You can fall in love with your husband all over again. Again and again. In this moment, and then this one now, again. You can love him all day long if you want. Or all your life long. Falling in love is a choice you get to make whenever you want to. I started learning this in my younger years. Through making art. Much of my life I was a visual artist. You’d often find me in the studio with paint-stained pants and charcoal-stained hands. Playing with shape, capturing light and shadow, exploring color. What I most loved about drawing wasn’t so much the end result of an image rendered on a page. I loved the ACT of capturing it. Getting lost in, being enraptured by what my eyes were taking in. Looking more closely than ever at the object I was drawing. Everything became utterly beautiful to me by looking at it so deeply: A crumpled piece of paper. An old chipped bottle A droopy sleepy eyelid. A round round thigh. None of these things were beautiful by normal standards. But the act of witnessing them with careful attentive eyes—seeing them like I'd never seen such things before —made them beyond-beautiful to me. Made them sacred, worthy of reverence.
Looking so deeply was always a sort of falling in love.
We can all look at our partners like this:
As if we’ve never before seen him... With fresh eyes… With artists eyes that find gloriousness in every smile-crease and forehead-wrinkle. With eyes that see LIFE there. Precious and fascinating. With eyes that actually SEE him deeply. It’s hard to not fall in love all over again when you look at him through these eyes. It’s almost impossible not to love what you really truly SEE. Try it truly and then tell me otherwise. P.S. How can you be with your partner in a truly fresh way that brings back a natural sense of the loving admiration of the earlier days, and anchors it in an abiding sense of connected security?
You break free of the habit of perceiving him through tired habituated eyes that only see the stories your brain has superimposed onto him. The stories that keep him dull, foggy, hard, irritating, unkind, unloving, inept, tiresome, faulty, and unreachable to you.
And you do the same for yourself.
Then you begin to see clearly again what's lovable in this man....not in spite of, but because of his humanness. And you see again what's lovable in your own self --and act accordingly. So you let yourself be loved by him, undefended.
Now you experience both of you as delicious, love-worthy, bright beings again, lucky to be here together. You hold your marriage fondly in your heart, feeling the deepening solidness and buoyancy of your love.
Everything else that makes up a healthy happy marriage flows easily from there.
If you want that, but have a hunch you could use some help getting there, come coach with me. It all starts with a consult call. Schedule yours here and we'll find a time that works for you.