Newly in love? The memory of it can later save the relationship

The infatuation has fallen into disrepute

"But then we were also just in love," laugh couples as if it had no meaning, what happened there in the gray couple-ago. "My God, I found him attentive!" Says the woman, shaking her head as if to shake off the memory.

Our love is pretty much in disrepute. We now regard it as a phase in which we are not sane, but are in drug delirium. Strong hormones trigger a kind of mental derangement, and all of a sudden we only have the judgment of a hungry toddler in a confectionery department. The biology wants us to mate, so it photoshops us a human average copy to the dream prince. All illusion, pink soap bubble, just cloud number seven. We are floating. And then we fall back into reality.

Here you will find all the clever phrases and thoughts that couple therapist Oskar Holzberg says about love.

Whoever invalidates the past harms the relationship

But if we devalue our past, we harm our relationships. Instead of letting our first time become a source of power, we throw it on the rubbish heap of our couple's history. The American family therapists Barry Dym and Michael Glenn emphasize that not all is illusion and romantic transfiguration: the first time a couple is like an initiation rite, "a milestone of change in the lives of most people living today". We are changed. We come as close to our ideal self, as we would like to be, as probably never again. That's not an illusion. We are in top form.

Later, when we are disappointed in each other and misunderstand each other, we see the weaknesses and inability of our partner against it. It is difficult for us to open ourselves to him and approach him.

Satisfied couples are proud of their shared history

Oskar Holzberg, 62, has been married for 30 years. For 20 years the psychologist advises couples. He found that some sentences apply to all relationships. In each ChroniquesDuVasteMonde he introduces one of them.

Just then, it can be helpful to rekindle the feelings of that time and to remember, in their confident way of asking us. His humor that saved us without ridiculing us. Psychologist John Gottman has discovered that the way a couple tells their shared story is the safest way to predict the survival of a relationship. When a couple presents both its founding myth - by which particular circumstances the two have found each other - as well as the years spent together as a negative, banal, random, and uninviting story, it announces the end of the relationship.

Satisfied couples are proud of their shared history. Also to have overcome obstacles and hard times together. It is up to us what story we create.

Our memories are not video tapes. They change through every memory. Our story as a couple is not a historical document. But a story with which we can warm ourselves when it gets too frosty between us. At the source, a river is purest. We should always go there together and bathe in the memory: at our best.