Keep Your Love Alive — What Fuels YOUR Relationship?

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and I’m coming to you this Sunday with another video on sex and happiness. It sometimes seems absurd, but it really is an important part of our lives, and it’s one that, unfortunately, isn’t going very well for a lot of people. Like, even before the pandemic, lots of people were dissatisfied with their sex lives, and in particular, women. And since the pandemic struck, it’s even gotten worse with all the anxiety, stress, and too much time intensely together watching zoom calls at home together. So, this video is all about how we keep love alive because so often in the beginning part of a relationship, love is abundant and wonderful and exciting, and then love dies. And this video is about why that happens and how we can avoid it occurring.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, we all know that at the beginning part of a relationship, there’s something that we call romantic love. It’s the intense, highly energized, super excited, can’t get enough of my partner, romantic love. The sex is fantastic. We’re banging like bunnies all the time, and there’s wonderful emotions associated with it, and big doses of lovely hormones like dopamine and endorphins, and we feel great and happy in this romantic stage of love. And it tends to run its course sort of about four to 18 months in length, and it’s a lovely, exciting, if sometimes a little bit too passionate of a time in our lives. And then, we switch to something called companionate love.

Companionate love is beautiful in its own right. It’s when we become much more committed to the partnership where we have our best friend with us who’s our lover, and it’s more associated with the hormone oxytocin, which is the attachment hormone which is like “oh, you’re mine” and she says to you “oh, you’re mine”. It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, and companionate love is often associated with switching a little bit away from the intense “you and me” to a little bit of “us together looking out”. So that we’re looking out at things that we partner in, maybe it’s raising kids, as a great example, it might be projects we do together, social activism, house repairs and projects, and that kind of stuff. And when we’re working well together in that partnership, on these things that we’re looking outside of the relationship into, we bring a similar energy to it. We become kind of energized together with this purpose.

You’ll recall from previous videos in sexual love, there’s something that we need called polarity. It’s this opposite of energies, masculine and feminine energy. It’s not necessarily female or males that have those energies all the time, but there’s this polarization where the feminine energy is attracted to the masculine, masculine energy is attracted to the feminine, and it’s beautiful, and it draws out our desire, and makes the sexual events that we have together fun and engaging and exciting, and brings that energy to the point where we want to have sex with our partner. And in companionate love, if we’re looking out together and creating these same energies in ourselves for that thing that’s outside of our relationship, like the kids, then suddenly we’re these partners who don’t have a lot of polarized masculine feminine energy. Instead, we brought our energy together for that thing that we’re dealing with over there, and that can be a real problem. It’s why there’s that old adage that you can put a penny in a jar for every time you have sex before you get married, and then take a penny out of that same jar for every time you have sex after you get married, and the joke is that you’ll never run out of pennies after you get married, which is kind of sad, but probably true too often.

So, what is it that we need to do? Well, we actually need to invest consciously in our sex lives with our companionate stage lovers. I can even think of a time in my past where I had a pretty serious groin injury. It was kind of embarrassing to tell you this one video, but I was unable to be very active in my sex life. In other words, I wasn’t having any sex with my partner because it hurt too much, and I noticed that over a period of days and weeks, the quality of our loving relationship diminished. We simply weren’t connecting with that beautiful sexual energy. And there were other sexual things that we sometimes undertook, but traditional penis and vagina energy brought us a tremendous amount of synergy. It’s not just because we’re face to face and heart to heart in that kind of sex, it’s rhythmically our bodies are in tune, and of course also then energetically we become in tuned as well. And so, non-penis and vagina sex can also become very attuned and that’s beautiful, and you can work on it.

There’s all kinds of ways to have sex that’s not just penis and vagina, ask any lesbian who might have fantastic sex with her lover and men could learn a lot of things from that kind of those kind of relationships. So what do we need to do to maintain that polarity even when we’ve gone into a companion stage of love? Well, first of all, make it happen. If you know your sex life is less than satisfying, talk about it with your partner, schedule time, become committed to making that better, read books together, spend time together. You might need to schedule it, plan for it. You don’t need to create space for it. If your lives are really busy and the kids are always in your way, or your room, or your houses are messy, and you can’t find the space that creates opportunity for romantic love, turn your mind to that.

And finally, I think it’s really important is that we have to linger together. That means protracted time in bed, face to face, having a conversation, soothing, wonderful touch. It might mean the Saturday morning sleep-ins or the Sunday morning, spending the morning in bed, and yes, you can have coffee and you can read the paper and all those things too, but it’s making this space where you’re intimately closed in a private space that’s dedicated to you and her being relaxed, or him and you, or whatever it is. Those are the kind of things that intentionally we can make sure that our companionate love, beautiful in its own right, does not become disappointing because our sex life, that part of our bodies and our energies that brings really true great connection and warmth together, all that doesn’t fizzle out with time.

So, I’m encouraging you all to invest in the polarity, invest in your companionate love, enjoy it, enjoy your lovers. That’s all for this week. If you like the video, click the like button. If you want to see a video like this every Sunday morning, subscribe to my channel, and you’ll get a video sent right to your mailbox. Thanks so much, bye for now.