Science Investigates How to Keep the Spark Alive in Your Relationships
Sexual desire wanes over time more often than not. Is there anything we can do about it?
It’s no secret relationships can take a lot of work.
No matter who you are and how compatible you are with your partner, all relationships take effort to keep them healthy and happy.
One common misunderstanding about love is that being swept up in a wave of infatuation is the same thing as love.
Another frequent misunderstanding is the belief that the intensity of the initial spark is a surefire sign of the romantic compatibility of the two people falling in love.
Neither of these is true.
Love is a wild beast of fire that must be kept carefully and mastered artfully.
Taming chaos is no easy task.
Cupid dips his arrows in an unforgiving cocktail of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline, measured in perfect amounts, concocted to hijack your central nervous system and make you stupid for someone else—at least for a little while.
When you fall in love, you’ve been drugged—naturally.
As hard as they’ll try, your friends and family will never talk you out of it. You can’t even talk yourself out of it. You lay awake all hours of the night dreaming about your partner, hopped up on Cupid’s speed, basking in the insane amounts of energy you inexplicably have.
But, like all drugs, puppy love too must wear off.
That’s when the real work begins.
Does Lasting Love Exist?
It’s not uncommon for people to ask themselves if long-term love truly exists. It’s everywhere you turn. It’s all over the radio, all over TV, all over the internet. Burning romantic love is such a magical feeling that people naturally want to extend it indefinitely.
This is why reality often hits them smack in the face after a year or so.
As your relationship progresses over time, your body changes, your hormones fluctuate, and you shift from a competitive orientation (where you feel the need to compete with others to find your match) to a secure attachment orientation (where you defend the relationship you’ve built from external threats while maintaining it for the long haul).
You naturally go from solidifying your bond to maintaining it.
Society focuses on how to obtain love and forgets how to maintain love.
A lot of research has shown that humans might be designed to experience that deep, passionate, burning romantic love for about four years, and then it either fizzles out or transforms into something greater.
This is incidentally the same age most children are weened from breast milk and begin eating a diet of solid foods. It’s also when most divorces or breakups happen in most cultures across the planet.
This is disheartening to the monogamic, hopeless romantic who desperately wants to believe a life of eternal, effortless passion is possible.
But what if asking whether lasting love exists, and confining it to effortless passion, is asking the wrong question? What if we’re looking at things all wrong?
When our relationship feelings start to change, it’s indispensable that we grasp the biological processes going on. We must redirect our focus and priorities away from chasing the dragon of lifelong stay-up-all-night-and-have-passionate-sex-until-the-sun-comes-up lust (which is unsustainable, anyway) and focus on building a life together.
Sometimes we need to move our own goalposts and let ourselves grow with our relationships.
The Science of Long-Term Attraction
A psychologist by the name of David Frederick, Ph.D., along with a research team, conducted a study to find out the traits that helped keep the passion alive in long-term relationships.
He analyzed an astonishing 38,747 married or cohabitating couples. They were all people who’d been with their partners for at least three years.
Predictably, the researchers noted a drop in sexual satisfaction. A full 83% of participants were sexually satisfied during the first six months of their relationships (I feel bad for the other 17% who weren’t).
This number declined to about half (43% for men and 55% for women) when they were asked about their satisfaction at the time of the study—remember, the couples had been together for at least three years.
For the most part, sexual satisfaction naturally declines. Most people experience it, but not all.
So what separates those who continue to want their partners from those who don’t?
Nurturing.
People who nurtured their sex lives and who spent time and effort trying to enjoy sex with their partners had a much stronger craving for their partners.
The researchers found that there are four critical elements to the strategies people employed to keep their passion alive over the years.
People who were satisfied with their sex lives made a habit of:
Setting the mood during sex.
Using foreplay to spice things up.
Mixing up the sex (positions, activities, etc.)
Having more oral sex or incorporating foreplay more often.
Other research has shown that sending nudes to your partners can help mitigate waning desire.
Last year, a study called A Preliminary Study on Up-regulation of Sexual Desire for a Long-term Partner investigated whether viewing sexual pictures of our partners would ignite our spark and reinvigorate our attraction toward them.
Though small, the study falls perfectly in line with piles of other research on the subject. It asked participants to appraise both their partners and their sex lives. Then, researchers asked them to take a look at some naughty photos of their partners.
Participants were then given a worksheet. On the sheet, they rated their infatuation, desire, attachment, and relationship satisfaction with their partners.
People reported having more infatuation with their partners when they viewed their naughty photos. But checking out sexual images of their partners didn’t alter how they viewed the relationship.
Their relationship satisfaction wasn’t changed by seeing their partner’s booty.
This tells us some very important things.
First, that effort is a necessary component of long-term attraction.
Science suggests that putting in the effort — rather than expecting our romantic flames to miraculously burn effortlessly — makes all the difference.
Second, it’s essential that we separate love and sex. While both are magical ingredients of a relationship, it’s far too easy to assume they’re the same thing and assume that our focus on one aspect of our relationship automatically translates to ease in another aspect of our relationship.
That’s like mowing the grass and expecting your room to be clean!
Nonetheless, it’s promising that we’re not all doomed to the long, slow, begrudging drudgery of dead bedrooms, boring sex, and passionless relationships. We just need to invest a little time, effort, and creativity into nurturing our attraction for our partners.
If we show up and put in the work, long-term attraction is certainly possible, even if it changes from the insanity of being drugged by Cupid’s arrows into something deeper.