What to do if you are bored with your marriage

Most studies of love and marriage show that the decline of romantic love over time is inevitable. While brain scan studies show that some long-married couples do maintain intense romantic feelings, they seem to be the exception. For most people, the butterflies of early romance quickly flutter away and are replaced by familiar, predictable feelings of long-term attachment. There’s nothing wrong with the calm, settled feeling of companionate love, and many couples wouldn’t trade the deep intimacy and commitment they’ve achieved for another whirl at passionate romance. But the risk of companionate love is that it might go stale and that, when it does, boredom and discontent will set in, and your hard-won intimacy will fade.

But it doesn’t have to happen. Love researchers have come up with a way for long-married couples to rekindle their early feelings of romance. Here’s the prescription: Embark on a regular date night, but reinvent it to include new and unusual experiences.

The advice is based in brain science. New experiences activate the brain’s reward system, flooding it with the brain chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the same brain circuits that are ignited in early romantic love, a time of exhilaration and obsessive thoughts about a new partner. And several experiments show that novelty—simply doing new things together as a couple—may help bring the butterflies back, re-creating the chemical surges of early courtship.

Over the past several years, Dr. Arthur Aron and his colleagues have tested the novelty theory in a series of experiments with long-married couples. In one of the earliest studies, the researchers recruited fifty-three middle-aged couples. Using standard questionnaires, the researchers measured the couples’ relationship quality and then randomly assigned them to one of three groups.

One group was instructed to spend ninety minutes a week doing pleasant and familiar activities, like dining out or going to a movie. Couples in another group were instructed to spend ninety minutes a week on “exciting” activities that appealed to both husband and wife. Those couples did things they didn’t typically do—attending concerts or plays, skiing, hiking, and dancing.

After ten weeks, the couples again took tests to gauge the quality of their relationships. Those who had undertaken the “exciting” date nights showed a significantly greater increase in marital satisfaction than the “pleasant” date night group.

Next, make a list of ten to twenty activities and “date night” excursions that sound fun and exciting that you haven’t done together for the past six months. Ask your partner to do the same and compare your lists. Choose ten “dates” that sound fun to both of you and schedule one activity a week for the next ten weeks. After completing the ten-week prescription, retake the Passionate Love quiz on page 59 and compare with your previous score.

Dr. Aron cautions that novelty alone is probably not enough to save a marriage in crisis. But for couples who have a reasonably good but slightly dull relationship, novelty may help reignite old sparks.

And recent brain scan studies show that romantic love really can last years into a marriage. Bianca Acevedo, a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, led brain scan research involving ten women and seven men who claimed to be intensely in love with their spouses after an average of twenty-one years of marriage. Brain scans confirmed it, showing increased brain activity associated with romantic love when the subjects saw pictures of their spouses. The images were markedly similar to the brain scan studies of newlyweds.

It’s not clear why some couples are able to maintain romantic intensity even after years together. But the scientists believe regular injections of novelty and excitement most likely play a role. Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher notes that the new activities couples choose don’t have to be time consuming, expensive, or wacky. “You don’t have to swing from the chandeliers,” she says. Just take a drive, wander around a new part of town, or stop by a local art show or community fair. The key is to share a new experience together.

THE LESSON: Protect your marriage by regularly trying new things and sharing new experiences with your spouse. Make a list of the favorite things you and your spouse do together, and then make a list of the fun things you’d like to try. Avoid old habits and make plans to do something fresh and different once a week.

Of course, it takes more than a pottery class, regular sex, and a few celebrations to make a good marriage. But these seven strategies for strengthening your marital bond can put you on a path to restoring and strengthening the positive connections that brought you together in the first place. The dual ability to stay positive and minimize the negative behaviors is what distinguishes long-married stable couples from those who struggle.

For Better by Tara Parker-Pope