I realize I am being a bit facetious here since I am sure there are couples out there that do get married and continue to have a passionate connection. But I really would like to hear some opinions on this matter. I met someone when I was very young (early 20s). We had a great connection. Intimacy started becoming an issue after 8-10 years or so. I probably should add that we started out in a long distance relationship at the beginning (through our college years). Then gradually diminishing once we moved in together. I guess I thought love would conquer all. That if we both put in the work we would be able to overcome anything. I have come to realize that we probably were not as compatible as I thought. We did a lot of growing in our 20s and those differences probably just compounded over time. So back to my original question. Is it really possible to continue a passionate connection after 5 years, 10 years, etc? How do I know during that "honeymoon phase" that it is sustainable? Or is it? I really am interested if there are some success stories out there. This is probably not the best forum considering that I am asking on a dating website, but if you know of some success out there, I would really be interested in hearing about them. Thanks!

I was 17 and my girlfriend was 16, we were married 27 years. all was great until about year 25 and we became more " friends " than husband and wife. I still had the passion and still do, but hers went away long ago. the divorce really hit me hard but i'm going to be fine. I'm at the point that I need another woman in my life. I really think passion can last a lifetime with the right person. As I was told by her, people change.

Through my experience , my ex husband did not give me a hint of his passion waning. This is the reason why I did not find out about his cheating sooner so learning from this. I can say that the emotional and spiritual side of the marriage would hold the partnership far more longer. Sensitivity to a partner brings out learning to what he /she needs and staying faithful will give the focus of doing anything possible for one person to make things work out with just one person... the person he/she vowed to love for better or poorer and in sickness and in health, never shall part I know I am in a dream .... good luck to you sir

I feel 'passion' is not a stagnate concept but changes, or rather the things that evoke passion and the ways we express passion change.

Just like when I was a kid, I might get 'passionate' about ice cream and jump up and down. Now that I am adult, ice cream doesnt excite me as much, and rarely do I express what excites me by jumping up and down.

I feel 'passion' can be sustained if instead of looking for it in a partner, we look for it in our experiences and I think we can feel 'passion' with our partner forever if we continue to share those experiences we are both passionate about, together.

If that made sense ....

No

I think being in a relationship whether married or not I feel each has to do things together most of the time without the thought of a reward. I feel doing the little things for each other goes a long way in keeping the passion alive. I think once you stop doing those little things your passion has start to wane. I also think just sitting back and waiting for things to be done for you is selfish and will eventually cause resentment from the doer. It's about the give and take.
Soulmate.. maybe your ex thought you weren't doing things for him that he liked so started to look elsewhere. I think we get complacent and just accept things will slow down so to speak between couples. Both have to be mindful to keep doing the little things for each other.. it builds love and trust.

I think another component of 'passion' is 'inspiration'. I think they fuel each other. If one partner no longer inspires the other, the other person can lose that sense of 'passion.'

I still believe passion comes from inside ourselves and not another individual, but I believe passion is fueled by first being inspired on some level by something or someone.

Passion should increase with marriage. When passion starts to fade is when infidelity creeps in. Two is a couple. Three is a crowd.

Hello sir. A failed marriage I admit does not only involve one but two. Each has a contribution why it didn’t work out. I have my flaws as he does too but I feel the love was never enough even when the passion was there, if he felt that I was not satisfying him then he should’ve loved me enough to have told me made me understand but obviously he didn’t. He cheated on me not only once and I am a forgiving person but not a saint

Yes and no.

Sexual passion is your mating instinct pushing you to attempt to get someone pregnant.
Throughout the majority of human history birth control didn't really exist. And women aren't constantly ovulating.
So there's pressure and incentive to keep trying. Fulfilling sexual passion is pressure and incentive.

When you start having sex with someone you start to bond with them, deeper and deeper. You can't help it, only interfere with it.
You have sex with someone (of the opposite sex) long enough (without birth control) someone usually ends up pregnant.

