Usually, the romantic portion of love declines as a marriage continues. Some people (especially women) interpret this as meaning that love itself has gone from the relationship and this can start a search for a new lover or even a divorce. In other cases the woman who feels this may meet the deficiency she is experiencing partly by addiction to media accounts of romance (in romantic novels, for example) and partly through her children in whom she invests over-romantic feelings. Men often try to ignore their disappointment about the loss of romance and either become involved in affairs of the ‘my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me’ type or take up compensatory pursuits such as absorbing hobbies or more work. Each partner may attempt to punish the other, using sex as the weapon and the ultimate consequence can be that the real love in the relationship is in fact eroded, even though it was still there at the beginning of the problem. More couples should understand the link between romance and sex and how to put it in perspective so that its natural decline is not blamed unrealistically.
As we have said elsewhere, a well-developed man-woman relationship consists of several roles. One, and an important one, is the lover role. The romantic-love portion of their love for each other can easily be kept alive when they are functioning in the lover role. When a loving couple are making love they can recapture this late-adolescent phase of emotional development and again immerse themselves temporarily in the intense and passionate expressions of feelings of love, valuation of the other and commitment. We shall see later how important this is. After all, each time we make love we go back in time to our courtship days when romantic love played an important part in our lives. Regular top-ups of romance during love-making can be all that most couples need to keep romance alive in their lives.
Many married women complain of the lack of ‘warmth’ in their relationship, and many men wonder where the girl who loved them so intensely and of whom they have so many happy memories has gone. Obviously, talking can resolve the problem but deeply romantic feelings cause many people embarrassment after adolescence and in any case if one partner has to tell the other what to do to show romantic love, they may feel that the very fact of having to tell shows that it was absent.
Surprising though it may seem, too much romance can be a problem. The excessive expression of romantic loving feelings can mean that the individual is more in love with love (as are the characters in the late-adolescent phase of romantic love) than their partner. As we said earlier, some people never develop emotionally beyond this phase and this severely limits the love they can feel. It is a shame but a fact that these so-called romantics never really enjoy a natural, loving relationship and suffer accordingly.
So what are the answers? Perhaps the most important is for the partners to avoid assuming thoughtlessly that their notion of romantic love is identical with that of their mate. If each pays attention to what really gratifies the other in this area then they can build up an accurate impression of their individual needs. In this sense post-marital romantic love is not quite identical with the late-adolescent type, which is based purely on the notions of the individual. Post-maritally it needs to be adapted towards the needs of the partner.
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