What’s The Episode About:

In this episode, Paul and Stacey will share the truth about why passion fizzles in long-term relationships and what we can do to reignite it! They will dive into the two most common phases of a relationship where people need help in creating an unleashed passion that is hotter than it’s ever been. Paul and Stacey will be very detailed about this so it can help you get the kind of relationship you deserve. If you are looking to reignite the passion in your relationship, don’t miss out on this value-packed episode!

Key Points Discussed:

• The hanging-by-a-thread and the passionless (01:00)
• The salad versus garbage concept (02:29)
• Passion is not meant to fade (05:27)
• Building up walls of resentments (08:12)
• It’s not your fault and you’re not alone (11:30)
• Breaking the chains for the sake of future generations (15:02)
• A height of passion that matches the depth of love is possible (16:10)

Where Can I Learn More:

Get your ticket to the next Relationship Breakthrough Retreat here: http://bit.ly/rbr_podcast

When Did It Air:

June 20, 2019

Episode Transcript:

Disclaimer:   The Transcript Is Auto Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors

Paul:               00:00 Hey Relationship Transformers! Welcome to the Relationship Transformer Podcast. Today, Stacey and I are sharing the truth about why the passion fizzles in long-term relationships, and what you can do to reignite it. This is all about creating an unleashed passion, hotter than it’s ever been.

Stacey:             00:18 Yeah.

Paul:               00:18 This is a big one. You deserve all the passion in the world. And today, we’ll expose the number one reason why passion fades. So, let’s queue up the intro and dive in.

Intro:              00:31 So the big question is this; How is it possible that one person alone can transform any relationship, save their marriage, create their unshakeable love, and unleash passion, divorce-proof their family, without needing their partner to get on board and do this with them, and yet still get to be happily, authentically you without compromise. That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer.

Stacey:             01:00 Awesome. Alright, so people come to us for us relationship assistance and in all different phases of relationship, whether they’re navigating co-parenting and they need to rescue that relationship, or they’re not in a relationship and they want to get, you know, into the right relationship for them, or they have an amazing marriage, they want to take it to the next level and divorce-proof it, but the two most common phases of relationship where people seek out help, and our tools, and our strategies, are what we call, “The hanging by a thread and the passionless.” Hanging by a thread is where one or both of you has thought about leaving. Right? You have your hand on the button, you don’t like the way things are going, you don’t necessarily want to leave, but you’re not sure you can stay with the way things are, or you’re thinking about and planning your exit. Right?

Stacey:             01:50 That’s hanging by a thread. Passionless is where you’re not considering leaving, you have a good relationship. You parent well together, you’re good friends, but you’re more like roommates. You’re not… there’s no passion, there’s no heat, there’s is no excitement anymore. And to a lot of people, the difference between passionless, and hanging by a thread can look like, and feel like, the Grand Canyon’s distance apart. But to me and Paul, it’s the same relationship. Here’s the metaphor that we created in order to teach this. It’s a tool that we call, “Salad versus garbage”

Paul:               02:31 It was actually based upon like, an old joke actually.

Stacey:             02:32 Right? So the joke is, what’s the difference between salad and garbage?

Paul:               02:37 Time.

Stacey:             02:41 Given time salad will eventually turn into garbage. And it’s the same thing with the difference between a passionless marriage and hanging by a thread. The only difference there is time. Let me explain. What happens is, when the passion fades in your relationship, over time, that leads to discomfort. It’s uncomfortable that you’re no longer having sex with the person you’re supposed to have sex with, or there’s not… there’s no playfulness, or there is no kissing, or there’s no hand-holding, and eventually, that discomfort starts to build, and the more it builds, it starts to feel more like rejection. And then that person starts to feel rejected by the only person they’re really supposed to be able to have that kind of relationship with. And eventually, that rejection turns into hurt, and turns into resentment, and turns into what feels like an insurmountable barrier to recover from. It’s one thing to say, “We don’t really have sex very often.” It’s another thing to say, “It’s been four years since we’ve had sex.” And so, it starts to stack. And what happens is, eventually, the passion and the sex start to fade and disappear.

