One common feature in marital relationship is called burn out. It’s a time when you feel so low about your spouse, and you begin to feel that he or she could have been a mistake, after all. This is the time that you feel dissatisfied about your spouse. It can be so bad that you feel you need another wife or husband, or you begin to crave for a taste of extra marital experience, especially if you have an ex that you had a great relationship with. The burn out can also be due to a feeling of boredom, thus craving for varieties. Like one man put it, “eating beans all the time is boring and leads to loss of appetite”. Feelings like these are features of burn out. It’s like your love is burning out for each other. This is one of the reasons why many people are enduring marriage, rather than enjoying it.
When you are in a state like this, it’s time to fan the flames of romance in your marriage, in order to overcome the burn out. What is romance? Someone once defined romance as keeping the excitement in your relationship alive. That is, you must continue to be ravished in your love for your spouse. You can’t seem to have enough of him or her. If you like, call it being regularly intoxicated with his or her love. This is one way of overcoming your dissatisfaction with your spouse. You just need to create a new level of excitement in your marriage. Anytime you are dissatisfied with your spouse, or he or she feels dissatisfied with you, know that it’s time for a new level of excitement in your marriage. So that you are all over him or her.
No matter who you are married to, there comes a time when you feel a dissatisfaction with that person, especially if you have not cultivated the art of excitement in marriage. Burn out is not a respecter of anyone. It will come, but handling it well is what matters.
Creating a new level of excitement in your marriage requires you going back to the beginning of your relationship. Like I often say, no matter how a relationship ends, the beginning is always a sweet story. That beginning includes the devoted attention, regular gifts, holding hands, impressive dressing, weekend outings or clubbing etc. All these get you excited about each other.
But once married, unmet expectations and challenges take its toll on your excitement level. They make you feel low about each other. That’s why you need to be deliberate about creating a new level of excitement in your marriage. It’s like re-engineering the excitement level of your relationship.
It’s a price you need to pay for your marriage to survive the burn out stage. To get going about this requires the following:
Regular skilful sex
A couple that enjoys regular sex will always find a way out of any conflict. As a matter of fact, it has been discovered that many of the marital conflicts have sex as an undertone reason. So, skilful, regular sex creates excitement in marriage. How skilful a couple is in the act of sex makes sex an enjoyable activity. So, each couple should ever be working on acquiring sexual skills in terms of time, styles, locations etc.
Attention
How much attention do you give each other these days? One aspect of the beginning of a relationship is the high level of attention. You hardly can do without seeing and speaking with each other. But with marriage, proximity seems to breed contempt. You gradually begin to give less attention to each other due to many factors: house chores, work challenges, quarrels, children, delayed child bearing etc. All these affect the attention level in marriage. There is therefore the need to deliberately work on these in order to raise the excitement level of a couple. The more attention you give each other, the more the bonding. This brings about a captivation of each other’s heart.
Regular and surprise gifts
This contributes a lot to the excitement level of a married couple. Each spouse should work on creating excitement in the marriage by revisiting the gifts idea, especially if it is the love language of either of each spouse. At this point in time, you don’t need to wait for the traditional time of valentine, festivals and holidays to appreciate each other with gifts. You do it regularly, with the intention to show that you are still in love with him or her.
Physical touch
Holding hands, kissing, pecking and the likes should not be a once in a while affairs in marriage. Physically touching each other sparks fire of love between couples. You can’t be physically touching each other and not be excited about each other. This becomes necessary especially when you realise that the fire of love is burning out in your marriage; fan the flames by physically touching each other more than ever before. Don’t make it a sex induced one, but love centred which may eventually culminates into sex.
Impressive dressing
This goes a long way in creating excitement between couples. Looking good for each other should not be relegated to the background in a marriage. You should dress to keep your spouse spinning in the head. Let him or her be excited about the way you look all the time. Some spouses become loose in dressing after getting married, with the notion of “who is looking at me”. This affects how their spouses admire them. If you realise that your spouse is dodging joint outing with you, it’s time to work on yourself.
When you feel like you have had enough of your spouse, or vice versa, that is when you need to take a second look at your look, and make necessary adjustments. In fact, dressing seductively in bed works wonders in raising the bar of excitement in marriage. Let us keep raising the bar of excitement in marriage by dressing intentionally for our spouses. You know his or her fashion preference, and your looks should be tailored towards it.
I can go on and on about this but, the point is that there are no hard and fast rules about it. Each spouse should study his or her spouse and make necessary adjustments in getting more excitement in your marriage.
When you do these, you will realise that there is a magic wand in creating new excitement in your marriage. Instead of getting tired of, or become bored about your spouse, you are evergreen in your marriage. It makes marriage being enjoyed rather than being endured, as is the case with many today. Wishing all of us a prosperous and happy New Year 2024, in advance.
