How Do I Fall Back in Love With My Partner?

Remember when you and your partner first got together and felt inseparable? When you couldn’t wait until the next time you saw each other, and that was all you thought about? What you felt was the intense rush of being in love.

Your partner may have been amazing, but hormones had more to do with this feeling. When we are in love, our brains produce three particular chemicals that foster these emotions. Noradrenaline stimulates adrenaline production and causes racing hearts and sweaty palms. Dopamine, also called “the feel-good chemical,” stimulates pleasurable feelings. Finally, phenylethylamine gives us that butterfly feeling in our stomachs. All of these chemicals are released when we are in love.

Over time, these chemicals fade. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine if those chemicals remained at the same high level forever. We would never want to leave our partners or do anything else.

Also, over time, as the intensity of “being in love” fades, people may question their feelings for their partner. That’s normal. After experiencing such an intense initial rush, our expectations get skewed. People can wonder if they still love their partner if “being in love” doesn’t feel like it used to. There isn’t the same rush, intensity, or excitement.

People who wonder where the feelings of being in love have gone need to recognize that those feelings aren’t meant to last. It’s hormonally impossible to sustain them. That doesn’t mean people don’t love their partners, but the experience of love, and even the nature of their love, changes.

The first step to reconnecting, then, is to stay curious about and explore the nature of your love. Perhaps feelings of lust have been replaced by intimacy. True intimacy means loving someone in a more complete way on many levels; the sources of connection are deeper and more profound than simply romantic sexual attraction.

The beautiful thing about true intimacy is that it can’t be formed quickly. It takes time to grow, and it gains intensity over time. In other words, it’s not something people experience right away, and not every couple can achieve it.

Here is one strategy to help partners “fall back in love”—and get those butterfly feelings again—as well as cultivate true intimacy.

Appreciating the continuum of long-term relationships.

Sometimes, we need to zoom out in order to zoom in. What does that mean? Sometimes, we get so fixated on the now that we can’t see the bigger picture. This strategy is about zooming out and stepping back to see the big picture of a long-term relationship.

Let’s assume you’re in a long-term relationship and you met your significant other in your 20s. Again, assuming all goes well in your relationship—you put in the work, time, and commitment—you’ll be together into your 70s, 80s, or longer. Of course, during that time, over the course of 50 or 60 years, the road will not always be smooth. There will be bumps, blips, and challenges. Like any other healthy couple, you will have arguments or periods when things aren’t always easy. But you commit to each other, work on the issues, and stay together until one of you passes on.

Imagine a graph that illustrates the ups and downs of this relationship over time. As the line moves horizontally, it would be jagged, almost like a heartbeat, with good times followed by challenging times followed by better times in an ongoing cycle. Zoom out, though, and the jagged line would look much smoother; only the biggest ups and downs would be noticeable. The line would look stable and overall probably ascending since, in this scenario, you, as a couple, are successfully meeting your relationship challenges.

When looking at the timeline over 50 years, do the individual zigzags matter? Not really, and not more than the overall growth. That’s this strategy in a nutshell: To avoid focusing on and getting upset by downturns, focus on the overall long-term continuum.

Author Jonathan Haidt made a similar point in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt researched two kinds of love: passionate and companionate. Passionate love is romantic love; it’s “being in love” when our hormones surge. Passionate love feels urgent and fills us with overwhelming happiness, euphoria, fear, and anxiety. It can feel like being on drugs. Haidt calls it “the love that you fall into.”

Companionate love is more of a slow-burning fire. Haidt says companionate love “grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely upon, care for, and trust each other.” In other words, passionate love is destined to burn out, while companionate love is destined to grow.

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Haidt shows the difference in two graphs that track both types of love: One graph is of a six-month relationship, and one is of a 60-year relationship. In the beginning, passionate love is way more intense than companionate love, which barely registers. Then, over the first six months, passionate love experiences steep peaks and valleys until both types of love are experienced as roughly equivalent in intensity.

Now consider the 60-year graph. Passionate love remains at a low intensity and has much smaller peaks and valleys, while companionate love keeps getting stronger and stronger.

My imaginary graph of a long-term couple, as well as Haidt’s graphs, are helpful ways to view a relationship. Even if someone is in a downturn, that doesn’t mean the relationship will stay there forever, and seen from a long-term perspective, that dip in intensity will be just another blip. The trick is not to fixate on the blips.

And if a couple has gotten through hardships before, that is even further confirmation that they can get through a blip again. Simply commit to your partnership for the long haul—blips, bumps, and all.