The bonding process evolves as you keep having sex with them and it leads to pregnancy.
Pair bonding. Emotional marriage. Your brain is rewired for deep emotional and memory association.

After someone gets pregnant, there's less reason for passion. There's greater reason for calming down and focusing on keeping the relationship and the kid(s) alive.
Of course after puberty you are always pressured to try and get someone (or yourself) pregnant. Pair bonding develops inhibitors to lust making it more difficult to succumb to passion with people other than your mate.

"Marriage," as in the ceremony, where you make a verbal/legal commitment doesn't really change anything. People (women mostly) delude themselves into believing it is some sort of meaningful ritual, but it's more of a social convention. Primarily invoking the social contract of consistency with commitment.
Passion "can" die after marriage because people fear/expect/believe it will, there's social training to push it to. To "grow up" and "be adults" and make the relationship not "based on sex," to fulfill the expected script.

One thing about the organic, natural, biochemical pair bonding process is that if it doesn't lead to pregnancy within a certain amount of time it effectively tells your mating instinct the pairing is a dud, there's something "wrong" with them. You stop feeling passion for them, the inhibitors to lust aren't associated with that person, you are incentivized to go out and find someone where it will lead to pregnancy.

But people still continue the relationship they've worked to perpetuate to that point.
Again, mostly due to social contracts and social training.

People build shortcuts. They can mimic a good enough degree of the organic passion triggered by attraction by fetishizing their mate. Role play, experimentation, fantasy fulfillment. The more they use "tricks" to stimulate or trigger "passion" the more they ultimately objectify the other person.

Therein lies the biggest difference between the organic and natural pair bonding process and social construct relationships/"love."
The organic process tends to rewire the brain for emotional/memory association with all things.
The social construct tends to shallowly associate with pleasurable/positive things primarily, unless reassociating with negative things suits the purpose and rewrites the association, meaning it can change at any time based on mood, so to keep the relationship you have to constantly seek new highs.

So, if you consider the organic biochemical mating motivated pair bonding process that is the basis for "true" love as "marriage," as it "marries" you deeply emotionally and mentally, then passion will always die after it has served its purpose or if it isn't fulfilling its purpose.

If you consider standing up in front of people and saying "I do" as marriage, then passion does not have to die, but the more you attempt to constantly trigger it for the sake of your own pleasure, the worse it's going to be for the relationship in the long run, the more difficult it is going to be to sustain the relationship (unless you are both looking for a shallow relationship or are incapable of anything else due to social training).


What do you want to "sustain?"
The passion or the relationship?
If "passion" leaves, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing.
But it demands that you are extremely honest about what you value and want from that particular relationship. It can't be what it's not.

You are absolutely right soulmate.. Although I don't know either of you I feel he is the one losing out with you as you have a level head on your shoulders and speak a lot of sense.. Something else I was told many years ago about young people getting married.. and that was this man thought many people get married for the wrong reasons.. I think many males (and possibly some females) maybe just looking at the free sex side but once the initial thoughts ware off things start to change and that's the end of the relationship. He was on his second marriage and he said it was great as they both knew what they wanted at that later age.

I see nothing wrong with being friends in a marriage. If you can't be friends with each other, you can't be anything else. The passionate connection thing, Before you can feel passion for another, you have to have a passion for yourself. In other words, this works both ways. If a man loses passion with/for his wife, that means he has become bored with himself.

If a woman loses passion for her husband, she has become bored with herself. When you become bored with yourself, you lose passion for everything. You disconnect. Some people think that if they divorce their spouse they will find that passion again with another. And they might, for a little while. But the next time, it may not last as long as it did the first.

It all boils down to you being happy with you. If you are happy with your life, you can be happy with another person. You can't be happy with another person if you aren't happy with yourself. You can't feel a passionate connection with another person if you can't find a passion for yourself.

