Kick Your Relationship Rut in the Butt!

The first few months of a new relationship are nothing short of magical. You want to spend every minute together. All of your conversations are enthralling. You laugh at each others jokes as if you're the funniest two people on the planet. You spend hours making out like teenagers...sometimes even in public. Its like your days and nights are a montage scene from your favorite romantic movie. You can almost hear "I'm Walking on Sunshine" playing in the background as you skip down the street hand in hand. Until one day, the music stops. Real life sets in. You both take off the rose-colored glasses and you begin to see one another not in the image of perfection you projected, but as real human beings...with flaws. Your romantic date nights filled with deep conversation and passion, have been replaced with ordering pizza and watching Netflix. One day you wake up and ask yourself the question: when was the last time you actually kissed? The thrill is gone. Is it gone forever? Isn't there something that can be done to fix this?

A relationship group that I follow on Facebook ask the question: Is it possible to repair a long term relationship with a significant other that has become boring? If your guy or girl is telling you "they are not feeling it", can you do anything about that? How can you be bold enough to let him or her know you are losing interest or you're not interested anymore? The short answer is yes, it's possible to repair it, but it's going to require effort from both partners and not just in the ways you might expect. Now for the not so short answer. First you must both understand that love is a choice, not just an emotion. When you're in a committed relationship, you and your partner must wake up each day choosing to love each other, whether you're feeling that warm and fuzzy feeling, or you are still annoyed from a disagreement you had the night before. You don't expect that every day is going to be rainbows and roses, BUT you don't just settle for being stuck in a rut either. When you face challenges in your relationship (not just arguments, but boredom too), you must to put in some effort to strengthen your bond and turn things around. If however you're bummed out because you're not feeling fireworks every day, and you think somehow is all your partners fault, this isn't good news. This kind of attitude is a sure sign of immaturity and unreasonable expectations for a relationship. Which brings me to my next point...

You are responsible for your own happiness, and your partner is responsible for theirs. A relationship is only healthy with two individuals living happy lives, coming together with a desire to share them. When one partner is unhappy with the other, hoping they will complete them, its a recipe for disaster. I suspect that it has a lot more to do with their own discontent than a genuine problem with the relationship. In fact, there are no boring relationships, only people who settle for boring lives. Sure, there are some long term relationships that don't work out because ultimately the couple was incompatible, or one partner refuses to grow and evolve, leaving the other to feel stifled in a relationship. But for a couple who once enjoyed fun, lively conversation, passion and excitement is now stuck in a rut, the solution to a rekindle a relationship is often counter-intuitive. You need to focus on yourself!

What are some things you used to do before you got comfortable in your relationship that brought you joy? Did you used to run, write, try new restaurants with friends, enjoy playing sports, or singing in the shower because there was no one around to hear? It's time to reconnect with those things that brought you happiness. It's all too easy, when we get settled in a relationship, to let those things slide because we do not think we have time or we've lost interest because it's so much more enjoyable to veg out on the sofa and watch reruns of Boardwalk Empire. That's crazy! In order to have balance in our romantic relationships, we must do things that fulfill us as individuals. In this case, you should definitely reconnect with the things that make you happy. No matter what happens in the relationship, you'll feel an instant boost of your own. And though this should not be your motivation, by invigorating your own life, you may very well discover that your significant other will wake up from their haze of boredom and say to themselves "something seems different about them, they're excited about their life, their busy, and they can barely find time to hang out with me!" But (and this is a big but), they must be willing to reincorporate into their life some activities and passions of their own. The effort you put in to make your own life more interesting, will pep up the relationship temporarily, but unless the significant other is focusing on their own happiness as well, eventually they will plummet right back into that rut. What's difficult about this is we don't have any control over our partners actions. Only time will tell if they will follow through...

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