Stacey:             03:56 This is not a judgment thing, by the way. If you find yourself in a passion, less relationship, there’s an epidemic of passion, fewer relationships right now, and you’re about to find out why it’s not about you or your partner needs nothing wrong with you. Here’s the thing, when that passion fades over time and eventually you kind of give up on the passionate side of your relationship and uh, you know, out of being a really good person, people say things like, that’s okay, that’s okay. Like I’m going to be mature about it. I’m not an idiot. Like, I’ll focus on the kids. I’ll focus on my work like we’re a family. I can do without that. Like that’s fine. Like, well, this is what happens, right? Have to be a grownup. We say all these things to justify losing that passion in our relationship and we focus on other things like the kids like our work until time builds and over time what’s been keeping you together is no longer a factor in your life because your life phase changed or what was keeping you together, moved out of your house and you look at the person you’re with and you say, Oh God, I don’t know if I can do this for another 40 years.

Stacey:             05:06 And that’s when all of a sudden it hits you and you realize I’ve become the garbage. I was salad, but I slid to garbage. Now what the only difference between a passionless relationship and a relationship that’s hanging by a thread, is time.

Paul:               05:27 Unfortunately, as you know, we see this everywhere. That’s why we call it an epidemic. But here’s how it even plays out in a bigger picture. It’s become socially acceptable. People just say, well, that’s just the way it is, right? Passion is meant to fade. Yeah. There’s just way it goes that goes out and they give it these labels as if they really mean anything. Oh, that was just sort of the honeymoon phase. Right. You know, and this is just the way that it is, get used to it, suck it up.

Stacey:             05:49 What did you think it was going to be like?

Paul:               05:51 What’d you think it was going to be like? And because they ran to the end of their skillsets, just like in every other case that’s, and no one knew what to do prior to Stacey and I, it really comes down to the point where they’re just like, oh well that is just the way it is and everybody tells me that. So that’s just the way it is. What are you going to have to suck it up otherwise everybody else has to be wrong? Well, I’m here to tell you just because we didn’t know better until now, does it make them right? Every generation has issues. Every generation has problems that they create and every generation has problems that become resolved for the first time. Nice. We’re here to tell you that this one is resolved and it’s just really, we have to stop believing all of the crap that’s being told to us and accepting it as the truth. So let’s, let’s look at this a little bit deeper. So first of all, it’s only because we didn’t know what was happening and this is going to be a little bit of a, perhaps more of a metaphor to use for this, but you hear this, you know, talked about for various reasons, but you imagine the frog in the water.

Paul:               06:48 The old expression is there’s a frog in the water in a pot and if you turn up the heat slowly, the frog will eventually cook to death. But if you took a frog and throw it into boiling water, it would hop right out. The frog didn’t hop out in the first example because it just didn’t see it coming. It was happening over time. Slowly. And that’s what’s happening with the salad versus garbage Stacey described so well it’s time. And because we don’t see it happening, we think that’s just the way it is and we don’t really know how we got there. Again, when you know what’s been keeping your focus moves out of your house and you’re forced to face the fact that, hmm,

Stacey:             07:25 do I really want to be with this person? I’m really not happy.

Paul:               07:28 How did I get here? Is the thing that’s in your mind? Yes, because the heat was turned up slowly. That’s really what it comes down to. The real reason why it turns to garbage. But here’s the other thing that happens along the way and we’ve been doing it because we’ve had no awareness of it is every time there is a kerfuffle and we don’t have the tools to navigate that kerfuffle, we’re basically building up a little portion of a wall between us and the partner that we now have some resentment for. So imagine it as like a nice big cinder block. We sat down one cinder block with this kerfuffle that doesn’t get solved because we don’t know how to do it. And then a week goes by and there was another one and we build that up and we put another big cinder block between us and our partner. And this goes on over these years where we think, ah, it’s just okay, I don’t need passion and all these other things are happening and we just keep building up these resentments

Stacey:             08:16 and it’s things like, you know, we disagreed on parenting and uh, I wasn’t heard and nothing was done about it. And another block goes on the wall or she spent money without talking to me about it, didn’t even consult me. And another block goes on the wall or, you know, I made an advance and they told me if they’re not, they are not interested or they’re too tired or now’s not the right time and another block goes on the wall.

