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

Let's get the Valentine's thing out of the way. If you are reading this in February, you have been told for two weeks that love is a dozen roses and a dinner you cannot get a table for. If your marriage is quietly struggling, that noise makes it worse, because the roses arrive and nothing changes and now you have proof that even the grand gesture did not work.

Here is what I have learned from my own marriage and from every couple I have coached since. Love does not live in the grand gestures. It lives in about two hundred tiny moments a week, and most of them are so small you would not notice them unless they stopped.

So if you have started to wonder whether you are still in love, I want to offer a different diagnosis. You are not out of love. You are out of practice.

The pickup game

I played pickup basketball for years. Then I stopped for about five. When I walked back onto a court, I was terrible. I could not hit a free throw. My hands did not know where the ball was. For about a week I thought I was old.

I was not old. I was out of practice. Three weeks in, the jumper came back. It had not gone anywhere. It was just buried under five years of not being used.

Feeling in love is a skill, not a weather event. It is made of reps. The hand on the small of her back walking through a doorway. The "hey, look at this" over the phone. The way he used to ask about your day and actually wait for the answer. The look across a room at a party that said "I choose you, out of everyone here." Those are the reps. Stop doing them for a few years and the feeling goes flat, and then you both look at each other and say "I don't feel it anymore," as if the feeling was supposed to keep itself alive without any reps at all.

The moment I noticed the reps had stopped

I will tell you exactly when I knew. My wife said something funny at dinner and I did not laugh. Not because it was not funny. Because I was somewhere else. And I saw her face register it, this tiny flinch, and then she went back to her plate.

That was a bid. She reached for me, and I was not there. And what hit me later that night was that she had probably made a hundred of those bids over the past year, and I had missed most of them, and each miss was a tiny lesson that reaching for me did not work. No wonder she stopped reaching. No wonder we felt like strangers. Nobody had done anything wrong. We had just stopped practicing, and the not-practicing had taught us both that the other one was gone.

We rebuilt from there, and thirty-six years in I can tell you the jumper came back. Better than before, actually, because now we know it needs reps.

How to practice again

You do not fall back in love by deciding to. You fall back in love by doing the reps until the feeling has somewhere to live. Here is how I teach couples to start.

1. Count the bids for one day. Do not respond differently yet. Just notice. Every time your partner reaches for you, a comment, a touch, a "look at this," a sigh that is asking to be asked about, put a tick on your phone. Most people are shocked. They count fifteen or twenty in a day and realize they turned toward maybe four of them. That is not a love problem. That is a practice problem, and practice problems are fixable.

1. Turn toward the small ones on purpose. When she says "look at this dog," look at the dog. When he sighs, say "what's up?" This feels ridiculous the first day and it is the entire game. You are not doing anything romantic. You are teaching your partner, one rep at a time, that reaching for you works again.

1. Make one bid a day yourself. Something small and specific. Not "we should talk more." A hand on the shoulder in the kitchen that lingers two seconds longer than a pat. A text at 2pm that is not about logistics. "Thinking about you" is enough. You are not trying to be impressive. You are getting the ball back in your hands.

1. Skip the big night, protect the small window. If you have to choose between a fancy dinner once a month and fifteen minutes a day with no phones and no logistics, take the fifteen minutes every time. One honest conversation on a Tuesday does more than a dozen date nights where you both sit there being polite over a menu.

1. Say "I miss you" when you mean it. Not "we need to work on us." Just "I miss you." It is the single highest return sentence in a marriage and almost nobody says it, because it feels vulnerable. That is the point. It is a bid. Make it.

To the men reading this: a bid is not a request for you to do something. When she says "look at the sunset," she does not want you to fix the sunset. She wants you to stand next to her for eight seconds. Stand there. That is the rep.

When the reps alone are not enough

Sometimes the practice has been gone so long that neither of you can make the first bid without it feeling fake, and there is enough backlog underneath that the bids bounce off. That is the couple I built Fall Back in Love for. It is a structured program, online, that clears what is in the way first and then rebuilds the daily practice on purpose, so the feeling has somewhere to come back to. I do not promise a feeling. I promise the reps, and I have watched the feeling follow the reps in enough marriages, including my own, that I would bet on it.

Love is a verb, an action, and a choice. Feelings follow actions, not the other way around. If you wait to feel it before you do it, you will wait a long time.

If you want to talk about where your practice went and how to get it back, book a free fifteen minute call. Online, from your own couch, no pitch. Bring your bid count if you did the exercise. I would love to hear it.