Let’s face it, falling in love is giddily exciting but staying in love can be quite a pain. Find out how to stay in love forever by really understanding your relationship and your partner.
You may not voice this out loud or even talk about it with your partner.
But at some point in every long relationship, all of us wonder about how to stay in love forever.
Even in the happiest of relationships, it’s natural to get interested in someone else or find someone else attractive.
It may seem surprising, but it’s against human instincts to stay in a monogamous relationship or not find someone else sexually appealing.
But then again, social norms and societal pressures bind us to stay in a committed relationship.
[Read: 7 secret signs of a relationship that’s starting to go bad]
How to stay in love forever
To understand how to stay in love forever, we have to understand the basic requirements of a romantic relationship.
And we have to accept that sexual attraction and love are two completely different aspects that come together in a successful romantic relationship.
Staying in romantic love with your lover doesn’t just depend upon intense love or affection for your partner.
If staying in love was all about fondly liking someone or loving them unconditionally, there’s no difference in the love you’d experience for a friend, a sibling, a child or even a parent. In these cases, love is unconditional.
But romantic love needs intense love and sexual attraction to work successfully. And to make a relationship work, you need to keep the relationship alive and relive the excitement of the first few weeks of love every day for the rest of your lives. [Read: Top 20 reasons for divorce that most couples overlook]
Of course, it’s rather difficult to trick your mind into recreating those fleeting glances of first love and those passionate first kisses, but it’s definitely doable if you use these simple relationship changing steps on how to stay in love.
Ways to stay in love forever
To stay in love forever, learn to keep an open mind and always exchange thoughts with your partner to create new exciting memories that can last a lifetime. And never ever forget the two things that are required to stay in love, affection and sexual desire. Find out how to use affection and sexual desire to stay in love with each other using these tips. [Read: How to better a relationship]
1. Get a great body
Yes, this is shallow. And you need to face it, sexual desire is shallow too! If you want your partner to love you and desire you, you really can’t expect your partner to desire your Michelin tires, can you?
In several extensive surveys, it’s seen that over 60% of Americans are either overweight or obese. In the beginning of a relationship, you pay attention to your physique and try to look your fittest best. But as the years go by, you know you have a partner who won’t leave you anyway and you just stop taking care of your own body.
To feel good in a relationship or to sexually attract your partner, you really need to like what you see in the mirror every day. You can’t expect the affection and sexual interest to stay on if you can’t arouse your partner anymore. It’s brutal, but you can’t laze like a slob and expect your partner to genuinely think you’re sexy and find you desirable! [Read: How to sex up your bedroom]
2. Dress up and look your best
Looking fit and getting a great physique is the first step to knowing how to stay in love, but that’s just not enough to arouse the sexual desire in long term relationships. You also have to understand how to look good when you’re walking down the street.
Sexual desire is an evolutionary trait, but knowing that there are a lot of other people who give you a second glance involuntarily makes your own partner desire you more. [Read: How to turn on a guy]
Look your best, whether you’re at home or out with your partner at the movies or at a restaurant. Groom yourself and awe the people around you, and your partner will love you more, respect you more and definitely sexually desire you more than you’ll ever know! [Read: How to sleep with your man in a sexy way]
3. Give each other space
As the relationship grows older, lovers start to spend time with each other a lot more than they would at the beginning. While spending every evening together is a great way to bond, it’s not good for the relationship.
If you really want to know how to stay in love forever, you need to learn to give each other space in the relationship to grow as individuals. Create your own hobbies and explore your own interests. Enjoy something that you love doing, be it playing video games or gardening, and grow your own passions. Keep your own lives interesting, and you’ll be able to have better and more interesting conversations with your partner. [Read: How to give space in a relationship and better your romance]
4. Go out with your own friends
In a long term relationship, the lives of the partners are too closely entwined and one partner’s life becomes the other partner’s life. But for a successful romantic relationship, you have to remember that both of you are two individuals who love each other and desire each other, not two people who are attached at the hips. Every now and then, spend time with your own friends, have your own jokes and share your own gossip.
