Can the Honeymoon be Saved? The Ultimate Relationship Challenge

If someone tells you what love is, do not believe him.

Thus having given you good reason to ignore me, I shall pretend you’re still reading and provide a possible answer.

First, I’m writing about being “in love” and “swept away,” not a sedate, loving, and less ecstatic attachment. More the honeymoon than the place down the road where engines slow and the fire truck in charge of routine overtakes the couple and douses the flames. Here the dead hand of habit makes an unwelcome appearance.

Before I get to how to forestall that undesirable event, let me speak more about it.

Madness describes the state of new love — “the full crazy.”

Some call it obsession. The idea of the other floods your being with face, form, touch, scent, voice, intelligence, and laughter. Sex, too.

Love makes the world new: everything sparkles. Perception is enhanced, like the change from black & white to colorized, 3-D.

One day ago, you were a sleepwalking, beclouded person. With the sunrise of a new romance, each day is broken open the way a child attacks the gift wrapping on his Christmas presents. You come alive to what it means to be alive.

Love is foolishness and wisdom, silliness and joy, slavery and escape. The bewitched circumstance is so perfect that we make the arrangement a 24-hour cohabitation and risk killing it. “More” is not necessarily better. In a world where we adapt, adjust, do the laundry, and pay the bills, the mundane moves in and makes it a threesome.

Love is falling, but believing you won’t hit the ground. Reason plays little part. Friends question your judgment and warn you. Even astute ten-year-olds witness your rolling eyes. They fear for your safety. Unsolicited words of advice make abstract sense but appeal to a brain taking a smoking break.

This state of euphoria is heedless of tomorrow. One cannot imagine the emotion fading, the beloved aging, troublesome relatives, and quarrels over money. Intensity and gratitude are all.

Whenever amour is the real-deal, you are changed, enlarged. The personal, permanent passport of your existence gets stamped with the name of another, a human possessing an addictive flavor.

Thought alters. You conceive anew what is possible in life because you experienced a sliver of the impossible.

Love, when authentic, inflates your humanity, the capacity to give to another, and the knowledge that the world possesses mountain tops of rapture and well-being. No wonder an abrupt end to this journey rips your insides out.

This glorious condition rarely lasts. Time tends to mold the relationship into a different shape of love. The rip-your-clothes-off, rhapsodic fervor becomes more episodic, a tune you notice less often, assuming it is played at all. Heretofore unseen personality incompatibilities intrude.

The arrival of children enriches a marriage, but also stresses it. For most duos, the grinding of frenzy gives way to the rubbing of friction and familiarity.

Sometimes the marital pair discovers a challenge in their conflicting motivations. People live for love, for the kids, for money and objects, for fame, to live-on in artistic or scientific works, etc. Moving in tandem over a lifetime requires lots of coordination, tolerance of the other, and sacrifice.

Being crazy-in-love doesn’t demand much except a shower and a fresh set of clothes. A life together does.

Much writing offers guidance on perpetuating the enchantment. The list of suggestions includes effort, imagination, surprise gifts, date nights, sexual experimentation, playfulness, and remembering why you fell in love. Kindness, apology, and respect are essential, as is an absence of condescension. The therapist, Esther Perel, believes infidelity with the consent of the mate can also enhance the marriage, though I have doubts.

For the candle of courtship to remain lit, both parties must grow and transform. They otherwise offer nothing new to their partner. Boredom out of the bedroom is a killer of passion within it. While renewed love is not so effortless as the new kind, recapturing a time when you were an explorer to an undiscovered country is worth another safari.

Sensitive conversation is required. Some people listen only to fashion a reply. Instead, the husband and wife must hear to understand.

The wise pair benefits from balancing time together and apart, hours without the spouse, and solo interests as well as activities they share.

If the lovers do not bring fresh ideas into their interactions, nearness becomes a dreadful repetition. Each might take comfort knowing every thought before their companion thinks it, but dullness makes an extramarital affair appear enlivening.

I know a magician, a specialist in racing with the moon when not nursing the rabbit in his hat, who conjured a way to keep marital bliss rolling forever. The plan requires the sweethearts to live in different cities and meet every few weeks, traveling back and forth, sometimes to places beyond their homes.

Habit wouldn’t play any part, but a vacation atmosphere of excitement and adventure would. No children were offered a role in the trickster’s equation. He recommended regular phone calls, however. The wizard guaranteed a “Saturday Night Date” aura to every encounter, no matter the place and time.

Of course, few have the resources or vocation to permit this. Moreover, the urge to join together — the want for “more” — still presents an ever-present risk.

Relationships change like everything else in the world. Youthful newlyweds are endowed with a spark but don’t yet possess the history awarded by age alone. Nor do many of us realize the one-we-can’t-get enough-of lacks the magic to make us whole. That heroic task is a never-finished solo assignment.

The clock takes away but also gives. If grating and the sense of imprisonment in a two-person chain-gang are what remains of the dyad’s past ardor, these souls missed a great opportunity.

Yes, long romance always finds its way to conflict. But shared challenges, mutual support, tragedy endured, joyous memories, acceptance of shortcomings, pride and love for offspring, aligned values, and countless moments of tenderness compensate for the diminished presence of the enkindling thing that brought their hearts together.

The lucky older couple has encountered the absurdity of life as a team, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in tears. In the best of cases, their love is now different, in part because of what they lost, in part because they have transcended the honeymoon.

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The images above in the following order: The Family by Gustav Klimt, Upward by Paul Klee, White Line by Kandinsky, the Red Balloon by Paul Klee, and Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne (aka In Fronto of a Door) by Modigliani.