Keeping Your New Relationship Fresh and Alive

Starting a fresh relationship can be fun and exciting. The excitement that stems from a new relationship can make you feel on top of the world. As the newness wears off, the relationship can feel like its growing stale. You aren’t doomed to remain in a dull and boring relationship, however. These are some steps you can take to keep a mature relationship fresh and exciting.

1. Meet Often, but not too often: When you’re in young love, you’d want to spend every waking minute with your sweetheart. It’s understandable, you’re obviously excited. But could you be pushing it too far? By meeting too often, you’re suddenly changing the lives of two individuals who have fallen in love. It may feel great for the first week or so, but eventually your other commitments may pile up and one of you may end up getting annoyed with the other for taking too much time. Go out on dates once or twice a week and it’ll keep the love and excitement on a high for a long time.
2. Take Advantage of Technology to stay in Touch: When you’re apart, send romantic text messages to one another. This can build anticipation for when you’ll see each other again. Use texting to send short messages of love, admiration, and encouragement. Don’t be afraid to send some sexy text messages to spice things up. It is a simple and easy way to keep the romance in your relationship.
3. Don’t be clingy: Just because you’re dating doesn’t mean you own each other. Shocking, yes, but it’s true. If you want to know how to have a good relationship from the beginning, learn to give each other space. Especially in a new relationship, you’re only dating each and don’t really need to know every little piece of information about each other. Right now, you’re only a small part of each other’s lives, so don’t give yourself more importance than you deserve.
4. Keep the Element of Surprise alive: Surprise your partner from time to time in a variety of ways. Arrive home with a small gift, cook your partner’s favorite meal or book a surprise weekend getaway. These types of surprises will keep the excitement alive and prevent you from getting stuck in a relationship rut.
5. Be a Good Listener: There still is the time when your partner will need you to be there, just to listen. You have probably heard the joke a thousand times and heard the family issue twice that often, so listening to your partner is not always easy. The extra effort, however, can be priceless. Remember, often people don’t want their problems solved, just a shoulder to lean on. Taking away the burden of “fixing it," might make it easier.
6. Be Generous with Praises: What you focus your attention on grows.  Say “thank you,” offer a hug, pay your partner a compliment—anything that communicates you acknowledge and value how important they are to you and that you appreciate them. Accentuating the positive and what is good in each other and in the relationship is a win/win for both partners. When you feel grateful for the good things in your life, you attract more of those good things to you.
7. Keeping Your Identity and Individuality: Losing yourself in love is one of the biggest threats to maintaining intimacy. Getting close to someone shouldn’t mean fusing our identity or losing respect for our innate separateness. Couples should try to complement and support each other in an effort to become their fullest selves instead of merging together to become something else.  Appreciate your partner’s unique interests and enjoy them for the vital individuals they are.
8. Accept each other’s Habits: When you fall in love with someone new, you fall in love with a person who’s unique, not a splitting image of your dream lover. Instead of trying to change them to fit your requirements, learn to adjust to their habits. By restricting a lover or trying to change someone at the very beginning, you risk the chance of losing them forever .Whether you’re in love or otherwise, you can’t really change someone’s personality. If you find your new lover incompatible, end the relationship instead of suffering a nervous breakdown due to frustrations or insecurities.
9. Talk to Each other: When you’re in a new relationship, the bodily exploration may be the high point of every date that ends in a cozy corner or in one of your beds. But that doesn’t really help create a good relationship. Communication does. It’s likely that when you were dating, you talked about your hopes and dreams. However, over time, those sorts of conversations can fall by the wayside. Set time aside to continue to discuss your dreams for the future and support one another in making those dreams a reality.
10. Don’t Introduce your Date to your Friends too Early: When you’re in a new relationship, you’re still exploring each other and learning about each other. Don’t call your friends over when your new lover’s with you or plan a group date just to show off your new catch. And if you do meet a friend when you’re on a date, introduce your date by the name and don’t really get into details. Your friends would understand the relationship status. And you’d save your date from an awkward situation, especially if they haven’t made up their mind on your relationship status.
11. Ask Meaning Full Questions: The types of questions people ask one another often change over time. Questions such as, “What was your life like when you were growing up?” often get replaced with questions like, “What do you want for dinner?” Ask meaningful questions about your partner’s past, thoughts on current events and feelings about a variety of topics. Try to get past superficial day-to-day conversations and dive deeper.
12. Make Love with Passion: The beauty of a long term sexual relationship is that the intimacy builds over the years. That intimacy makes sex much more genuine, gratifying and fulfilling. It is also an area that is not often put high on the importance scale. Work, career, school, and kids often exhaust our energy so we find it hard to “be in the mood." Make the intimate part of your relation a high priority. Make time for “love sessions." Take time to “make love” rather than just have sex. Use candles, perfume, or whatever that is that get your juices flowing. Like all else in life, intimacy dies if it is not nourished. Feeding it with affection, compliments and time will make it something that feels less like an obligation at the end of a hard day, but something to look forward to.