other well a priority over the lifetime of their relationship.
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