Understanding how to stay in love forever can be difficult to follow if all you look forward to is the monotony of a bored life together, right from the moment you wake up to the time you kiss each other good night.
In a successful relationship, both partners have to be excited to see each and share the events of their daily lives. If there’s no difference between one day and the next, your relationship can get pretty boring and distasteful.
5. Spend time with each other
To stay in love forever, it’s important to give each other space and grow your own life. But at the same time, both partners should spend enough time with each other to talk about each other’s day and spend quality time with each other, be it watching movies or just cuddling up and watching the evening soaps on the television.
Most couples assume they have to spend every minute possible with each other, but for a relationship to be successful, that’s just not true.
More than the time spent with each other, what really matters is the quality time either of you spend with each other. By creating your own lives, both of you would have a lot more to talk about with each other. At the same time, both of you would be excited to spend time with each other instead of just sitting next to each other and staring into space or reading a book. [Read: How to communicate in a relationship and get closer]
By avoiding all individual social activities, hobbies and social interactions and spending all the time with each other, you aren’t really improving your relationship. Instead, you’re just boring each other and preventing each other from growing into exciting individuals who can be more fun and interesting. [Read: Things lovers in perfect relationships talk about]
Knowing how to stay in love forever is pretty simple, as long as you remember to stay as two individuals in love instead of one couple living together.
To keep a relationship exciting, it takes little steps to help each other become better individuals and grow each day, so that each of you can inspire your partner to become a better person. [Read: Why are women fickle in love?]
Knowing how to keep love alive in a relationship can seem easy, but it’s actually more difficult that most lovers imagine.
You have to remember you’re not always going to be the same teenager who fell in love with your teenage lover. You will evolve and so will your partner.
Most couples assume they don’t need to have intimate conversations or exchange thoughts about each other’s views on life because they already know everything about their partner.
But what many don’t understand is that we grow and evolve as individuals constantly, and our likes, dislikes and opinions too change all the time.
In the introduction on how to keep love alive, we’ve seen that there are just two basic requirements for a relationship to be successful.
Affection and sexual desire.
As long as we can keep these two emotions on a high, love too can be kept alive and exciting.
Find out how to keep love alive and make the relationship more exciting and fun, even as the years roll by with these simple and at times, unconventional tips.
How to keep love alive
Most lovers start taking their partner for granted over the years, and this eventually leads to boredom in a relationship. Curiosity in a relationship is the driving force in keeping love alive in a long term relationship.
When you assume you know everything about a partner, love starts to stagnate and differences start to crop up, even if the words aren’t voiced out. After all, both of you grow as individuals with each passing day. [Read: How to know if you are in love]
Here are a few tips on how to keep love alive in a relationship and how to bring the excitement back again, especially when it comes to affection and sexual attraction.
6. Avoid taking each other for granted
One of the disadvantages of long term relationships is the fact that lovers start to take each other for granted. They assume they know their partner’s likes and dislikes and end up making a lot of assumptions, which can be critically wrong at times.
On the other hand, even favors and special gestures are taken for granted as the years go by. If a husband prepares a breakfast-in-bed for his wife every Sunday morning for a few months, it’s a special gesture at the beginning. But as the months go by and the husband decides to sleep in one Sunday morning, the wife ends up getting upset that she wasn’t served her breakfast. Likewise, there may be several other kinds of special gestures that lovers share with each other which can eventually be taken for granted. [Read: 25 sweet romantic gestures you can use for everyday life]
By taking these gestures for granted, nothing really becomes a special gesture anymore. Instead it becomes an obligation. Always remember to acknowledge a gesture, however small it may be if you want to understand the secret behind knowing how to keep love alive in a relationship.
By taking each other for granted, be it an evening foot rub or a big birthday bash, you’re taking away the affection behind a gesture, and turning it into an obligation. If you want to keep the love alive in your relationship, acknowledge the gestures and never ever take your partner for granted.
