The feelings that are there in the beginning stages don't last forever. When you are first in love, everything seems right with the world. You don't see any of the imperfections in the other person, and think that you have found the perfect one for you. You enjoy spending every minute that you can with them, and you think about them when you're not together. You're willing to do things that you don't enjoy just so you can spend time with that person.
You get excited at the mention of their name and put a lot of effort into being the person that you think they want in their life.
And this feels amazing. But once the newness of a relationship wears off, love starts to change. You start to see the things in that person that bother you a little. You may start to disagree more. You may not even feel the same spark every time you see them across the room. If you're unfamiliar with the different stages of love, it's easy to think that this change in feelings means that you're no longer in love.
You may think that if you love someone, those feelings are always going to be there, just like they were in the beginning. Popular movies like romantic comedies add to this belief. But in reality, love changes over time. While the newness might wear off, if you stick with it, it grows into something much deeper and more sustaining. It's unrealistic to think that you can go through your entire life at the level that your relationship is in those early days. If you want to have a long-lasting relationship, it means that you need to get familiar with how to make the relationship last once the puppy love stage wears off.
You need to be able to recognize when this happens and realize that it doesn't mean that your relationship needs to end, but simply that it's changing—and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. While you might miss some of the excitement that you felt in those early days, a new level of comfort, trust, and security shows up when you move further along in the stages of love. So instead of thinking that love is fleeting and giving up on your relationship, here are some things that you can do to make love last.
And no, this doesn't mean choose a different person each day. It means that you need to choose the partner that you are with day after day after day. Love might partly be a feeling, but it's also a choice. You can choose to love someone even when those initial feelings have worn off. There are some days when you may be angry at each other and you may not feel all the warm and fuzzy feelings of love, but it doesn't mean that you can't choose to act in love towards that person.
One of the ways that you can choose to love your partner as the relationship progresses is to continue to do the things that you did in the beginning phases of your relationship.
But there is no need for anyone else to understand the grounds for our love, indeed the last thing we want to do is provide others with a recipe to steal our object of desire. Equally, in ceding control to recorded cultural practice, evolution would place too much "trust" in a capacity — collective rationality — that is, in evolutionary terms, far too young. It is also a mistake to think of instinct as simple , and inferior to careful deliberation.
That it is tacit makes it potentially more sophisticated than rational analysis, for it brings into play a wider array of factors than we could ever hold simultaneously in our conscious minds. The truth of this stares us in the face: think how much better we are at recognising a face compared with describing it. Why should the recognition of love be any different?
Ultimately, if the neural mechanisms of love were simple, you should be able to induce it with an injection, to extinguish it with a scalpel while leaving everything else intact. The cold, hard logic of evolutionary biology makes this impossible. Were love not complicated, we would never have evolved in the first place.
That said, love — like all our thoughts, emotions and behaviours — rests on physical processes in the brain, a very complex interplay of them. Like art, love is more than the sum of its parts. So those of us lucky to experience its chaos should let ourselves be carried by the waves.
And if we end up wrecked on the surf-hidden rocks, we can draw comfort from knowing reason would have got us no further. It seeks to answer our readers' nagging questions about life, love, death and the Universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.
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We have to accept them and love them as they are. If we go into a relationship thinking we can change someone, we are setting our relationship and ourselves up to fail.
We all have flaws and quirks and are weird in some ways. Accepting those differences is part of love. We can choose to ignore the petty, irritating small things our partner may do. If our partner forgets to take out the garbage, or leaves the cap off the toothpaste, we can talk about it with them, but we also can accept that this just might be forgetful, and choose to move on.
Trying to change our partner into us is one of the biggest relationship mistakes we can make. When we are unhappy with how things are in our relationship, it is easy to overfocus on what we are not getting from the relationship.
Instead, a healthier response is to see what we could be doing for our partner, rather than focusing on what they are not doing for us. We should always try to be supportive of our partner, because we cannot expect anything from our partner that we are not willing to give ourselves. Another important choice we can make is to choose to remember the reasons why we committed to this person. Our relationship will not always be pleasant and there will be times for serious discussions and disagreement.
There will be trying times and even bad times that we will need to work through together. It is true that old love does not equal new love. In the Old Love camp, gone is the anxiety over what to wear, what to talk about, is it too soon to call, and whether there is food stuck in your teeth. Scientists acknowledge past research that argues romantic love is generally over 12 to 15 months into a relationship, but add that this study proves that particular timeline is not a steadfast rule.
And no, Old Love couples are not sleeping in separate beds nor carousing with younger partners. They still like to have an exciting relationship in the bedroom, and continue to want connection, engagement, and a sex life.
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