There's a particular kind of guilt that shows up around year five or seven of a relationship. You catch yourself missing the version of you that got nervous before a text back, and then you feel bad about missing it, because you love your partner, you're not confused about that. It's the butterflies that went quiet, not the love. If you've ever typed some version of "is it normal to miss feeling in love" into a search bar at 11pm, you already know exactly the ache I'm talking about.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because it comes up constantly once you start paying attention. Someone in a long-term relationship forum described it as "the blahs"—that stretch where the zest wears off and things start feeling familiar and mundane, not because anything's broken, but because seven years of familiarity just does that. She wasn't wrong. But she also wasn't done, because right after naming the problem she said something that stuck with me: it doesn't mean you're doomed to stay that way.
Missing the spark isn't a symptom. It's the default setting for anyone who's stopped doing anything about it.
Nobody says this part out loud: butterflies were never really about your partner. They were about uncertainty. Early on, you didn't know if they'd text back, didn't know if they saw you naked without flinching, didn't know if the relationship would survive a bad week. That uncertainty is what made your stomach flip. Once you're seven years in and you know, with total certainty, that they're not going anywhere, the nervous system has nothing left to spike about. One person going through this exact thing put it plainly: "I don't feel that the love is gone, the love is very much there. I love him with all my heart and vice versa. But the butterflies are gone." That's not a breakup-shaped problem. That's a biology-shaped problem, and biology can be worked with.
So if it's not about falling out of love, what actually brings the excitement back? A few things, in no particular order of importance, because you'll need more than one.
Stop treating comfort and excitement as opposites. They're not. Comfort is what lets you be fully yourself around someone, no performance required. Excitement is what happens when you introduce something that person hasn't seen you do yet. You can have both at once, but only if you keep feeding the second one, because comfort takes care of itself and excitement doesn't. One person in that same relationship thread put the trade-off honestly: if you don't get excited to see each other anymore, you're in a rut, and the fix is devising fun plans and surprises, not waiting for the feeling to reappear on its own.
Novelty is doing more work than romance is. This isn't about grand gestures. It's about doing something neither of you has done before, together, on purpose. New restaurant, new hiking trail, a weekend somewhere neither of you has been. Your brain doesn't release the good chemicals for "dinner we've had forty times." It releases them for the unfamiliar. That's not cynical, it's just how attraction chemistry works, and it's why couples who actively chase novelty report feeling more "in love" even decades in.
Play is not optional, it's structural. This is the one that surprised me most while researching this. A person who'd been married sixteen years, both of them military, said the thing that turned it around wasn't a vacation or a date night, it was games: "I highly recommend playing games like Taboo that will make you laugh. Laughter ignites passion for some reason. It's worked for my wife and I after 16 years of marriage." Laughing at something ridiculous together, competing over something that doesn't matter, watching your partner say something dumb mid-game — none of that is a distraction from intimacy. It's a shortcut to it. Research backs this up too: couples who bring more playfulness into daily interactions build trust faster, reduce conflict more easily, and are less likely to break up, according to a Psychology Today review of the research on playfulness in relationships. This is exactly the gap a game night fills, and it's honestly the whole reason LoveDaring's card decks exist — they force the kind of unscripted, slightly ridiculous interaction that reintroduces the version of your partner you fell for, without either of you having to plan a big romantic evening you're too tired for.
Flirt on purpose, not when you feel like it. Waiting to feel flirty before you flirt is backwards. The feeling usually shows up after the behavior, not before it. Send the text you'd have sent in year one. Notice out loud when they look good. It'll feel a little forced the first few times. Do it anyway.
Talk about what actually drew you to them, specifically. Not "I love you"—the actual, specific thing. What made you pick him out of everyone else. What his laugh sounded like the first time you heard it. This sounds like a small exercise but it works because it forces your brain to relive the original attraction instead of running on autopilot memory of "we've been together a while now."
The part I keep coming back to: nobody in that thread said the answer was to leave. Even the person most convinced the excitement was permanently gone got told, gently but firmly, that relationships take work even when they're going well, and that losing the spark just means you find a way to reignite the flame, not that the flame was fake. For me, that's the whole point. The butterflies were never proof the relationship was real. The willingness to keep chasing them, years in, is the actual proof.
If you want an easy on-ramp back into that kind of playfulness, LoveDaring's games are built for exactly this moment — the one where you love each other completely and just need a reason to be a little ridiculous together again.
Be the first to comment