I knew a woman once that lost her husband because she had become bored with sex. She found another man. She blamed it on him. Which ripped him up. In the end, before she died, she finally admitted to him that it wasn't his fault. It was her. She had become bored with herself. And somehow lost her passion and thought she could find it again with another man. She didn't. She kept looking for it with different men. She never looked for it within herself. Finally one of them gave her something soap wouldn't wash off.

This is an extreme case. But at the same time, it's really bad when you look for the happiness of any kind in another person, only for it to lead to death. Passion and happiness walk hand in hand. Look for it within yourself. Passion for yourself = a long happy marriage. Just my humble opinion.

Well if your relationship is based on sex..7 to 10 years is the limit of a marriage. Its much better to base it on love....If you have that, it should go past 20...but due to selfishness on either party, there are no guarantees.

My husband and I were together for 30 years and married for 23 of those. Love was always a constant, but not so much our intimacy. Life and stresses can alter one or both of your desires for the physical.

It’s when one of you cools that the other will suffer. I never took his desire cooling personally because I realized there were times I was the cooled one when he was still eager for physical attention. I would say those times will pass, but don’t know that, because I never waited for them to pass. I would try to seduce my husband when he got like that and would tell him I needed to be seduced when it was me.

In young relationships, we’re automatically seducing one another. Life gets in the way of taking time for seduction. It takes time to get back in the habit of seducing what you begin to feel should be a “sure thing”. But intimacy is never a “sure thing”. We all still need to feel the kind of desire we had in the beginning sometimes.

Ohhh.. snap !..that's what I did wrong..
.. I was supposed to keep the passion burning brightly throughout the relationship... not just for the first year....hmmmmm..... I figured once I got a ring on her finger... and showed her how I like her to run my house.... I wouldn't have to do... the romance thing anymore..
You know!! take her out for dinner show her a good time.. make her feel like the most beautiful woman in the world..
Keep myself looking good feeling good smelling good... so visually she's attracted to me.. help out with the day-to-day running in the house.. so we both have a little energy for play time....

Put her needs before my own....

Dang it I knew I was doing something wrong.... I'm such a selfish bastard...

Lol

There are usually circumstances that make 'always and never' inaccurate. To ask "Does passion always die with marriage?" the only answer that makes sense to me is "NO". This is because I know of married couples together for decades that are still passionate towards each other.

Why does passion die in marriages?
I figure it has something, a lot, to do with individual expectations. Probably has a great deal to do with the couple's expectations aligning and staying in alignment.
Realistically, life gets in the way.
Its how we handle life's challenges and how they change our expectations that cause a rift in the passion. Unless we can retain our original focus and adapt to the new life circumstances we are facing.

I certainly wasn’t meaning to offend anyone by sharing my own shortcomings and solutions in my own relationship.

I can help u

of course not. Being Passionate about being with someone is a choice.

This is where I am on the whole "passion" thing.

What I've come to after many years of pondering, is that it depends on what your "passion" actually IS. I don't think a lot of people really know anything more than that the feeling of "passion" is a tremendous lot of fun. So they seek it out, and when they choose a long term mate, they often pick the one who they have the most intense "passion" over at a single moment, rather than choosing someone who excites them less, but might be more compatible in other ways.

For one thing, I've directly experienced and seen in others, that one of the most intense kinds of "passion," boils down to the excitement of being with someone new, or doing something new. I think this is the number one cause of especially younger people, who take their first long trip without their long term mate, and think they've fallen in love with the hot babe they stumble across on the trip. What really happened, isn't love at first screw, what happened was that they experienced the same rush that they got from having sex the first time when they were even younger, and they think that that's what real love is all about.

By now, the passion I hope to find, is connected differently inside people. I want the passion of sex, to be the excitement of pleasing each other in particular, so that it doesn't matter how we go about the sexual acts. And I want the passion of being together to be about the challenge of making a life together, the life adventure itself, whatever it brings, rather than being about achieving certain financial or status goals of some kind.