Northern Beaches Mums Group
Northern Beaches Mums Group

The Love Cycle

When you really think about it, our relationships are constantly moving through a fairly predictable cycle.

In the beginning, we experience overwhelming feelings, butterflies in our stomach and we can’t stop thinking about the person we desire. Our body is being flooded by dopamine. This, of course, doesn’t last forever. We would go crazy for love.

More often than not, we find that after some time, a certain element of routine sets in. One week follows the next, one month looks like the one before and that one was like its predecessor. And soon we look back over the past year only to realise that nothing especially spectacular has happened. Certainly not romantically speaking anyway.

After being confronted regularly with stories of routine from various couples, I’ve created the Love Cycle, which defines the predictable phases most relationships will eventually go through. It starts with search and new love to then develop into other relational milestone phases.

The danger here lies when a relationship transitions beyond the stages of Happy to Routine, Boredom and Stop Talking in the cycle. In my experience, the potential danger is especially true for couples who have one partner staying at home to look after the children while the other is away more or less the whole day to earn a living.

Because the worlds are so different of the individuals in the stay home/working scenario, they may find that their experiences during the day are so different, that they eventually stop talking to their partner about them. Sometimes we worry that we’ll bore our partner with the seemingly mundane stories of yet another day of the same routine, so we choose to stop sharing altogether.

‘How was your day?’ ‘Oh, fine, nothing special’ could be a typical exchange valid for both sides. Each partner is holding back his or her small wins from the day and soon the routine turns into boredom and slowly into stop talking.

Wouldn’t it be better to open up and tell each other about the small wins you had over the course of the day? One of the sayings at Inspiring Relationships is actually that we all need more Love and Understanding.

We all want to be understood by our partner. We want to be hugged and loved for who we are. To achieve this, we need to let our partner in on our thoughts, no matter how big or small we assume they are. We need to let them really know us. When we found a New Love and started Dating we couldn’t stop talking about the goals we have, the things we want to achieve and the life we want to live. But now that we have Moved Together and are seemingly Happy our communication takes a turn.

It does not need to be that way.

My tip for you is to allow yourself a kind of ‘coming home ritual’, a time set aside for the moments when you and your partner are reunited at the end of the day. When you see your partner again, you have fifteen minutes to fill each other in on the major and on the minor developments. And if your children are listening in, let them. For them, nothing is more important than to see that you both are happy with each other. Children have an incredibly good antenna when it comes to the vibrations between their parents. They pick up on any tension between you immediately.

And if you have the chance, why not go out alone with your partner every once in a while. Spending quality time together is very rewarding on all dimensions of your relationships.

You see, even though the Love Cycle goes around in a circle, it does not need to be an inevitable journey. You CAN change the trajectory. Working with couples who hit a rough patch on their path is very rewarding, because there are ways to go anticlockwise and back from stop talking again to being happy.


Article provided by Jurgen Schmechel from Inspiring Relationships.