Why Does Passion Fade in a Relationship, Even When Everything Between You Is Fine?

Let’s imagine Anna and Ivan.

They love each other, they’ve been together for many years, they have a child, a dog, a shared household, and overall, a pretty good relationship. They worked out long ago who does the dishes and who cleans the floors, more or less learned how to divide everyday responsibilities, survived a few moves, job changes, having a child, raising a dog, and all the other things that tend to happen to people over years of building a life together.

They barely annoy each other anymore, which, after many years together, is already quite an achievement. As partners in crime, they’re doing pretty well too. They have things to talk about, they watch shows together, plan holidays, joke around, discuss their child, work, friends, and the fact that petrol prices have gone up again.

And then one evening, sitting in front of the TV, they suddenly wonder: where did the desire go?

They used to be unable to keep their hands off each other, and now everything is just... fine.

That’s when Ivan, or Anna, or both of them at the same time, may have a rather unsettling thought: if the passion has become weaker, does that mean the love is gone? Is something wrong with our relationship? Is something wrong with me? Or with you?

And this is usually where the uncomfortable question appears: why does passion fade in a relationship? People notice that they feel less sexual desire than they used to, compare their relationship to those first few months, and very quickly conclude that something somewhere must have broken.

But remember: in our example, Anna and Ivan actually have a good relationship. So before we pronounce their marriage dead, let’s try to understand what might really be happening.

As a psychotherapist, I like to start not with the underwear, but with what’s going on in the head.

Let’s look at how it all started

When Anna and Ivan first met, both the reality and the whole context of their relationship were completely different.

There was a lot they didn’t know.

Will he like my new dress? Will he ask me out again? Did she like the flowers I picked for her? Is it too soon to hold her hand? What about kissing her? What if I invite her back to my place? What if she says no? What if she says yes?

None of these questions had a definite answer, which meant there was a huge amount of space for fantasy.

At the beginning of a relationship, the other person is not yet completely understandable or predictable to us. We know some things about them, fill in some of the gaps, imagine other things, anticipate what might happen next, and quite a lot exists only in our own heads.

And somewhere inside that novelty, distance, fantasy, and inability to have the person beside us whenever we want, there is a particular kind of tension created by the unknown.

And uncertainty is one of the contexts in which desire can grow very easily. I want to stress: one of them. It is not the only ingredient of a good sex life, but it can be particularly powerful at the beginning of a relationship because uncertainty leaves so much room for fantasy.

Sex starts in the mind

We sometimes talk about sexual desire as though there were a button somewhere in the body: attractive person, nice body, therefore I should want them. But sex lives in the mind, strange as that may sound.

Imagine the simplest touch. Ivan takes Anna’s hand for the first time. Physically, nothing terribly complicated has happened: one hand has touched another.

Meanwhile, there’s an entire TV series playing in their heads.

His hand is so strong. Her hand is so soft. What happens next? Is he going to kiss me now? What if I move a little closer? Is he passionate? What will happen when we’re alone?

The actual touch lasts a few seconds, but everything our mind manages to build around it can keep going for a very long time. We are not only feeling another person’s hand. We are also feeling everything that touch means to us.

Then there is the physiology of falling in love, which I don’t want to dive too deeply into here. I’m sure many people have read about the hormonal fireworks that can happen at the beginning of a relationship.

Dopamine, for example, is strongly involved in anticipating a reward. It isn’t only about the moment when I already have something. It’s also about the feeling of: “I don’t have it yet, but maybe I will soon.”

We have a date tonight. Maybe he’ll kiss me. Maybe she’ll stay. Maybe we’ll have sex. And sometimes the anticipation itself creates almost as much excitement as whatever eventually happens.

Ten years later, things look a little different

Ten years pass. Anna and Ivan live together, have had a child, and have probably walked the dog about four thousand times.

Ivan is no longer looking at the mysterious woman he once noticed in a bar and asked out on a date. He is looking at the woman who forgot to buy milk yesterday and spent half an hour today arguing with their child about homework.

And Anna is no longer looking at the mysterious man she once wondered about: will he text me today or not?

She is looking at the person who left a wet towel on the bed, threw his socks somewhere into a corner, or accidentally washed the dark clothes with the colours and turned half the household a delicate shade of grey.

