The Surefire Formula for Killing Romance

Most of us have felt the delightful, ecstatic experience
of being in love
at least one time in our life.
Wow! What a feeling!
Passion, intimacy, chills,
a deep feeling of tenderness and specialness.

Many of us either lived with 
the person we loved and/or married him.

Then, with rare exceptions,
the romance faded into a distant memory.
Maybe it took only months, maybe it took a few years,
but, sooner or later, the romance faded and died.
When this happens, 
a large part of our motive for staying together disappears.

If we remain together after romance fades,
although a more mellow love can develop,
most often we remain together because of feelings
of responsibility, obligation, resisted fear, and entanglement.
What we experienced as so precious
and thought could last forever
is now gone with little chance of redemption.

Why?
Why does something so special,
which both parties want so much,
escape from our grasp,
laughing in mockery at our best efforts to hold onto it?

I think there are many reasons why.
But the most important one,
the one that almost guarantees the destruction of romance,
is living together.

In the spring of 1998, I was renting a house in Hiroshima, Japan.
One day, four Japanese women joined me for lunch at my home.
These four women were all married,
all in their 40s, all with children.
We were discussing passion, sex, and romance.
I could tell by the way three of them were talking
that there was no passion, no specialness, no romance
with their husbands.
It was all dead.
But they were teasing the fourth woman
about her passion with her husband.
Her face was red from blushing
so I turned to her and asked,
"Junko-san, you've been married for 18 years!
How are you able to still have passion with your husband?"

I found out that her husband worked in another prefecture.
He came home infrequently,
somewhere between one day per week
and one day per month.
They essentially did not live together;
they had time to hunger for each other;
they had time to miss each other;
they did not easily step on each other's toes.

To maintain romance
we must have time to develop hunger for each other,
we must have time to miss each other.

Letters, emails, and telephone calls
are great and can add to the hunger.
But face-to-face contact
must be moderated to maintain the hunger and the romance,
especially for the man
(men, much more than women, are pursuit machines;
when the pursuit seems over, they tend to lose interest).

Did you ever ask yourself,
"Why do brother and sister so rarely
fall in love with each other?"
It's not because of the taboo; people break taboos all the time.
It's because they grow up living together.

Romance typically develops
in a nourishing atmosphere of living separately.
Once our romance is blossoming,
we then move it into the toxic atmosphere of living together.
Sometimes, our romance is more robust
and can withstand this new atmosphere for a while.

But, sooner or later, romance starts to breathe uneasily
and most often takes its dying breath
without us ever suspecting that it was 
the atmosphere of living together that killed it off.

What do you think?
What evidence do you have that supports my thesis?
What evidence do you have that undermines my thesis?

If you see validity in what I say,
how might you structure or re-structure your life
to support continued romance and passion
with that special person?

?


Marriage changes passion ... suddenly you're in bed with a relative. 
-unknown

One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love and to long life. -Alexander A. Bogomoletz

The Price of No Desire
The number one problem in marriage-type relationships today is the lack of desire. If both parties had the same level of desire for each other and to please each other that they had near the beginning of the relationship, almost all other problems in the relationship either would not exist or would be easily solvable.
-Dwight GoldWinde (February 14, 1999)

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