Nothing is wrong. The current is just lower every year. Why pleasantness is the culprit, and the calendar that fixes it.
Nothing is wrong. That's what makes this hard to raise, with her or with yourself. You get on, you like each other, nobody is unhappy. The current is just a bit lower than it was last year, and lower again than the year before that, and if you extrapolate the line you don't love where it goes.
Most advice for this is about adding niceness. Be more thoughtful, more attentive, more present. All good, and none of it addresses the mechanism, which is that pleasantness and spark aren't the same variable.
In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath make an observation about experiences that transfers almost directly onto a marriage: "The surprise about great service experiences is that they are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable". Not consistently good. Forgettable, with peaks in it.
Now look at what a long marriage optimizes for. It removes friction. It smooths out the arguments, the surprises, the risk, the inconvenience. Every one of those is a genuine improvement and the cumulative effect is a life with no pits in it, and also no peaks.
That's the mechanism. You didn't lose the spark by getting worse at anything. You lost it by getting better at being comfortable, and comfort is measured on a different axis from memorability.
Which means the fix isn't more niceness. It's more peaks, at a frequency you can sustain, deliberately scheduled, because a peak that waits for spontaneity in a household with jobs and children in it doesn't arrive.
A reliable default helps here more than a good idea does. That's what Date Nights Dancing is built to be: easy swing dance moves taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you working on the same moves from the first video on. No dance experience required.
Three frequencies. None of them is expensive and none of them is an evening you have to be talked into.
1. Monthly: a small peak. One thing a month that isn't the ordinary week. Out somewhere, in somewhere different, doing something rather than watching something. It doesn't need to be big and it does need to be different.
2. Quarterly: break the script. Four times a year, do something that violates your own household's pattern. If you're always in, go away for a night. If you always plan, do the unplanned version. If it's always the two of you, make it four of you, or the other way around.
3. Yearly: a first. One thing a year that neither of you has ever done. This is the one that gets talked about years later, and it's also the one that gets postponed indefinitely because it's the only item on the list that requires a decision.
The monthly tier is the one that needs a default, because a monthly slot with nothing booked into it turns into takeout and a movie by about the third month. Having one repeatable thing in reserve solves that.
Desire runs on anticipation, and anticipation needs time between the suggestion and the event. Suggest something on Tuesday for Friday and you've created three days of a marriage in which something is coming. Do the same thing spontaneously on Friday and you get the event without the three days.
That's the whole argument for planning over spontaneity in a long marriage, and it's why "we should be more spontaneous" tends to produce less rather than more.
Two things, and both are invisible while they're happening.
The always-practical veto. One of you suggests something and the other one produces a completely reasonable objection: the cost, the drive, the timing, the sitter. Every individual veto is correct. The cumulative effect is a household where suggesting things has stopped being worth it, and the person who stopped suggesting rarely announces that they have.
The phone at the peak moment. The one thing that reliably converts a peak into an ordinary evening. Not phones generally. Phones during the specific hour you arranged.
The messages I have from people at this exact point are notably undramatic. One is a single sentence:
Well, we need something to get some fun in our lives!
Another sets up a whole plan and hands over the controls in the same breath:
It’s time for us to have some fun and connect by having some dancing date nights.
And a third puts it as a question rather than as a fix:
To keep "US" fresh and new and to say I Love You! Will you be my dance partner for the rest of our lives?
None of those is a crisis. All three are people noticing the line on the graph and deciding to do something about it before it matters, which is the correct time to act on this and also the hardest, because nothing is wrong.
And the honest limit on a spark calendar: it's built for a marriage where nothing is wrong. If what's in the house is contempt that won't break, untreated depression, or anything that frightens either of you, then peaks are the wrong tool and a counselor is the right one. That's a matter of matching the problem to the right tool.
Not the yearly first, which is the one you'll enjoy planning and postpone. The monthly one, this month, with a date on it.
If you want the full three-tier infrastructure model rather than the spark version, building emotional connection in marriage is that. If the two of you have drifted into being different people rather than just settled, growing apart in marriage is the piece for that. And how to be more romantic is the individual-skill version of the same problem.
Scheduled isn't the opposite of romantic. In a household with anything else going on in it, scheduled is how peaks happen at all.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
