How to Keep Passion Alive in a Long-Term Relationship

Remember the beginning of your relationship, all those feelings of passion? You were lustful and excited about getting to know the other person. You stayed up all night talking, and a look or a slight touch turned you red hot inside. You felt alive, with more energy and happiness about the way your life seemed to be figuring itself out. You felt intense desire and excitement.

Then this person started to become familiar, and the passion you two once knew seemed to disappear as quickly as it came on. Most of us accept the idea that the passion is gone. We go on living our lives just as before, with or without this new person.

What if you could make a different decision about your relationship with passion? What if you could let that bursting-open excitement come back into your life without relying on, or expecting, your partner to give you that feeling? What if I told you that much more of your passion is up to you than you think?

Allowing ourselves to feel strong emotions is simply that: allowing. You have to give yourself space and permission to be alive in this world.

To do this, you first have to slow down. Get quiet enough in your own mind to hear your passion. This can happen through meditation, or just by quieting distractions: not constantly looking at your phone, computer or book. Even turning off the music.

Personally, I like a focusing exercise where I first just feel myself breathing: breath coming in, breath going out. I let my breath naturally slow down and become fuller and deeper. Then I notice all the sounds around me. I really listen to the room, and to what's outside the room. Next, I take in the smells. I let my senses slow down and just be. I connect with the pulse of my body: my heart beating, the awareness of life moving through me. This is aliveness.

Try it today for five minutes, with your phone in another room.

Slowing down gives me space to see what in my life I need to move toward or away from. From this place of aliveness, I reflect on what feels missing, or what I need more of. What do I want? What do I want from this day? This week? This year? From life? How can I make that happen?

From these questions, I start to see my goals. And from seeking out my goals, I begin to feel where my passions lie.

For a very long time, my main passion in life was riding horses. Through horses, I felt alive and connected to the world. When I left the horse world for some years, really because I'd lost my passion for competing, I struggled. I struggled to feel my own aliveness; a sense of being and passion felt gone from my life. I wanted to feel passionate again about something! Anything, I thought. I found myself turning to sexual partners to try to fill the space I couldn't fill myself. I wanted the passion of the night to rub off on me and help me feel alive again. But I learned a valuable lesson about passion: a relationship cannot provide what is missing in our own bodies. The passion would soon fade from the relationship, and I would move on to the next one to try to get it from someone else.

In finding my own passions in life, I grew to understand that passion is not outside of ourselves. It is within us, all of us. Yet to find real passion that lasts a lifetime, not just the beginning of a relationship, we have to cultivate, and keep cultivating, the aliveness that already lives within us.

Some of the things I was most passionate about when I wrote this:

• learning to play the cello
• exploring my sexual fantasies
• helping people grow into their humanness as sexual beings
• learning new things and taking risks (safety first)
• growing indoor plants
• (now again) riding horses

Some of these are large and some are small. I recommend starting a list for yourself, and adding or taking things away as you learn more about yourself.

You might be wondering how this carries over into your sexuality. It completely does. Once you identify what you feel passionate about, explore it and feel your body as you do. Notice the excitement and conviction in how you carry yourself. Really get to know this feeling as a "body-felt experience" (an experience of the body, not the brain). Let it flow into your sexual experiences, maybe first with yourself in masturbation and then with your partner. Notice if you are blocking the passion or holding back in some way. The more you know about how passion moves in your body, or how it doesn't, the closer you will be to keeping it burning for your whole life.

If what you're missing is desire for your partner specifically, I've written about how to bring back desire in a long-term relationship.

Passion first,
– Keeley

Want more of this? Everything I teach clients about desire, pleasure and talking about sex is in The Sex Class, at your own pace.