7. Surprise each other
Remember the first year of your relationship? Both of you went out of your way to buy each other birthday gifts, and every now and then you popped in a surprise just to see your lover smile in surprise. Do you still do that?
In almost all cases, couples stop paying attention to happy surprises after a few years. We want to keep the love alive in a relationship, but almost all of us stop doing anything to keep the relationship exciting and unique. It doesn’t matter if it is concert tickets, a surprise vacation or even a posse of flowers. Go out of your way to make your partner feel special like you used to, and you’ll see that the relationship will only get more exciting and affectionate in no time. [Read: Dating facts]
8. Celebrate special occasions
Pay attention to relationship landmarks and special occasions in the relationship. Many Valentine’s Days, anniversaries and birthdays may come and go, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them because you have so many special moments all year round.
Try to make every year exciting and special in its own way. And wherever possible, try to go out of your way to make your partner feel special. You may lose a few hours or a couple of days planning something special, but the fact that you still try to please your partner and make them feel special is a sure sign that you’re taking an initiative to keep the love alive in the relationship.
As long as you give enough importance to affection and sexual desire in a relationship, it’s a great assurance that the flame of love will burn bright in your relationship for years to come. [Read: 9 relationship stages all couples go through]
9. Keep sex exciting
Sexual desire is by far, one of the most important requirements of a happy romantic relationship. If you want to know how to keep love alive, then your best bet is to focus on a more than satisfying sex life. [Read: Why is sex important in a relationship]
Can you remember the first time you got intimate with your partner? It may be a while ago, but you can’t really forget the racing heartbeats, the passionate cold sweat and the weak knees, can you?
Now just because it’s been a few years since you’ve been together, there’s really no reason why sex can’t remain exciting and heart pounding. Most people want to know how to keep love alive, but yet they don’t really pay attention to sexual attraction between the partners. [Read: Don’t want to have sex anymore?]
Humans are built for procreation, we’re one of the few species on earth that indulge in sex for pleasure. All of us want and need sex, irrespective of whether we get to have it with a partner or someone else. So if you really want to keep your love life on a high, you really have to understand the importance of sex in a relationship, and how vital a role it plays in holding two individuals together in a romantic relationship.
You may have been satisfied doing the missionary position or making love in a quiet bedroom for years until both of you start to get bored with each other bodies. But you can change all that in a few weeks. Start doing something new and exciting, be it indulging in a few fantasies or trying new things in bed or finding new places to make love with each other. It may feel awkward at first, but you’ll be able to have a more satisfying and fulfilling romantic life if you can satisfy your inbuilt sexual urges. [Read: How erotica saved my marriage]
10. Explore each other’s sexual interests
If you want to understand how to keep love alive in a relationship, you need to understand your partner, both romantically and sexually. Individuals and their interests, sexually or otherwise, change over the years. Do you really understand your partner and their sexual interests?
In several cases, partners may be reluctant to share their secret sexual interests because of the fear of being judged negatively in a relationship. And instead of actually enjoying a great sex life, they end up dissatisfied and shrink further away from intimacy.
[Read: Top 10 sexual fantasies for men]
[Read: Top 10 sexual fantasies for women]
To keep love alive and keep the sexual intimacy on a high even as the years pass by, you need to take a few bold decisions. Speak with your partner about their sexual fantasies and what excites them in bed, be it a sexual fetish or a sexual fantasy. You have to remember that we’re all human, and just like we enjoy expressing our love in our own ways, sexual desires too are unique and can be enjoyed better in its own ways. [Read: What men want in bed]
Try these simple tips on keeping love alive and you’ll be able to see the difference in no time, and enjoy a better love life that’s strong on communication and enjoyable in bed.
[Read: The 10 types of love you’ll experience in your lifetime]
Remember that knowing how to keep love alive in a relationship even after years of being together can be simple if you learn to understand your partner, and keep affection and sexual satisfaction on a high.