Paul:               08:44 So you keep doing that year after year while you find other ways to adapt and contract and distract, which is a huge one while all this is going on. And then you find yourself one day realizing, wow, I’m there, I’m the garbage. But what happened was you built up the walls so well over time that we didn’t even realize because it happened over time, one block at a time, that we’re now encased in it and we can’t feel a connection to our partner anymore. We can’t feel what it used to be and we think it’s just impossible to go back. And yet we did it to ourselves every step of the way.

Stacey:             09:21 It’s not only that you built up this wall between you and your partner where you feel so disconnected, so misunderstood, so unaligned that the relationship has suffered as you’ve been building the wall you blocked yourself in as well.

Paul:               09:39 And then the common things that you’ll hear is, ah, I guess I just picked wrong because if I didn’t pick wrong, this would’ve worked out like some kind of a, a Disney movie. No offense against Disney, but you know, we look for these happy endings thinking, Oh, I, uh, I’m a princess now. Whatever the case may be,

Stacey:             09:53 if we love each other enough, it would be meant to be. Or if we were spiritual enough, it would work itself out. Or if I was pretty hidden off, then we would just be fine or if I was thin enough or we were rich enough for wasn’t because

Paul:               10:07 of one of the labels that we talked about in a previous episode. Right? Do you see how this happens? It happened over time and then we find ourselves wondering how he got here and it seems impossible to fix, but the truth is we created every one of those blocks. We put everyone in its place, but because it happened without our awareness, because it happened without the awareness of the dynamics that are happening around us and what we could do about that moment by moment instead of building up our relationship moment by moment, we’re literally tearing it down and building up walls between us and our partner. That’s what created it. It had nothing to do with your partner had nothing to do with you as a person. It’s not because you picked wrong, let’s be honest. Let’s call it out. You got married. You had to overcome a lot of obstacles just to get that far.

Paul:               10:51 What do you think the chances are that you really picked that wrong versus what we just described? Think about that for a moment, and this is really what’s happening all because we didn’t know how to do this thing called a relationship. No one showed us the way. No one brought the invisible to become visible to us. We could do something about it and as long as it remained invisible, these dynamics perpetuated. It’s not impossible. It’s completely possible. And I’m here to tell you the good news is I don’t care if you find yourself at the end of this position that we just described where you’re somewhere in the middle or you’re at the beginning and you just don’t want to go down that path and you want to know better, those bricks can be removed quicker than you put them up. Once you can see them, amen.

Paul:               11:30 They became a problem because you couldn’t see them being built. That’s right. But once you’re aware of what the problem is, you can take them down really quickly. You can reverse all this. So when it comes to passion and bringing back that that spark in your relationship that you may be had in the beginning, it’s not gone. You didn’t lose it along the way. You didn’t drop it on the train, on the way to work. It’s always been there. And again, we’ll go back to that quote from Rumi Cause it’s perfect. Rumi’s quote is your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. So again, we also said in a previous one, it’s not your fault. Like don’t, don’t be beating yourself up over this either because just look around. You are not alone.

Stacey:             12:12 No, this is everywhere. Everywhere you look, you can see, um, partners who are disconnected partners who have checked out, partners who have lost their playfulness, lost their passion for each other. Um, not having hot, incredible heat in a longterm relationship. It’s, you don’t have to look far to see this everywhere and they’re at a loss. They, everybody, it’s, it’s one of those things, man, like passion and sex and all that. It gets so charged. We take it so personally. This is why salad turns to garbage because when the one person who’s like legally supposed to be having sex with us and is allowed to do that, stops having sex with us, it hurts so much because it’s so charged. It’s so personal that those blocks start to go up.

