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How many people feel strong romantic connections with their partners? I feel like I experienced this in my first few relationships but not really in the decade since then. I'm not really clear whether you're supposed to still feel a spark in adult relationships or whether those are just irrational young love feelings that don't really pop up again, and most healthy adult relationships are just based on finding someone who's compatible and nice.
Define ‘romantic connection’.
Are you happy with someone? When something happens in your life, are they the first person you want to tell? Do you picture yourself growing old with them? Do you find yourself staring at them when they’re not looking? Do you recall tiny, irrelevant details about them that your mind made a note of because you’re in love? Do you sometimes find yourself telling your friends or family how great they are without prompting? Do you miss them when they’re gone and look forward to their return? Do you have great sex, regularly, and look forward to more? Would you unequivocally be happy with them as the mother or father of your child?
If the answers to these are yes, then I think that is a romantic connection, and that’s something certainly achievable in your late twenties or early thirties!
I think I'm happy with the person I've been seeing and that I could easily see them being a long term partner/parent. But I don't think I catch myself staring at them, thinking about them, or talking about them, and I'm pretty sure they do all those things for me, which is part of why I feel worried for not being on that same level.
If I may insert something here (in no way intended to be a pun on sexual congress), the fact that you are "pretty sure" that the person you've been seeing is in this state of preoccupation with you may be a contributing factor into why you do not find yourself having reciprocal feelings. Perhaps especially if you are male, and I am not feeling energetic enough to close this mobile window and surf through your profile to get a sense of whether I think you are. Your post here perhaps intentionally leaves that vague.
Anyhoo, the way it seems to work is when I can't take my eyes off her, I feel it's natural, romantic, complimentary, praise. When she keeps looking at me with cow eyes, it's off-putting. When I talk about her, it's me wanting to let everyone know how real these wonderfully rare and implausibly strong feelings are, it's me on Oprah's couch feeling the beauty, at last, of pure joy. It's true love, princess; do you think this happens every day? And when I hear she's been going on about me at first it's fine you know, spread my legend, but then it's like do you not have a life?
When I think of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night, it's a magical reason to get out of bed. When I come to understand that she has been thinking of me all day I have the urge to bolt like a deer when the predator"s focus has flagged momentarily.
It's the dance, and if you're lucky you end up on both sides of this dichotomy more than once and with the same person. Too much complacency spells doom for any relationship, but then so does too much obsessive possessiveness.
You also say you're happy with whoever it is and can see that person being a good partner/parent. Well, that's excellent. You won't feel in love TM all the time, even when you do have the feeling occasionally. I find a nice slow burn lasts as long as it needs to, at least so far. Where more than a few explosive flare-ups didn't last long at all.
This probably all sounds like homespun nonsense. Maybe it is. I certainly can't be sure. And it's also true you may meet this evening someone in an elevator who hits all your buttons and for whom you might imagine you'd give up everything, without even having exchanged a word. But those feelings pass. They simply do.
Anyway, that's my take and I am not prepared to offer any pseudo-evolutionary biologist reasons for why it may be correct. I am old, at this point, not even relatively. I am getting up there. But the spark still lights sometimes.
I do think for some, cynicism and mistrust douse the ground enough that spontaneous flame isn't very likely, but again I am not familiar with your situation.
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