In my work as a couples therapist, I regularly help couples expand the narrative they have about what being with someone is “supposed to” look like. In this country that narrative varies, depending on the culture/religion/region, but one idea that is nearly universal is that a relationship should be romance-based.
What this means is that we should not marry our best friends; instead we should marry someone we are “in love” with, someone we want to have sex with, someone we feel romantic about. Some marriage narratives go even further and tell us that we should feel these things for only one person, and we should feel them for the length of the marriage.
This narrative is appealing to think about, but often leads to anxiety, shame, and resentment in practice, because it is way too narrow to hold the complexities that modern relationships consist of. There are few relationships that can sustain “in love” romantic feelings exactly how they felt at the beginning–most experts estimate that this stage burns out in 1-3 years max. So what happens when the temperature drops in a marriage? Well, one of the things that happens is boredom.
While it may be upsetting to think you will eventually feel bored in your relationship, I assure you that while this can be a sign of trouble, it can also be a sign that you are moving from limerence to real love.
-YOU WILL BE BORED, AND WHAT THAT MEANS: Relationships used to be necessary for our survival as a species. They served the critical purpose of providing protection, companionship, family, and someone to share responsibilities with. Those who were left alone rarely stayed alive for long.
As time went on, and societies changed, the purpose of relationships changed along with them, and the needs they provide changed as well. You might laugh to think of dating someone so that you are “protected” from marauders, but it would be perfectly reasonable to marry in order to join incomes. So what does boredom have to do with this?
Today, many people marry partners they like spending time with–we have all heard people say “I am marrying my best friend!”. The thing about best friends, though, is that historically we did not live with them. We planned fun activities to do together and then went back to our respective spaces. When we marry our best friend, we are committing to sharing a lot of time together, time that does not always involve fun shared activities.
Boredom happens when we encounter the mundane nature of everyday life together: paying bills, taking out the trash, grocery shopping, doing laundry, nursing a cold, and we start to “tune out”. These activities may be necessary, but they are hardly what we think about when we fantasize about finding a romantic partner. While we like to imagine married life as exciting, romantic, and sexy, it usually settles into the same level of mild contentment that we feel for most things that we do.
Feeling bored may in fact be a sign that you don’t have interest in your partner beyond the wild sex you had the first six months after you met, but it more often signals that we have simply “gotten used” to our partners, which is natural, but can also cause us to take them for granted.
-THE DANGER OF BOREDOM: The risk of boredom is not that it can happen (it will!), but instead how it makes us feel about our relationship, ourselves, or our partner. Feelings, I am fond of telling my clients, are good advisors, but they should not be making the decisions for us. They are real, but the information they tell us is not always accurate.
What boredom often “tells” us is that we have lost interest in our partner or the relationship–that we are no longer attracted, or that we need to get excitement from outside the relationship. If we settle on this translation of our boredom, we could unnecessarily damage or leave a relationship that has just revealed key areas of vulnerability to us.
Boredom can reveal many things, including the possibility that we are not really in the relationship anymore. Because let’s face it, if you are truly leaning into each another, the relationship will buzz. This is because relationships, when fully engaged in, show us not only our deepest vulnerabilities but also our areas of greatest strength.
While most people think of getting into a relationship as “settling down”, in reality relationships can be quite unsettling–in a good way! They show us there is much to be learned about ourselves, our partner, and who we are together. They invite us to risk ourselves with another in the hopes that our risk will be responded to with care.
If we feel bored, it is possible that something is stopping us from continuing to learn about ourselves and our partner. If we don’t look deeper into what that obstacle is, we may falsely conclude that there is nothing new to learn, leading us to leave the relationship by mistake.
The danger of boredom is that the feeling of it does not always show us the truth that lies behind.
HOW TO GET OUT OF BOREDOM AND KEEP IT FROM RETURNING: It really is time to stop thinking that relationships only need “love” to thrive, unless, like many relationship experts, you define love as a verb and not a noun. When defining love as the former, we can say what makes a relationship thrive is action, deliberate, intentional, mindful actions. So what does this have to do with getting out of boredom?
I have a theory. It is not tested, but it does come from years of observing myself and others, as well as listening to clients talk about feeling stuck or dull. My theory is that there is no such thing as boredom, really. It is a term that falsely creates a label for something that is a symptom rather than a thing in itself. Boredom does not exist because it is not something, it is the absence of something.
What is that something? Attention. When we are not paying attention to the surrounding environment and people, our brain goes on auto-pilot. In the same way that we don’t really taste what we eat when we are driving a car, it is hard to experience what we see and hear when our attention is elsewhere. Where is our attention found these days? You guessed it–our phones.
This is not bashing phones, but rather commenting on how we use them. If we stimulate our brain by watching videos or looking at pictures all day, the actual world around us can seem rather dull. My theory is that this happens not because the phone is more exciting than the outside world (sometimes it is!), but because our passive scrolling has weakened our ability to focus attention intentionally.
In relationships, this means that our partners can hardly compete with what we see online, at least on the surface. But you can train yourself to exercise your attention with your partner by going below the surface: don’t just see them in the house–notice what they are wearing, how they smell, the tone of their voice, their level of eye contact.
Have you noticed that dogs never seem to be bored of going on the same walk every day? Why do you think that is? I think it is because their senses have not been dulled by the comfortable lives they live, unlike human beings. Even though they are being led down the same route, it appears as new to them because there are new things to notice (or smell). What if we approached our lives and our relationships similarly?
- When you talk to one another, really listen to what is being said before forming a response. Pay attention. Really pay attention.
- Be mindful in your own life, even if there is nothing “exciting” happening. Train yourself to be curious about things that may be less stimulating.
- Don’t wait for excitement to come to your relationship–plan it! You can get excited about anything from a big vacation to a new take-out restaurant.
- Play together. You can play cards, you can dance, you can sing together at karaoke. Find ways to engage your sense of play.
- Talk about your turn ons. This does not just have to be erotic turn ons–it can include anything that makes you feel alive.
There at dozens of lists like the one above with suggestions of how to “spice up” a marriage, but what I hope you take from mine is that it is not what you do that is important, it is the attention you pay to it. If you look at boredom as a sign that your attention has lapsed, rather than your interest for your partner, then you have an opportunity to refresh your reasons for being together in a way that makes you want to engage with one another again.
