Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
Relationship Radio: Marriage, Sex, Limerence & Avoiding Divorce
5 Ways to Feel More Alive In Your Marriage
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Do you ever wonder how to feel more alive in your marriage again? That spark you felt in the beginning doesn’t have to fade forever. In this video, Kimberly Beam Holmes, CEO of Marriage Helper, shares 5 proven ways to reignite passion, intimacy, and connection with your spouse so you can feel fully alive in your relationship again.
Research shows that “being madly in love” is often just limerence—a temporary stage fueled by brain chemistry. But real, lasting love is built on intimacy, passion, and commitment. The good news? You can rekindle that passion and start thriving together no matter where your marriage is today.
Inside this video, you’ll discover:
- How a shared purpose can pull you and your spouse back together when life pulls you apart
- Why adventure and play boost bonding and create lasting memories
- The role of emotional safety and vulnerability in building trust and passion
- How affection and desire keep love fresh through small daily actions
- Why supporting each other’s growth leads to a stronger, more secure marriage
If you want to know how to feel more alive in your marriage, these five steps can transform the way you love, connect, and grow together.
👉 Watch until the end for practical ideas you can start using today to bring intimacy and passion back into your marriage.
If you're struggling in your marriage, don’t wait. Get our FREE resource: The 7 Steps to Rescue Your Marriage 👉 https://marriagehelper.com/free
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What can you do in order to feel more alive in your marriage? If you're anything like the majority of marriages, then after a couple of years, that feeling of being madly in love with your spouse may have worn off. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, what we know from research is that many times when people initially start dating and fall in love, that feeling that they are experiencing, that feeling of being madly in love, where you're thinking about the other person 85% of the time, where all you can do is imagine your future together, all of those things, that is called limerence. And limerence isn't a bad thing, but the thing about limerence is it always fades. So even if you and your spouse were in limerence with each other when you were dating, and then you get married, and then you realize that over time that limerence has worn off, it doesn't mean that you married the wrong person. It doesn't mean that your chemistry is gone. Biologically, limerence has to end in order for something stronger and deeper and more time committed to take over because limerence is all about the here and now, so to say. It's about that feeling in the moment. It's those initial biochemical reactions that happen in our body that lead us to quote unquote fall madly in love with each other. But we can't live like that forever. Something more stable and more long-lasting has to end up taking over. And that's what's called love. We know that love is comprised of three elements. It is intimacy, it is passion, and it is commitment. But even with that passion part being an important part of falling in love and staying in love for the lifetime of your marriage, passion can also wane. Passion is actually, when we look at those three components to love, the first thing to typically fade in a relationship, but it doesn't have to. The thing about passion, it's not just about sex, it's about feeling oneness with each other, yearning for the other person, desiring to be around the other person. And that passion is what can help you feel alive in your marriage. So today I'm going to talk about five things that you can do to keep that passion alive so that you can feel alive in your marriage. The first is shared purpose. Now you might be thinking, how in the world is that going to increase this desire for oneness for my spouse? Here's why. Because when life starts to get crazy, it starts to pull you apart. You start working on your job, your spouse starts working on their job, maybe the kids start having different things they have to go to. And so you're not spending as much time together as you used to. You have two different things that you might be pursuing in your life, and life starts ripping you apart. But when you have a shared purpose to bring you back together, it allows you to continue to cultivate that feeling of oneness and that craving for oneness of being with each other because this is the thing. This is the habit, this is the ritual, this is the focus that you have that's going to bring you back together when life tries to pull you apart. I have a close friend and her and her husband, one of the ways that they have shared purpose is by volunteering together. Every weekend that they can, they're going and doing food drives with a local nonprofit that feeds food and does uh like grocery delivery and things like that for people who are in need of food. And so even though they both are high-driven career individuals, this is their way of constantly coming back together every week, nearly. It's nearly every week that they have that one thing that they do together that gives them a shared purpose. So, what could that be for you? That's an important question to figure out. Shared purpose, actually, when we talk about the love path, which is marriage helper's model of how people fall in love and stay in love and have long-lasting love, we know that a shared purpose, what we call aspirations, is that fourth and final step of the love path. It's the one that most people never even get to. But when the marriages do get there, they have stronger, more satisfying, long-lasting marriages than ever before. It's the quintessential level of the love path that you want to try and get to. And so I'm telling you one of the best things up front, find a shared purpose. It will increase your passion. It'll help you feel more alive in your marriage. The second thing that you can do to feel more alive in your marriage is adventure and play. There's some really fun things that happen neurologically and neurochemically within us when we have new experiences. And so I encourage you to go and try something new with your spouse. It actually helps you to bond better to that person when two people are experiencing something new