Strange, Small Ways That Couples Fall in Love--Again and Again

It happens unexpectedly. A tingling, a passion, an electrical charge, the fluttery stirrings of a renewed sense of being in love--even after decades of togetherness.

“It can be a slight gesture, an intonation of voice, a playfulness, a look and those feelings of love come back in a minute,” mused artist Jo Anne Hertz, married 42 years to Robert Hertz, an oral surgeon. “It is like a breeze coming in, it’s so delicate. You don’t want to close the door on it.”

Infatuation-like feelings don’t have to end once a couple falls in love and settles into a life together. Couples in long-term relationships do fall in love with each other again and again, psychologists say, and not necessarily because they fall out of love--although some do.

Rather, the quotidian demands of life preoccupy, causing mates to disconnect and forget what brought them together in the first place. Renewed feelings of infatuation spark when couples reconnect.

“Being in touch with our love feelings is a lot of what makes relationships last,” said Elaine Aron, a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist who studies the phenomenon of love. “There is no limit to the love feelings people can experience in a long-term relationship. All the things that trigger those feelings are ways to cut through the blahness of life.”

Mariannell and Tom Bassett-Dilley, who moved to Chicago from Los Angeles a month ago, have found that their partnership of 11 years can be infused with in-love feelings in many ways.

“It is the poem he wrote me hanging inside the kitchen cupboard,” said Mariannell, 35, a theater director and opera singer. “It is when he will come home from work and be banging at the gate with his bike. We will be smiling like fools through the window, waving. It is small, strange things that are attractive.”

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The feelings come easily to her husband as well.

“When we go through something interesting or difficult, what we love to do more than anything is communicate about it,” said the 36-year-old architect. “Change is galvanizing for us.”

Some people manage to recapture those feelings by simply taking the time to verbalize (to a third party, even) why they love their mate. (Verbalizing can jog the romantic memory.)

The possibility of losing one’s mate to illness or accident or to a competitor (even sometimes in cases of infidelity) can also inflame love anew, said Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist.

Some people experience the sensation of infatuation on the heels of an intense row, said Aron, especially if both parties have been honest, noble and have shown a willingness to apologize. Good sex stirs renewed feelings of being in love.

And it can happen when a partner raises another’s self-esteem by positively reframing a negative quality. (When one partner says, for example, “I am anxious,” and the mate responds, “That is what I love about you. You feel things deeply.”)

Engaging in exciting, novel or unexpected things together also renews a sense of being in love.

The element of surprise and novelty are certainly at work in the Hertz marriage. About 10 years ago, JoAnne told her husband that she felt he was not dealing with a problem in a straightforward manner.

He left for the office, and when he returned home later, he presented his wife with a sculpture he’d just made that was inspired by her remark, with a note that said, “I am looking at my behavior.”

She was bowled over. “I just fell madly in love with him again,” said Jo Anne, who lives with her husband in Little Holmby Hills.

“That he would tell me, an artist, with art that he cared enough about me to look at his behavior and say, ‘I love you and I want this relationship.’ He really got me.”