Can you regain your attraction to your partner?

When you first meet your partner, you can’t imagine not feeling attraction for them. The two of you are like magnets drawn to each other. However, years together, work demands, unresolved hurts, stress with daily life, and/ or sexual neglect can make you feel like you’ve lost connection with your partner. Feeling neglected by your partner causes your self-esteem to spiral downward, and unless you attempt to stop the downward spiral, you can find yourself feeling more like roommates than lovers. This is a scary feeling, and although many couples experience it from time to time during a new life adjustment, such as welcoming a new baby or enduring a stressful event, feeling this way for an extended period puts you at risk for affairs as well as breakdowns in other forms of communication and trust.

Couples who successfully regain their attraction for their partner do so by identifying the underlying issues provoking the loss of attraction. The following issues are the most common culprits of your fading spark:

1. You stop talking to each other and communication becomes difficult.

2. You hold on to past anger or hurts.

3. You stop engaging in activities you once enjoyed together.

4. You let yourself go; you’re no longer disciplined about taking care of yourself or your appearance.

5. You’re bored with your life and project it onto your partner.

When your marriage struggles with a loss of attraction for your partner, working with a relationship therapist will help you both get back on track. However, if you struggle financially, you can work to restore your attraction by practicing these suggestions:

• Face your fears and confront the issue. Lying to yourself or your partner about how you feel only deepens those emotions. Face the problem by talking to your partner about what they feel and begin a plan to work on your attraction for each other.

• Define other forms of attraction. You may lose attraction to your partner’s physical appearance, but there are other forms of attraction that can increase attraction. Who is your partner intellectually, spiritually, as a parent, and as a companion? Identifying how you see your partner as attractive helps minimize the area you find less attractive.

• Forgive yourself and emotionally connect. When we lose attraction for our partner, we may say hurtful things about them or feel guilty for superficial emotions or the anger we’ve harbored. Forgiving ourselves and making time in our schedule to emotionally connect and date our partner again restores feelings of attraction. Don’t expect a change overnight, as it works in stages and depends upon your consistency in keeping time together sacred and scheduled.

• Begin enjoying time together again by scheduling adventures. Couples who schedule and engage in adventures together increase their attraction to each other. Laughing and prioritizing doing new things together, such as attending events, dining in restaurants, and exploring new areas, change one’s perspective about their partner, igniting a spark in the relationship.

• Don’t expect your partner to fulfill all your needs in the relationship. Before marriage, you cultivated interests, friends, and goals which you may have abandoned. Reignite your personal ambition, reinvest in your interests, and develop friendships. Boredom is one of the most common causes of losing attraction for your partner, but blaming your partner for your loss of interest in life is unfair and emotionally immature. Take responsibility for what brings your life meaning and share new ideas with your partner.

There are many reasons partners lose attraction to each other, and most of the time the reasons have more to do with what the individual partner is going through than their significant other. Getting back in touch with the underlying reason(s) for the loss and taking responsibility for it is the best way to regain your attraction. Changing partners or ending a relationship because you have fallen out of attraction is ill-advised and rarely effective. Relationships teach us about our own limits so we can grow beyond them. Restoring attraction and intimacy requires work, but it is worth the effort.