Divorce is looming, both of you are actually estranged yet you still carry a nudging affectionate tendencies towards your spouse.
This is an indication that you are still in love with your partner. Here are 3 surprising signs that points that you are still in love with your partner.
1. Your partner is more like your best friend than your lover.
This is the most important sign that you are actually still very deeply in love with each other. Why? Just ask any happy couple who’s been together for decades what the secret to a lasting relationship is. They’ll both tell you that it’s all about seeing each other and treating each other as best friends.
One of the biggest but easiest to fix relationship-harming assumptions most couples have is that being in love needs to be passionate and intoxicating, like when they first started their relationship. But that’s just the “romantic” or “honeymoon phase” in your lifelong healthy couplehood journey.
After the first few months to a year, it’s totally normal for your honeymoon phase to fizzles out and for the “my best friend” phase to kick in. So, yes, your partner is your best friend. There’s no need for a breakup. This means you actually still love each other and just need to make some changes in your relationship.
With work, there will be romance more profound than you’ve ever experienced.
2. You’re having little to no sex.
If you want to get the sex back in your marriage, you need to get the love back into your sex. It’s that simple. That’s what best friends in a healthy marriage do. Recent research is very clear that emotional intimacy is the key to a couple enjoying lifelong sexual intimacy. This is especially true for women.
What’s the bottom line? The secret to lifelong physical intimacy for both men and woman is that sex is more enjoyable for women in love. The majority of woman in a major, recent survey stated that love is very important to be able to sustain that intimacy and have a successful lasting marriage. They also said that love made them let go of their sexual inhibitions. Because of that, sex became more satisfying for them.
What’s perhaps most telling about the nature of physical intimacy in long-term relationships is that the majority of women in the older age group being studied (up to 68 years old) also said that love and sex continued to be strongly connected in their marriages. What’s the message for the fast majority of couples having relationship problems? Fix your emotional connection and you’ll fix your sexual connection.
3. There’s no communication because you “argue too much.”
Of course you argue. Arguing is just the opposite of effective communication. Why is that? Because your underlying need for connection through properly expressed friendship is deeply frustrated right now. If you didn’t love each other so much, none of this would affect you.
The more frustrated and angry you feel, the more you actually love your partner inside. Learn to properly express and accept each other’s emotional intimacy needs. The arguing and other negative relationship behaviors will fizzle out.
So how do you get rid of those negative surface feelings and relationship behaviors that keep getting in the way of growing your friendship as a couple? You’ve probably heard it a million times, but it’s time to take real action. It’s time to learn how to communicate effectively.
Start by making a solid mutual pact to save your relationship. Healthy couplehood is like a two person dance pattern, with lifts and dips. One person can’t save a relationship alone. You have to do this as team.
Next, it’s absolutely critical that you turn your relationship into a “hurt-free zone.” This is one of the most powerful strategies for preventing breakups and divorce. How does this work? Simple. In your “hurt-free zone,” the four kinds of toxic communication that predict relationship failure and divorce are simply not allowed to continue.
Once you’ve set up your “hurt-free zone,” saving your marriage by making it a contest of generosity becomes faster, easier and will eventually kick into autopilot. Meeting your partner’s needs and wishes gets easier and easier as they meet yours, and vice versa. It becomes a contagious and virtuous cycle.
