Love life fading out? Here's how you can keep the spark alive

Priya was wondering as to what had gone wrong with her love marriage. Of late, her husband Piyush and she quarreled quite often. Many a time, she is unable to recollect as to what started the fight, in the first place. “Where has their love gone?” she wondered.

Love is an emotion. It is also a ‘response’ to an emotion. Hence this (emotion in motion) is a learned phenomenon. To quote psychologist, Leo Buscaglia, “Love is trusting, accepting and believing, without guarantee. It is spontaneous and craves expression through joy, beauty, truth and tears.”

Much as we’d like to believe in the profundity of Romeo and Juliet and Ram- Leela, we are endowed with more practical common sense. It is indeed nice to hear phrases like ‘love is blind’ or ‘love knows no barriers’ or ‘love is never having to say you are sorry’, but how application-oriented are these? Can one live on love and fresh air alone? Why do people look for love?

Love is considered something that is gratifying and desirable. It is also an outcome of a yearning for interpersonal closeness and companionship.

Other theories being, it could be spurred by a need to quell loneliness or sexual frustration or to replace past love.

A few factors that can affect love are every day tensions, pressures, health, fidelity etc. A few tips to help you work on your love relationship:

* Don’t expect perfection and be flexible.
* Be sensitive to your partner’s feelings. w This pertains to sex too.
* Never take your partner for granted.
* Allow him or her to grow.
* All that counts in life is intent, so work towards it. It does not have an auto-operative system. Work on keeping the romance alive, show your feelings.

The writer is a sexologist. Mail him at dr.narayana@deccanmail.com