Passion fades. It’s the sad truth about long-term relationships and marriages. Those heady early days of can’t-get-enough-hands-on-each-other insanity slowly morph into something different. And now researchers find it happens so much faster than anyone realized.
A survey from the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior (CORR) looked at 3,000 men and women between the ages of 25 and 41. They were asked several times how satisfied they were with their sex lives and it seems that passion peaks at 12 months in…. and then it’s all downhill from there. Ouch.
Except, what if it weren’t?
Here’s the thing, everyone laments the “passion” dipping from marriages. It is real. It happens. Let’s face it: No one can sustain what we all had in the beginning of our relationships. That all-encompassing, can’t sleep or eat or think about anything else adoration that comes with falling in love. I remember 14 years ago with my husband. We couldn’t stop kissing. We grossed everyone out all the time. We wanted to be together and touching every second of every day. I don’t think I thought about work for a minute.
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And then, somewhere along time line, it shifted. It probably wasn’t the one year mark. But it might have been two or three. By then we were married and living together and still in love, but that gotta have it right now insanity definitely died down. It does for almost all of us. But here’s there part no one mentions: That’s when things get good.
I have never been happier in my marriage than we are now. I adore my husband. We love to spend time together and don’t get nearly enough of it (hello, three kids), but when we do, it’s magic. Even better? We can think about other things. My husband finds his time to pole vault and take flying lessons. I read books, work on my novel, and go running. That all consuming insanity has died down. And thank God for that!
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This is real love, folks. It’s not heady and insane and passionate, but it’s so, so good. It’s fulfilling. It makes us better people. It’s the kind of love that sustains us through the years. These studies pretend it’s a bad thing. It isn’t. It’s the best part of all.
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