4 Hacks to Reignite Passion, Love, and Happiness in Your Marriage
Photo by Toa Heftiba
4 Hacks to Reignite Passion, Love, and Happiness in Your Marriage
By Chuck Starnes. This article originally appeared on www.chuckstarnes.com.
Note from BTO: This article addresses married couples specifically, but much of the content can apply to dating couples as well. Chuck Starnes is a good friend of BTO, and he has a deep, authentic heart for relationships.
Have you lost the feelings of love you once had? Are you longing for more passion in your marriage? Are you ready to call it quits because you’re not happy and don’t love your partner anymore?
Well, hold on a moment!
Don’t get rid of your partner and keep your problems. Get rid of your problems and keep your partner!
Here are four brain chemistry hacks that will help you recover lost romantic feelings and reignite your passion for each other! And I’ve put it all together for you in three simple tools that will help you build a happy marriage!
1. Touch
Science reveals that we are wired for connection with another human being. Therefore, touching your partner is not only nice—it’s necessary.
We actually live to touch. If we’re denied touch, we don’t do too well. Our health deteriorates emotionally and physically.
Multiple studies show that human touch triggers the release of oxytocin into our bloodstream. Oxytocin, also known as the love hormone, is a neurotransmitter that increases feelings of trust, generosity, and compassion.
And it also decreases feelings of fear and anxiety that block our communication.
Remember back when you first thought about holding hands with your partner? For many couples, that was an unforgettable pleasurable experience!
Read on to learn how to begin feeling those feelings again.
The case for the “one-minute full-body hug.”
While all kinds of touch are good—holding hands, back rubs, etc.—I’m going to ask you to give each other a one-minute full-body hug. We used to prescribe a 20-second hug because that’s how long it takes for a wave of oxytocin to be released into your system. But now we’ve learned that by extending the hug to a full 60 seconds, additional waves of this wonderful “love” hormone are released.
So whether you feel like it or not, do it. Make the science work for you!
There’s a second powerful hack…
2. Appreciation
Recent discoveries in neuroscience tell us that not only does gratitude create a more positive and happy mental state, but it also literally transforms your brain.
Each time you share an appreciation with your partner, it changes the molecular structure of your brain, keeps grey matter functioning, and makes you healthier and happier. Not to mention the positive effect it has on your partner.
Plus, it makes you more peaceful and less reactive in your interactions.
When you’re feeling emotional pain in your relationship, negative feelings tend to grow and expand until negative is all you can see.
And at the same time, everything good about your partner tends to shrink until there’s nothing positive you can see.
When that happens, we tend to get stuck in our own pain and self-absorption. We start reacting, and criticizing, and labeling our partner.
That’s when romantic feelings are replaced by anxiety and negative reactions.
When you share an appreciation, it reverses this dynamic.
Sharing an appreciation creates new neural pathways, actually rewiring your brain.
It transforms the space between you, filling it with positivity that pushes out negativity. And, needless to say, it feels really good, not only to your partner but to you too.
When you share regular appreciations with each other, you change your brain chemistry, waking up those powerful romantic feelings and creating entirely new ones.
What if we were to combine the power of sharing appreciations with the power of touch?
Here’s a simple tool that will help you access all the benefits of both TOUCHING and APPRECIATION.
Four Powerful Appreciations
Just click on the link above, print out the tool, and follow the instructions.
This exercise instructs you as a couple to do a one-minute full-body hug while taking turns sharing a 30-second appreciation with each other four times a day, during four critical moments.
What you do during these “critical moments” each day has five times the impact on your relationship: (1) when you are both first awake in the morning; (2) saying, “Goodbye,” for the day; (3) when you first come home in the evening; and (4) when you say, “Goodnight.”
Jack and Anna are a couple who were constantly fighting.
Doing this exercise for 40 days helped them begin to bypass their conflict and access the parts of themselves that really loved each other.
As the cascades of romantic feelings continued to flood their souls each day, negative feelings about each other began to be flushed out of their relationship.
Needless to say, their passion for each other was ignited, and today they are much better at handling their conflicts.
A third hack is what we call…
3. Caring Behaviors
When you do specific acts that hit the bull’s-eye of what makes your partner feel loved and cared about, it awakens all kinds of romantic feelings!
For example, if your wife says, “I feel loved and cared about when you initiate getting things done around the house,” and you get up Saturday morning and start washing the windows—wow! Nothing could be more of a turn on! Right?
Doing “caring behaviors” has two powerful effects.
First, it reignites your partner’s love for you.
And, second, it also causes your own dead feelings of love and passion to be resurrected.
There is a scientific reason this happens, and with this next tool, we’re going to tap into that and use it to our advantage.
Keep in mind, it’s science, so you don’t have to feel it to do it. Just do it and it will be effective.
Here’s why.
When you do something for someone else, your lower, unconscious brain thinks you’re doing that act for yourself.
That’s why it feels so good when you do something good for someone else. That’s why you feel loved when you do loving acts for others.
Doing these caring behaviors replaces the cortisol that produces anxiety and depression with oxytocin, dopamine, and other pleasure chemicals that cause you to feel joyful aliveness.
As a result, you’ll see depression literally be replaced by joy!
The Caring Behaviors exercise can help you identify precisely what makes your partner feel loved and cared about.
The fourth hack is…
4. Safe Conversations
The Imago Couple’s Dialogue is a powerful tool that helps make every conversation safe, enabling you to…
Talk without criticism,
Listen without judgment, and
Connect beyond your differences.
It’s the most powerful way I know to keep your conversations safe, enabling you to be fully open, present, and empathetic with your partner.
Putting it all together!
Here’s how to use these four brain chemistry hacks with the three powerful tools to reignite passion in your marriage. (Click on the links to print out the tools.)
1. Safe Conversations (every time you talk)
Use the Couple’s Dialogue as your core skill to keep every conversation safe and productive in a way that always leads you to connection with each other.
Flank this core skill with…
2. Four Powerful Appreciations (each day)
and…
3. Three Caring Behaviors (each day)
Using the Safe Conversation model with these two types of affirmations on a daily basis will change your brain chemistry and create new neural pathways that create new feelings for each other.
It’s so powerful that I cannot overstate the importance of using these three tools together!
But nothing happens until you act on it!
So grab the tools and let’s reignite passion in our relationship!
Interested in reading more about dating, relationships, and your walk with God? Here are a few articles on related topics:
For more information on sex, marriage, and finding the person who is right for you, get a copy of Becoming the One by Salomé Roat. Click here to learn more. The book is also available in Spanish.