How to restore the lost passion in your relationship

When this subject is mentioned, people often think about about sex and intimacy and all the physical and emotional stimulation that goes with it – the excitement of it all. That is part of passion, but I want to broaden it out beyond that and explore how we cultivate passion for the whole relationship, whether we are in bed or not.

Passion can cover a huge range of interests in life. You can have a passion for almost anything, and you can feel passionately about many things, including sex and intimacy. Passion in that broad sense is all about your energy, your focus and excitement, and a commitment to something that is going to fulfill you when you achieve it. It is the core energy of life seeking to express itself and to delight in its expressions. The word delight is important here: passion brings delight and expansive energy, and is the energy of joy, delight, expansion, enthusiasm, and love. It is the urge of Life to keep on expanding to find more fulfilment and more freedom.

How does this apply to your relationship? If you want more passion, you will need to find more energy, more aliveness, more excitement, and more delight. You will have those moments in the bedroom, but will they be enough for the whole relationship? Will they be truly satisfying if they don’t emerge out of a greater context of passion that is in your whole life and in the whole relationship?

Generally, at the beginning of a relationship there is energy, enthusiasm, excitement, and passion. You meet somebody and there’s a physical, emotional and mental attraction. The energy of who they are attracts you and you start to build a relationship. And those early days can be heady days. You have energy; you are excited; you can’t go to sleep at night thinking about them. You’re up again in the morning looking at your cell phone to see if they have texted you. You can sit up all night with them. Your heart starts beating faster when you come close to them, you have energy, and you want to be with them and talk with them.

There is so much passion there in the sense of being energised and feeling alive, and there’s the delight of the first time you hold hands or touch cheeks, or the first kiss. That is real passion. And remember the excitement of looking forward to the first time you were going to be physically intimate. Hopefully that passion was present at the beginning of your relationships.

Then you start to get to know more of that person. At the beginning you only want to see the good stuff, but everyone has a shadow side. It is usually not too long before you find that they can be lazy, selfish, or quick to anger, or have dirty habits around the house, and so on. And what happens? They lose their lustre. It’s not quite so intoxicating being around them because now you are aware that they can be lazy or maybe have body odour, or they can react at a moment’s notice.

It’s no longer so appealing to have so much energy and excitement, and to be gazing into their eyes and holding their hands all night. You want to tell them off, or criticise them for leaving the bathroom in a mess, or for what they said about your mother. You start to see the whole of that person and it is so easy for the passion to diminish in that seeing.

So the challenging question is, how real and permanent was the passion you felt in the first heady days when you could see only the good stuff, or only the stuff you wanted to see? What you felt was genuine in those moments, but did it have a strong foundation that would keep on growing and deepening, and keep on allowing you to live at a higher level of energy?

Passion is not just something that happens in bed. It is what you bring into the relationship. And what you bring will create an atmosphere and a context that allows the more physical and emotional expressions to be deeply satisfying and enjoyable.

What if you could approach every day with a sense of newness and excitement - the sense you had at the beginning of the relationship? What if you could wake up every day beside that person, look in their eyes, and have the same feeling of delight in their presence as you had at the beginning? It is still the same person. A few years may have gone by, and maybe they have got a bit greyer or put on an extra kilo or so, but it’s still the same person. It’s still the same body that you are touching. It’s still the same energy that flows back and forth. So what would it be like to wake up with that sense of newness? If you could wake up delighting in their presence five years ago – why can’t you do it now?

You can have a passion for the greater potential of the relationship that allows you to grow into the fullness of who you can be. And the infinite fullness of who you are is bliss, joy and delight that continually bubble up from the core of your Being. That is passion. As we experience more of that infinite fullness we know it as delight and bliss, and it is carried into our life and our relationships by passion.

If you want to serve your beloved by making them ecstatically happy every day, and helping them to know that you delight in them, then there will be ample passion in the relationship. Let them know that you delight in their presence, in being close to them, in sharing energy with them. Delight in living your life with them, and they will respond.

Then you will have a passionate relationship within which the more intensely enjoyable moments will occur.

Enjoy.