Keeping the Love Alive

What happens?  You meet, you fall in love, you can’t take your eyes off each other

You want it to last forever.   And then all of a sudden everything seems like hard work.

Perhaps because it requires no skill to ‘fall in love’, it is often thought that maintaining your relationship does not need skill either. It requires education, communication, and self-discipline – does that sound like hard work?

Well in all other areas of your life, you put effort into being the best you can be, improving, growing and achieving. So why not with love too?
We have said in another article that there are three distinct kinds of love.
1. First is Romantic Love with its passions and impulses.

2. Then follows Working Love which involves teamwork in a partnership to do whatever has to be done.
3. Later comes Mature Love with rather different requirements than either of the earlier forms of love.

It is usually during the time of Working Love that the love wears a bit thin. Maintaining love during this time of hard work is very demanding. This hard work is not just about bringing up children, but setting up a home and paying for it, and building one, or two careers to ensure financial security for the future.

These demands produce multiple stresses that put considerable strain on the relationship. The good news is you can teach yourself how to keep the love alive.

It’s not what you say it’s the way you say it

We need to learn and use the correct Love Language for our partners and make sure they know what ours is.  According to Gary Chapman, author of The Love Languages, there are five different ‘love languages’ which apply to both men and women:

• Words of Affirmation: Chances are you will be responsive to compliments and hearing the words “I love you,” Insults will kill your feelings of love.


• Quality Time full, undivided attention. Being there for this type of person is critical, but being there—with the TV off, fork and knife down and all chores and tasks on standby—makes your significant other feel truly special and loved. Distractions, postponed dates, or the failure to listen can be especially hurtful.

• Receiving Gifts: This is all about the thought and effort behind how love is expressed, rather than a need for material possessions. The perfect gift or gesture shows that you are understood, cared for, and prized. Thoughtless gifts or missing celebration dates spell trouble.

• Acts of Service: What this is all about is helping the other person, easing the strain, and using the magic words “Let me help you with that”. Someone who speaks this language will be hurt by broken commitments and laziness.

• Physical Touch: This is all about physical displays of affection- hugs, hand-holding, stolen kisses and physical closeness are all ways to show love to a person who speaks this language. Without touch, this person will feel very neglected and withdrawn.

Different people give them different levels of importance and we each have a priority love language which we need to receive from our partner. The first thing to do is discover your priority love language. How do you like to receive love from a partner? Then and, more important, you need to find out the love language of your partner. You may have your theories about what this is but it is better to test them in real life to see what response they bring.

Most people don’t have one exclusive love language, but if we are consistently deprived of communication in our preferred language we will become desperately hungry for it.

Use this simple way to keep love alive during difficult times, so it lasts a lifetime. Find out about our How to Find Love in Middle Life course.

More of these are in the Magazine
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