together. There's some dopamine stuff that happens in there, a lot of other fun stuff. But the bottom line of it is you're experiencing something new together, which is a shared memory. It's many times leads to those inside jokes that we talk about and something that you'll remember for years to come. Honestly, this one, Adventure and Play, is one of my favorite ways to keep passion alive in the marriage. And this is the way my husband and I are constantly, constantly continuing to come back together when life tries to pull us apart because we both love to travel. We absolutely make it a point every year to at least do one vacation to a new place neither of us have been to, just the two of us, and then at least one time a year with our kids to go somewhere new as well. We both love travel. Not everyone loves travel. It boggles my mind. I can't understand it, but not everyone loves travel. And so even if that's not you, that's okay. You can do things in your local area for newness. Go and try a new restaurant, go and hike at a new park, go and do something new, try a new hobby together, try dancing together, watch a new show together. But the idea is do something new. Get out of your comfort zone, laugh and play. These are the things that likely drew you together to begin with. And so these are the things that can help reignite intimacy and passion now and really help keep your marriage feeling alive. But here's the thing: feeling alive in your marriage isn't just about excitement, it's also about intimacy, which brings us to point number three, which is emotional safety and vulnerability. At our core, while we want to be desired, more on that in a minute, we also want to feel safe and soothed and secure in our relationships. One of the best things that we can do to increase passion is actually work on how good we are doing at being our spouse's best friend. Because at the end of the day, we don't really want to be passionate with someone that we can't trust. So creating that emotional safety, knowing that you can share anything with your spouse and they will love and accept you, and that your spouse can share anything with you and you will love and accept them for what they share with you is incredibly important. In fact, acceptance is the key to love. It is the absolute basis of how love happens. It is that intimacy part of the three parts of love. We have passion, we have commitment, we have intimacy. While we're talking about how to increase passion, we can't negate the fact that intimacy has to increase as well. In fact, one of the things my dad, who is a sexologist, has always said is that everything that happens inside the bedroom affects what happens outside the bedroom. And everything that happens outside the bedroom affects what happens inside the bedroom. So if you're wanting to feel more alive in your marriage, start by trying to be a great friend, your spouse's best friend. And that is going to pay dividends. The fourth way to feel more alive in your marriage is affection and desire. Pursue your spouse. We want to be desired. We want to feel like we are desirable. And so the way that you can do this, because right now you're the one listening to this video, begin being flirty again with your spouse. Tell them how great they look. Maybe just squeeze your husband's arms and be like, ooh, look at those muscles. Or look at your wife and say, man, you look really good today. Do the things that you did to flirt with your spouse in the beginning. Physical touch matters here. Holding each other's hands when you're watching a movie or walking down the street together. Hugs, so important. A 20-second hug and a 20-second long kiss each day can do wonders for the amount of passion that you feel for each other. So affection and desire and showing your spouse that you have affection towards them and you still desire them, incredibly important. And then the fifth way that you can increase intimacy and passion and feel more alive in your marriage is by supporting each other. You want to grow individually and you want to grow together. In fact, marriages start to die when people in them stop growing. That's what happens to plants. That's what happens to so many things, and it happens to us as people and in our marriages as well. When we stop growing, our marriage starts dying. So continue to grow together, but also growing separately, as long as it doesn't tear you apart from each other. Being able to support each other in your individual goals and pursuits is a huge part of what helps us to feel seen, helps us to feel like we have an identity outside of our marriage and allows us to actually end up being more confident inside of our marriage, have more of a secure attachment inside of our marriage. Again, as long as those desires aren't ripping us apart. So my husband is in flight school to become a commercial pilot. And while we are well aware of the time, the effort, the investment that that takes into him pursuing that, I support him. In fact, there has rarely been a time that I have not supported my husband in anything that he's wanted to do, even when those things haven't always paid off the best. Because I know the importance of showing my husband that I support him and how much that's going to come back to him supporting me, which he does. He understands that for my job, I have a lot of travel, speaking engagements, things that I need to do, and he supports me. That also fills me up so that whatever he wants to do, I support him as well. Now, that doesn't mean that we both just have blind eyes to each other and say, do whatever you want to do. We talk about it. We talk about the pros, we talk about the cons, we pray about it. But at the end of the day, we get to a place where we can have mutual support for each other, even if compromise has had to happen along the way, because we know that that leads to growing intimacy, growing passion, and helping us feel more alive in our marriage. My name is Kimberly Beam Holmes, and I'm the CEO at Marriage Helper. As always, we would love for you to subscribe to this channel as we are always putting out new and hopefully relevant content and some fun content. In fact, I highly recommend that the next video you watch be some fun ideas for date night that you can use that are free all the way to something that you pay for, but something that could really help to spruce up your next date night.
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