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When people say that you have to work at a relationship, they mean it. If you’re quite young or you’ve never had a relationship that lasted more than two or three years, you may think, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll work at it. I’ll make time for date night and make sure my partner feels loved and all of that.” But, first of all, the work involves so much more than just that. And even that stuff—the keeping up date night and the little romantic gestures part—is far from just that. That seems easy at first, when everything is exciting and your partner is your whole world and you can’t imagine ever not wanting to see him every night and doing nice things for him every day. But even the most loving couples with the best intentions eventually find that keeping up the love is not easy. Life doesn’t allow it to be. You can’t be obsessed with each other 24/7 forever. You have jobs and friends and family and lives outside of each other to attend to. Having lives outside of each other is actually both a critical part of being happy in your relationship, and will often be the exact thing that’s making it hard to be fully in your relationship. Not fair, right? Nope. But it’s an impossible and ever-evolving balance that every couple has to maintain: be great in every area of your life while still being a present and appreciate partner to your partner. It’s completely understandable that sometimes, we get a little lax in one area or another—we fall to one side of this tight rope we’re walking—and fall into a slump. We hit a rough patch. To go through rough patches is part of spending a lifetime with somebody. Absolutely every couple goes through these once, but only the strong survive.
A sexual slow down
That first sexual slow down—when you go from not being able to keep your hands off each other to…falling asleep before him because he’s taking too damn long to come to bed and so you just don’t have sex that night. And then, that happens a couple nights in a row. You two once had endless energy for sex, doing it several times a day, and now you have it mostly on the weekend. Oh my gaaaawwd that’s what old married couples do, you think.
