How long is it since last time you felt like you were in love?

**This year my wife and I will be celebrating our 36 years of marriage.
When I think back on my life and our relationship, I feel that questions like these are relevant: **

• Why is it that love is so important in people's lives?
• Is love the opposite of living in an exile?
• What makes a relationship last a long time?
• What causes relationships to end prematurely?
• Is it too easy to break out and start a new relationship?

We can focus on many aspects of love, and people experience love and happiness in many different ways. Each person must find his or her own defintion.

We are different, but there are a few things we have in common. If we want to try to say something valid for most people and most relationships about what makes relationships last, we should depict a number of elements that according to many peoples's experience indicate that the relationship should have fair chances to last for a long time.

Such elements are love, sex, emotional attachment, common interests, communication habits, mutual respect, the couple's private rites, emotional stability, seeing that you get something important from the relationship, predictability, and surprise, enduring difficult situations, tolerating the partner's bad character traits (because her/his good sides counterweigh the bad ones), having a solution-oriented approach, (not walking away at once when there's a problem), and a few more.

One of the most important parts of a relationship is when you fall in love. The basic crush is an important foundation - perhaps the most important basis for making relationships last.

The basic crush provides a common emotional foundation, a basic positive experience that you can always bring forth, even in difficult times.

Falling in love is one of the most focused and talked about sides of the relationship. It is difficult to say what it is because it is different from person to person how we experience it.

You know what it is when you have experienced it.
People write poetry about it every day, and it seems like the need to remember and portray love is inexhaustible.

The memory of when we fall in love is what we lean on in difficult times when we begin to find it difficult to understand why we are here, in this relationship. Life can many times be a row of anonymous, rainy, gray days with dark clouds hanging over the horizon, and we need a good amount of inner strength and motivation to keep up our mood.

Love is an open source to well-being and happiness. We can ourselves do a lot to evocate such positive memories, especially if we create the habit of evoking them when we experience good moments near our loved one.

When did you last time initiate a conversation with your loved one about the crush you experienced when you fell in love with each other?

Sex is another one of the main compsants of the love experience.

• Can we be happy without sex?
• Certainly! We can sometimes experience deep love without sex being part of it.

But in most cases sex is a crucial part of the relationship. Good sex is a wonderful glue that can strengthen the relationship and make it last through difficult times.

When did you last time take some careful seductive steps towards you lover?

Emotional attachment is another crucial factor to strengthen and make last a deep relationship.

Emotional attachment means that we both feel that we are close to each other, we feel strongly connected and we can read and understand the other person's feelings and her body language without using words.

Mutual attraction sometimes loses its power as time passes by, and causes other persons than our loved one to become more interesting or attractive.

Have you ever thought of that mutual attraction is a force that should be actively nurtured and cared for by you and your lover?

There are so many kinds of forces acting and that can have a decisive impact on how we experience the world, life and ourselves.

Life is filled with challenging and often contradictory feelings. Sometimes we get annoyed.

*It might be late in the day,
or maybe it's late in the relationship.

• Or late in life, and we might think that we want to walk away.
  We can think about it, we express it inside us. But usually, we don't do anything about it.
  We're not going away.*

Sometimes we go for days with our irritation and dissatisfaction. Many can go on like this for years, maybe unhappy for almost an entire lifetime, and then suddenly one day there will be a collapse for one or both partners.

Sometimes it ends there. It's over, the two people in the relationship say thank you and goodbye to each other. And so they go. In two different directions, or maybe in the same direction, but they don't see it. Only after a while do they realize that they still belong together, that they are linked together.

You may be sitting in your seat in the kitchen, getting annoyed, or feeling disappointed that she is the way she is. You think of her and you, the disharmonies, the problems of everyday life.

*But in the end, does it sometimes happen that you find that she is not that bad anyway

• that she actually has good qualities that you know you appreciate and depend on?*

When we are in the storm of career, raising children and building our new house, we often don't practice much reflection. That's a fault.

We should both from time to time take a step back and look a little more thoroughly at the reasons why we came together that time many years ago, the reason why today we are still here together and have become who we are.

The magic happens in that blink of an eye when we realize that we have more to gain than to lose. When we - she and I - end up defiant the irritation and anger we sometimes can feel, it's because we see an advantage in it.

When we get together and we still stay together, is it because we know we benefit from it?
Or is it because we know our life becomes poorer if we go away from each other?

Sometimes we should actively do something about it. We should think we will win it. We can plan to do things together, one night we can watch a movie series together, or watch a tv movie together and talk about what we saw afterwards.

We can go for a walk together, or we can still today, after 15 or 20 or 30 years together find something new to do together that we both experience as meaningful. A talk about a topic we rarely talk about, a trip out in the spring sun one day after many weeks of rain, a road trip to visit family who live far away. Sitting in the car together, for many hours, being forced to be in company with each other can produce unexpected benefits.

*When did you last sit still together with your beloved one for over an hour?
What happened then?

• When did the two of you last time have the serious conversation about your life and purpose?*

Another way to ignite the relationship might be to put out tiny bait, little signs that now I want to be near you again, now I want us to lie naked, physically and emotionally undressed with all the senses active and share this indescribable good that we can have between us, a sensual moment together under the duvet when everything is in order in the house and we are going to have such a secret moment where we are only focused on each other, on giving of ourselves to each other. We are at our best there and then, in the middle of the moment when we give from ourselves fully and completely. It's the moment when the only thing that is real is what we experience and know inside us, here and now.

There is something quite special about giving yourself completely over to your loved one.

- Have you ever thought that you have someone in your life who knows you better than almost every other human being in the world, except yourself?

Patience is a key feature.

Building a relationship and living in a relationship is a challenge that demands two adult persons' targeted commitment over a long period.
A big common project or task to deliver over time can unite and solidify the partnershuip.
The same applies for having an external enemy, which can be good to strengthen the relationship.

What do you think is the biggest challenge when living close to another human for many years?

The routine and habits are what most of all characterize everyday life.
Perhaps the habit is a stronger force than we think.

You and your partner are down to your throats in the habit, in those day-to-day little routines that help to keep everything in place in our lives.

Is it true that we would rather not want to change?

We would rather not let go of what we have. But at the same time we want instantly to experience new things.

You may have experienced boredom for far too long. We want more of what we think is good in life.

Could it be that you think your partner is boring?
Could it be that you think your partner might find you boring?
What will you do with that?

When you are with a partner that you have been with for many years, it can be easy, but also at the same time very difficult to see that you and the other one will continue to be together.

But it can be just as difficult to imagine you and the other one breaking up, separating teams.

When did you last time look at your partner and think:
"I'm so glad I got you."
When did you last time say those words to your partner?