You Are Not Out of Love. You Are Out of Practice.

I played very competitive soccer growing up, started center half on the varsity team as a freshman, and at that age I was reasonably sure I was unstoppable. Then at 15 I quit. Seven years went by and I did not touch a ball.

At 22 I went back out there. Same guy, same legs, same brain that still knew exactly where to be on the field. And I was awful. Not a little rusty, I mean I threw up in the trash can on the side of the field, mid game, in front of everybody.

That night I was soaking in the tub trying to work out whether my lungs were ever coming back, and my wife walked in and said, word for word, "you sucked tonight, you didn't even score any goals, I thought you were good at that."

Here is the thing though. I was not bad at soccer. I was out of practice. I knew the game, I knew where the ball was going before it got there, my body just had not done any of it in seven years. So I kept playing. It took work, I got better, and I was still very out of shape for a long while because there is no shortcut around that part.

Sit with that for a second, because most of the people who tell me they have fallen out of love with their partner are standing next to that trash can, hands on their knees, deciding they were never any good at this in the first place.

You did not lose the love, you lost the reps

Nobody wakes up one morning and finds the love evaporated overnight. What actually happens is the small stuff stops. The tiny reaches stop. And you do not notice, because no single one of them means anything on its own.

She says something about her day and you are halfway through an email. He makes a joke and you do not look up. She mentions she is wiped out and you hear the words but you do not ask the next question. You pass each other in the kitchen four times in an evening and neither of you touches the other. None of that is a crisis. You would not even call it a bad day, you would call it Tuesday.

But that is a rep you did not take. Then it is a hundred reps. Then it is a couple thousand, and one night you look across the table and feel absolutely nothing, and the story you tell yourself is "well, I guess the love died."

No. You are out of shape. One of those is a verdict and the other one is a training problem, and almost everyone I talk to has a training problem and has been walking around with a verdict.

The reps I was not taking

By 2019 my wife and I were strangers sharing a house, we were both at fault. We had been together a long time by then, together 36 years now, married 28, and I had no idea how we got there, because in my head I was doing all the "right" things.

And I was doing plenty! Tell me what to fix and I fixed it. Tell me what to plan and I planned it. Big moves I could do all day long.

But she would go quiet, and the small rep sitting right there in front of me was to slow down, sit next to her, and get curious about what was actually going on for her. I did not take that rep. I chased. I got needy, I got clingy, I tried to read her mind and crack the code so I could go solve it, because solving it was the thing I knew how to do. I was the anxious one, she shut down, and the harder I chased the further she went, which made me chase harder. That is not love dying. That is two people running a play neither of them ever practiced.

So lets talk about getting back in shape, because nobody goes from quitting at 15 to match fit in one night. Small is the entire point.

1. Count the little reaches for one day. A little reach is any tiny thing your partner does to get your attention. "Look at this." A sigh at the mail. A hand on your shoulder on the way past. Complaining about traffic. Tomorrow, do not change a single behavior, just keep a note in your phone and tick it every time you catch one. That is the whole assignment.

1. Turn toward the smallest ones on purpose. Day two, pick the ones that look like nothing and actually turn. She says "ugh, this traffic" and instead of a grunt you say "what time did you leave?" He holds up his phone and you look at his phone instead of the one in your own hand. Ten seconds. You are not solving anything, you are saying I heard you. You do not need a weekend away, you just need to look up more, respond more, and stay silent less.

1. Make one reach a day yourself. Harder than it sounds, because if you have been getting ignored, sticking your hand out again feels like asking to get it slapped. Do it anyway. Send the dumb meme. Text "thought about you." Hand on the back as you walk past them at the sink. One a day, and if it lands flat, fine, that is the rust coming off. I did not get my wind back in one practice either.

1. Skip the big night, protect the small window. Everybody wants the grand gesture because a grand gesture is one thing and one thing is easy to schedule. Fifteen minutes a day is harder and it works better. Pick your window, the first fifteen after the kid goes down or before the TV goes on, and the rules are no logistics, no kids, no bills, no school calendar, no "did you ever call the insurance people." You get to run the household the other twenty three hours and forty five minutes.

1. Say "I miss you" and mean it. Not as a complaint, not as "you never" wearing a costume, just the plain sentence said out loud to a person standing six feet from you in your own house. It is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works. Most of us would rather sit on the resentment than say the vulnerable thing, and then we are confused about why the room is cold.

Are you back? Did you count? Do you have a number? Great! Now notice that the number was never the problem. The problem is how many of those you have blown straight past for the last two years without once thinking of it as a choice you were making.

Love is a verb, an action, and a choice, and like anything else you do with your body, you get worse at it when you stop and better at it when you start again. That is boring, and it is also the most hopeful sh*t I know.

If you have decided it has been too many years and it is too far gone, let me offer you a guy who had not played in seven years and spent his comeback match with his head in a trash can on the sideline. I kept playing. It took work. I got better. If you would rather rebuild the reps on purpose than wait and hope the feeling wanders back on its own, that is the whole point of Fall Back in Love.

If any of this landed, book a free 15 minute call and tell me which reps went missing in your house.