HOW TO FALL BACK IN LOVE USING THE SCIENCE OF ATTRACTION

To many people, love isn’t just something you experience; it’s something you do. When you treat love as a verb, you’ll feel love when you make efforts to show it. Sometimes we forgot to do this in our relationships, which can lead to us falling out of love.

how to fall in love

But you don’t need to throw in the towel just yet. You can discover how to fall back in love with your man and get your relationship back to where you want it.

THE THREE PHASES OF FALLING IN LOVE

To learn how to fall back in love, you need to understand the process of falling in love to begin with. It might seem like magic, but it’s really a process of chemical reactions in your brain.

1. LUST

First, you met your man. You lusted after him. In the lust phase. Testosterone and estrogen play a large part in lust and sexual attraction, but you don’t actually know one another as people, so it didn’t go any further that this lust.

2. ATTRACTION

The second phase is that of attraction. Emotions are starting to develop, and they’re prompted by a number of ingredients in the chemical cocktail known as love. This includes:

  • Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which the reward section of your brain releases in elevated levels when you’re falling in love. You couldn’t get enough of this man, and you felt good when you interacted with him and got a “hit.” You had more energy and needed less sleep. On the other hand, a lack of interaction made you feel like you were going through withdrawal, just like a drug addiction [1] [2]!
  • Norepinephrine also known as adrenaline makes your heart beat faster and blood rush in your ears. Real physiological responses such as your senses dulling happened whenever you’d see this guy.
  • Serotonin is the last part of the recipe in the attraction phrase. You can blame this chemical for your inability to think about anything else but this one man. Interestingly enough, it’s a drop of serotonin that women experience while men see their serotonin levels increase [3].

3. ATTACHMENT

Sometimes love gets stuck at the attraction stage, but if you were able to move through it with your man, you’d find yourself in the attachment phase. In this phase, your bodies saw an influx of oxytocin, also known as the cuddle hormone. The time you spent together and your physical interactions help to produce oxytocin, which makes you feel closer to your man. This is why it’s so easy to confuse love for lust.

Related: How to Cuddle for Maximum Intimacy

Oxytocin isn’t the only chemical at play, however. The second sub-stage of attraction involves vasopressin, which furthers long-term attachment to your man. Vasopressin does a whole slew of things from helping you grow your social network, enabling you to better support your man, feeling attached with more security, encouraging you to maintain your relationship and communicating with less negativity [4].

If you don’t experience hormones that encourage commitment, you’re likely not going to be able to resolve conflict with your man. Learn more about the conflict stage of relationships in this post. However, it’ll be easy to deal with whatever life throws your way when these chemicals are doing their work. You’ll feel comfortable and less anxious than you did in the beginning.

Obviously, the hormones that you experience at the beginning of your relationship are elevated, and they’ll decrease over time as other chemicals start their role in the assembly line of love. A couple may feel as though they’ve lost that loving feeling because they no longer feel the rush of adrenaline or a dip in vasopressin which may have you wondering whether you want to stick it out with your man.

Learn more about how people fall in love to leverage these hormonal changes.

FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT

However, there is good news. You can do things to encourage these hormones in hopes of finding yourself falling back in love again.

For example, you might have seen amusement parks recommended as a first-date activity. It’s not just because it’s fun to play games, go on rides and share sticky cotton candy. Rollercoasters are a great way to get adrenaline coursing through your body to mimic the chemical reactions that happen when you fall in love. You’ll probably have to do something a little out of your comfort zone

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a rollercoaster. You could go skydiving, bungee jumping, karaoke singing or even share a secret if you’re looking for that rush.

Fortunately, trying new things also encourages a release of dopamine in your brain, so your body will feel rewarded if you’re getting over a fear to induce an adrenaline rush. Of course, you need to do things with your man, so you’ll both experience these sensations.

You can boost serotonin by getting more sunlight [5], but receiving a massage is another great way to increase serotonin in your brain by nearly 30% [6]. This can directly lead to increased levels of oxytocin, which we’ve already explained can help you to feel connected to your man.

Remember that you can’t fall back in love without doing the groundwork, however. The above suggestions increase or exaggerate the chemicals involved in attraction and attachment, but a relationship in trouble needs more than that.

Is your relationship on the verge of ending? Find out here. And if it is in trouble, here’s how to save a relationship in 10 steps.

HOW TO FALL BACK IN LOVE

Much advice on falling back in love will tell you to relive those glory days when your stomach was full of butterflies, and your head was full of ideas for the future. You might literally do this by going back to the place you first met or kissed or by reenacting your first date. This will stimulate nostalgia but in a good way.

Plus, reliving your first date is a great way to spend time with one another. Too often, priorities such as work and kids get in the way. When was the last time you went on a date with your man, anyway?

Psst, why not try these 30 crazy cool date ideas to recapture the spark?

To keep the good feelings going, you can do things such as look at old photos or even your wedding video. You can plainly see that you’re in love, and this visual will remind you why. In the age of the Internet, we also have chat logs available to us to do much the same.

If both you and your man want to rekindle that spark, you can simply reminisce about old times. Soon the two of you will be laughing at the antics from your younger years, how nervous you felt around one another and the things you did to impress each other. It’s hard not to feel a rush of love when you’re in the middle of a conversation that begins with “Hey, remember that time!?”.

When you’re just feeling a little out of touch with your man, you might already feel better about the state of your relationship by following the above suggestions. But sometimes a relationship needs a little more work than that.

RECONNECT WITH YOUR MAN TO SAVE YOUR RELATIONSHIP

Relationships that are in more dire straights need more work to ensure you fall back in love rather than drift apart forever. You’ll need to commit to both putting in the effort and to making time for your relationship, which is often more difficult than we think it should be.

Start with a date night at least once a month; although, more frequently is better. It goes without saying that you need to make time for physical intimacy, everything from cuddling to sex. A weekend at a hotel or cabin, even if it’s in town, will provide an opportunity for an intimate setting that might not be available at home.

Read: 10 Weekend Getaway Ideas to Get the Spark Back

If you’re simply stuck in a sexless marriage (discover the causes of a sexless marriage here), then planning sex can give you the boost you need to get on the same page. You should also be flexible about where and when you have sex. Morning sex, for example, takes advantage of the time when you’re both just waking up and still in bed. More on that here.

It shouldn’t all be sexual, of course. You need to really communicate with your man if you want to know how to fall back in love. Yes, you talk, but so should he. Active listening encourages emotional intimacy, which may have been missing from your life for some time.

Related: 9 Vital Conditions for Emotional Intimacy

Being actively engaged with your man is key to falling back in love. It’s easy to take one another for granted. Sometimes people in long-term relationships feel more like furniture than people, but slowing down to listen to what your man is saying and remember that he’s more than just your boyfriend/husband, the father or your children or roommate is essential to do this.

Being stuck in a routine might lead to you feeling like you’re not in love like you used to be, which is why our final tip about falling back in love is to do something spontaneous. When you were first getting to know your boyfriend or husband, neither of you was sure what the other was going to do or say next. Introduce a bit of that spontaneity to your relationship again, and see where it goes!

Now that you know how to fall back in love with your man, you need to get started. Time is valuable when it comes to these things, but being proactive can help you create a loving atmosphere as well as increasing the feelings of love between you and your man.


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