Are you in a marriage or long-term relationship that has fallen flat in the romance department? Do you feel more like roommates or business partners than giddy girlfriend and boyfriend?
If the feelings of being in love with your spouse seem like a distant memory and you want to bring them back into your present life, believe it or not, couples counseling helps you fall back in love.
Many of the couples I work with in relationship therapy start out saying something along the lines of “We know we love each other, but we don’t really feel all that ‘in love’ with each other anymore.” Often, by the time these couples finish marriage therapy, they have fallen back in love, and are enjoying a happier, more secure connection.
Let me tell you about 7 ways couples counseling will help you fall back in love:
- Showing up for couples counseling is a signal to your spouse that he/she is your priority, and that your relationship comes first. That may not sound sexy to you, but it is! As humans, we crave attention and want to know that we matter. And when we suddenly experience being our significant other’s priority and getting focused attention from them in spite of the inconvenience, cost, and initial discomfort of going to therapy, the once frozen feelings begin to thaw.
- You’ll learn to listen to each other in a new and improved way during counseling sessions. Feeling really heard and completely understood infuses us with emotions of being in love. Remember the early days of your relationship (when you were totally in love)? Remember how you spent hours talking to each other and feeling like nobody “got” you like your new partner? Well, you can recapture that by tuning back in, sharpening your listening skills, and being each other’s confidant.
- Couples counseling is a safe place to open up and be vulnerable. Chances are that if you’re not feeling those “in love” feelings for your spouse, either one, or both of you have built up a wall and have stopped being completely open and vulnerable. Intimacy and feeling in love go hand-in-hand with openness and vulnerability. A relationship therapist will help you tear down that wall so you can create the open space to fall back in love.
- By cleaning up resentments from the past, your heart and vision will soften. You’ll start noticing the good stuff again. Resentments tend to block your ability to see the positive efforts, good character, genuine caring, and attractive qualities in your partner. But once the resentments fade away, you’ll stop feeling so angry and you’ll start to notice the things that you fell in love with in the first place. And, Voilà! You’ll fall in love all over again.
- A good marriage therapist will help you and your partner become experts on one another. As an expert on your partner, you’ll learn how to recognize emotions on her face, how to read his body language more accurately, or know what she reflexively does when she’s feeling threatened or stressed. Additionally, you’ll learn how to help your partner shift into a more positive emotional state, and how to consistently use attraction to get your partner to move toward you. By being experts on each other, you and your spouse will feel more secure and you’ll naturally allow the “in-love” chemicals to flow between you.
- You’ll finally find solutions to the nagging, recurrent problems that make you feel more like a parent than a partner. We all know that relating to your spouse as a parent or a child is not a good equation for romantic love. Nothing squashes libido and feelings of being in love quicker than a parent/child dynamic in an intimate relationship. You’ve got to function as competent, adult partners in order to tap back into romantic love. A skilled couples counselor can help.
- Transform your pattern of fighting into one that is less intense, not mean, and ends playfully. With some expert relationship therapy, this is possible. After you learn this new way of fighting, you’ll find that you’re both more likely to be in the mood for “make up sex” and you’ll notice yourself falling in love with your partner again.
Don’t hesitate to go to couples counseling if you want to fall back in love with your partner. For over two decades I’ve been helping couples in and around Pueblo Colorado fall back in love with each other. I can help you, too!
Call me at (719) 544-2016 to schedule a free consultation.