Are you in a roommate marriage?
Let me explain first what a roommate marriage means?
A relationship has 3 main parts: logistics, friendship, and lovers
It’s just like 3 legs of a tripod. All 3 parts are unique, serve a function each and relationship cannot exist if one of the parts is missing. Let me explain what each of these parts are and their function.
- Logistics: This is business of life. Couple can be Business partners, teammates, parents, family members. This is co-ordinating and doing day to day chores such as groceries, house maintenance, paying bills, raising kids, taking care of parents, financial management etc.
- Friends: Self-explanatory. Generally interested in each other, like hanging out. Enjoy each other.
- Lovers: You see each other as more than friends. You cultivate love and love energy together. You have romance, sex in your relationship.
Roommate marriage is where the lover leg is missing. So many couples in India are living roommate marriage where they are teammates but not lovers. They don’t have sex with each other and living together for sake of kids or simply their love juices in the relationship has dried down and one of them silently and painfully settle for it.
In this blog, I will help you explore more about the practicalities of that lover.
How to cultivate the love energy, the lover leg in your relationship.
Let’s understand why lover energy dries up in a relationship.
The thing is, as we all know, we fall in love. It’s the whole Western idea, is that you fall in love and that’s why you become partners. But you have to remember that at the beginning of a relationship, because you’re still in fairly early on. You’re just spending lots of really cool time together. You’re really enjoying each other, learning about each other, and you don’t have any of the logistics. Virtually none other than arranging the next time you’re going to see each other.
So lots of friendship stuff, being interested in each other, having a good time, enjoying each other’s company. So it’s very easy to feel the lover energy and to express the lover energy. But over time, one of the things that our wonderful brains do is that that becomes very complacent around familiar items.
Our interest decreases as things we once cherished turn old
Like if you buy, your new jewellery and you’re like, oh, my God, look at my new rings. Aren’t they amazing? And then, a few months on, you’re like, it’s just the old blings. You buy a new phone. It’s like, oh, so exciting. Got my new phone. And then some months on, it becomes a functional phone. You get used to it. It’s the same sort of thing. That means, you’re carrying your phone, and you hardly feel any different than the first time you bought it?
Our brain does that because it just couldn’t cope with all the information coming in all the time. So, it doesn’t pay attention to the familiar things. And that can include your partner. So, people can take each other for granted. They get complacent. Used to it.
Retaining lover energy in the relationship has to be conscious
So, one of the things that you have to do is to override that tendency of your brain consciously and when I say consciously, I mean, with attention, and intention.
That your partner is your lover.
Gratitude is a part of it bringing love energy in relationship
I think it’s important for couples to keep reminding each other of how much they love each other and why they love each other and an appreciation. Yeah. In ways that resonate for the other person.
In the right way that you express it.
It’s not like, well, I’m a good cook. You’re a good cook.
I don’t need to say, I love you. Yes, you need to do it. Over and over and over and over again.
If you see your partner looking nice, don’t just think it, say it. And say it with a big smile on your face.
Yeah. So that’s a lot of what seeing your partner as lover.
Consciously overriding your brain’s tendency to see things as familiar and hence routine and non-important. And that’s the change we bring in couples at our retreat.
Don’t take your partner for granted. Be as polite to them as you would to anybody.
Most people will agree that you’re probably politer to a stranger than you are to your beloved. It’s crazy. And this person (your partner) is someone that you like to care for so much. But it doesn’t get translated in reality, if this intention is just left to your whims and fancies.
You have to actively care for your partner
This is one thing I have actively followed in my marriage. We have regular physical intimacy and my desire to have sex or physical intimacy with my partner does not depend on my mood alone but realising physical intimacy is a part of our lover energy. It’s treating “sex” part of life as cherishable and actively prioritising it.
Like if you had a diamond, you wouldn’t be like throwing it around everywhere and smashing it on tables. You’d be like, this is my precious diamond. This is my precious thing. You are my precious thing. I need to preciously put you down and preciously move you around.
So that’s actively bringing lover energy in your relationship is important.
