New fall in love with the partner: Is this possible?

In short:

But absolutely! Is not it going on all the time anyway?

Now in detail:

30 years. Miriam and Rolf had not seen each other that long. At that time, after graduation, her love ended abruptly and unhappily. She fled from her parents' home to another city, he felt abandoned by her. They were too young and too inexperienced to sort it out. And now they face each other at the school class meeting - and fall in love again on the spot. The old familiarity encourages them to forget all concerns and to indulge their feelings.

What sounds like an extraordinary story, it is not on closer inspection. On the one hand, because class reunions are the place where old loved ones seldom revive: after all, the precious, intense feelings of our youth bring us back there. But it's not just that. Because when you re-fall in love with each other for a long time, it's clear what is constantly happening in relationships: that we fall in love over and over again.

Love, as US psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson describes it, is a micromoment of positive resonance. An eye contact, a hug, a praise, an honest conversation, a deep sense of unison, closeness, emotional and sexual attraction. We become a couple when moments of love connect us intensively and continually. Out of this grows a band that holds us together so that we can create these moments again and again. And these moments in turn strengthen the bond that holds us together. The cycle of love.

From long-lasting happiness to reality

In the first infatuation, it seems to us like pure endurance, but that turns out to be a mirage. Then we end up in reality, where we love and annoy, admire and criticize, meet and miss, are fulfilling and frustrating for each other. We get into arguments. If we do not resolve these conflicts, the situations in which we reach each other will become less frequent and with them the moments of positive response. Affection, tenderness and desire disappear. We alienate each other, and at some point we part.

Oskar Holzberg, 64, has been advising couples in his Hamburg practice for more than 20 years and repeatedly gets relationship questions. His current book is called "New key phrases of love?" (242 p., 20 euros, Dumont).

Many couples tell me that they were already separated once or twice. Because of her affair, his stay abroad, because they felt unloved or narrowed. Nevertheless, in retrospect, they regard their relationship as a continuous, interrupted process. This is understandable, because separations shake us. We think about ourselves and often only then realize what we have given up. The constant conflict has masked the good sides of the partnership that we now feel again - the destructive cycle between us no longer exists. One gesture or reaction from another may still remind us. Maybe then we will stay cautious as we stop in front of a precipice. Or we fall and fall in love again. Like Miriam and Rolf.

But we can also see it differently: just as we can not climb twice in the same river, we can never kiss the same partner twice anyway. But that's another story.