Paul:               13:00 And you know, when it comes to this, the topic of sex in particular, another thing that comes up is, well, it’d be different. I’m just not enough. I’m not pretty enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not wealthy enough. I’m not, whatever. You know, we give our own damage by giving ourselves our own label. Yup. But I just want to really quickly hit that. Just take a look around. Take a look at Hollywood, for example, full of beautiful, wealthy people who seem to have it all right on the outside without, you may be comparing yourself to, because we see them on movies and yet take a look at the marriages. They’re crap. They probably fall apart faster than the average person by far. You know, we look at it, they seem to go through people. Like I’m changing my, my pants for the day. Um, so it’s not, it wasn’t because there’s some kind of a flaw with you.

Paul:               13:45 It’s really just these dynamics and we really need to just free ourselves from any kind of a false belief around that as well too. So here’s what’s great too. Now you’re starting to see it right now it’s about a choice to do something about it because no matter how long that has been built, that wall, you can take it down. And just because that’s always how it’s been and people think it’s okay. It’s only because they ran to the end of their skill set. I feel like we’re going to have to just put that on a bumper sticker or something. And it was because all we’ve ever been modeled, his demand relationship and demand relationship will never survive in a free world. That’s what it comes down to. And because now we’re in a world where people are free to go, we’re finding things are falling apart.

Paul:               14:28 We find ourselves struggling with a relationship at levels we’ve never seen before. Because unless you’re going to try and suppress and control and force, which also will fail in the long term and it fails radically and quickly, typically in quite violently often unless that’s the model which was a primitive model. The way things used to be. We have to learn how to have the skills, we have to see the dynamics for what they are. We have to make different decisions than we have in the past and show up in a way. There’s not just accepting the common well, that’s just the way it is and I look around and that’s how it is for everybody else as being okay.

Paul:               15:02 Again, every generation solves an issue. This one is now something that we can solve and we can change so that the next generation doesn’t have to suffer the same way we can break the chains in this one. The time has come and just about a choice.

Stacey:             15:15 Yeah. Awesome. Just to share that when whatever you’re thinking about, whatever that that hurt has been, whatever that misunderstanding has been, you might be thinking, oh, but with a different partner, my, the passion would be hot. Right. Or with a new partner, or if I had an affair with someone different or when I used to have this partner, this dating partner or things, we’re passionate and that’s what I need, right? It’s just my spouse is not just your spouse. It is a dynamic of longterm relationship that the passion organically fizzles, and we’re going to talk about that in the next episode in part two, but I just want you to know, yeah, you totally can have fresh, hot, new passion with a new partner as long as you’re prepared in the next three to six months to throw that partner out and go do it again.

Stacey:             16:10 It’s kind of the dynamic because once things start to go from new dating, uncommitted relationship to longterm relationship, the same dynamics start to set in the same misunderstanding start to happen. The same disappointment start to build the same hurt, start to stack up. The same wounds start to show up. The same disdain starts to build. The pattern happens all over again. So please don’t believe the myth that, oh, with somebody different, I could have hotness that’ll last forever. It’s short lived and you’ll need to keep swapping it out if that’s your solution. But there really is a solution where you can actually have a height of passion that matches the depth of your love, like hotter than you’ve ever imagined it could be. All right, Paul. So what are some action steps that people can take right now to start creating change?

Paul:               17:11 Okay, great. So the first one is be honest with yourself. What are the things that have not been resolved in your marriage that have stacked up? What are some of the bricks in the wall between you and your partner? There is a solution for every one of those and you can solve each one and bring that wall down. As always, we’d recommend get into one of our programs. Book your ticket to relationship breakthrough retreat, live event. The only thing standing between you and your next level in your marriage is you making an empowered choice to start today. Start the program, start the event, start whatever is right for you. Okay? In the next is part two

Paul:               17:50 of this conversation. We’re going to dive into the number one thing that kills passion and how to reignite it so that it’s hotter than ever. This is where we’re going to talk about how passion fades organically in a longterm relationship and how you can flip the switch on it to start turning it back on. If you got value from this episode today, please take a screenshot of your phone, share it rate, and review the podcast to help us spread this mission to those who need it. Until next time, remember together we are changing the way relationship is done.

Speaker 2:          18:23 Okay? Are you ready to catapult your relationship forward to the next level in just three days, surrounded by relationship transformers on the journey with you? Then go grab your live event tickets at www.RelationshipBreakthroughRetreat.com and we will see you there.