I’m exaggerating a little, obviously, but that’s more or less the point. These people haven’t become worse, they’ve simply become more real.

The mysterious woman has gradually become a real woman with her character, habits, tiredness, fears, strengths, and the things she does that occasionally drive him mad.

The mysterious man has also turned out to be an actual human being, someone you can see ill, sleepy, angry, confused, or wearing the same old T-shirt he has inexplicably refused to throw away for the past eight years.

So the question why does sexual attraction to your partner fade? does not always have the answer: “Because I don’t love him anymore.”

Sometimes part of the answer is much simpler: the context of the relationship has changed. The two people have become much more real to each other, while uncertainty and fantasy have become less prominent.

And there’s actually some very good news here

I really want couples who recognise themselves in Anna and Ivan not to miss something important at this point.

If you have spent many years together, gone through children, moves, emigration, job changes, financial difficulties, family crises, illness, getting a dog, which, by the way, can reorganise your entire household perfectly well on its own, and you have seen each other in far more states than simply attractive and well-dressed on a date, yet this real person is still important to you, that is a pretty damn big achievement.

If you still choose this person, if you still like being around them, want to be together, can support one another, be friends, negotiate, joke, and build a life together, then a decrease in sexual desire does not automatically mean that everything is falling apart.

There is a big difference between falling in love with your fantasy about someone you have known for three weeks and knowing somebody very realistically ten years later, seeing both their best qualities and their decidedly less attractive sides, and still choosing them.

So if you’re experiencing a loss of desire in your relationship, or your desire has simply become much less spontaneous than it was in the beginning, that is not automatically a diagnosis for your relationship.

First, it may be worth asking what exactly has changed, and what kind of context your relationship exists in now.

Safety and passion need slightly different conditions

When we meet someone and gradually realise, “Yes, I genuinely like this person and I want this relationship to continue,” we start building safety.

We want to know that this person won’t suddenly disappear, that I have you and you have me, that I can be myself and still be accepted, and that I don’t have to prove every day that I deserve to be here.

We want our small world together to be at least somewhat predictable.

And this is an incredibly important part of a close relationship. Over the years, we build stability, trust, acceptance, and the feeling: “I am safe here.”

And then one day we may look at all that beautiful stability and ask: where did the fireworks go?

This is where an interesting paradox appears.

Passion contains certain elements that don’t sit particularly well with total predictability: curiosity, novelty, the separateness of the other person, the sense that the person in front of me is not simply “my Anna”, whose hair I once held back while she was throwing up under a bush, but a separate human being whom I can still discover, explore, and get to know.

So we spend years building a safe relationship, and then sometimes realise that as some of the uncertainty disappeared, part of the tension that used to fuel desire disappeared with it.

And I want to emphasise this again: safety does not destroy desire.

It’s simply that once safety is already there, desire may need something else as well in order to emerge.

At the beginning, novelty, uncertainty, fantasy, and the whole context of falling in love did part of that work for us. Ten years later, the context is different, and that is completely normal.

And no, the conclusion is not that you need to make your relationship toxic

Because it would be very easy to take this in the wrong direction and think: right, if uncertainty is good for desire, I should disappear occasionally, make my partner jealous, ignore their messages, and generally keep them on their toes.

I think if you imagine an actually toxic relationship, with the enormous emotional tension that comes with it, the picture quickly stops looking quite so passionate and romantic.

Sometimes people do unconsciously try to “repair” these relationships in an interesting way: they have a terrible fight, everything feels awful, then they have an intense reconciliation, and for a while it feels as though there is an incredible connection between them again.

But that is a completely different story, and I have written separately about relationships like that.

Here we are talking about reasonably healthy, long-term, good-enough relationships in which the years naturally bring more safety, predictability, and real knowledge of one another.

And that means the question gradually changes.

Not: “How do we make it feel exactly like the first year again?”

But: “What can create interest between us now?”

Because passion in a long-term relationship does not necessarily disappear, but it may need different conditions. And in the next part, I’ll talk about one of the most important of those conditions: why a couple needs to remain not only one big shared “we”, but also two separate people.