Why Can’t I Flirt with My Partner?

Dear Maxwells, I’ve recently been flirting with a co-worker of mine. It feels so natural and easy and playful. I remember that’s how it felt when I first started dating my husband. Now he and I hardly ever have that playful, flirtatious energy with each other. It would almost feel awkward to flirt with him again in that way. We love each other but that kind of energy feels gone. Can people who have been together for a long time recapture that kind of energy or is that just what happens at the beginning and then fades away over time. Is there any way to get it back? 

Dear Reader, you’ve touched upon a larger issue with your question that is prevalent in so many relationships which is this concept of “it feels hard to do xyz with my chosen partner, but I can do it with somebody else.” In this case, you are talking about bringing more flirtatious and playful energy into your marriage, but in many cases that same concept applies to things like sex, sense of humor, sharing secrets, talking about intimate or challenging feelings or emotions etc. We wrote a whole article about the love/lust disconnect before. Think about how many men there are who feel like they can’t lust after the woman they love but still lust after casual lovers from the past, or even with women in porn. Think about how many people there are that feel like they can’t share their secrets or most vulnerable emotions with their spouse, but can easily do so with their closest friends. Or how many people feel like they can’t really let loose and be silly with their spouse the way they can with their closest friends or siblings. This idea of having blocks around self-expression of any kind, including being able to flirt, with your long term partner is quite common. 

Part of the reason for this is because the more you are with somebody, the easier it is to fall into predictable patterns of relating. In many cases, these patterns are connected to themes from childhood and ways that you learned how to be in relationships from your parents. For example, if your parents were more serious and your only place to be silly was with your friends, it would make sense that you would attract a partner where you felt hesitant to be silly. Or, if your father was abusive towards your mother and you felt like you needed to protect your mother, developing a love/lust disconnect where it would be hard to lust after the women you choose to love would be a natural consequence. So not only do we pick people to be in relationships with that mirror a lot of our childhood trauma’s back to us, but the longer we are with them, the more entrenched our patterns become. 

Specifically regarding flirting, the more entrenched our patterns become with our partner, the harder it is to break out of them. Flirting is all about being playful with your partner, finding the humor inside the relationship and creating mystery and anticipation. This is hard to do when you already “know everything” about somebody, and especially hard to do when you are stuck in the same rut of how you relate to one another that have been deepening over years. Additionally, the longer you are with somebody the more different facets you have to your relationship and subsequently how you relate to each other. You live together, share finances, share household responsibilities, share friends, share kids, share history. The weight of the responsibilities of the everyday can start to slowly erode polarity, attraction and playfulness over time. 

So what is there to do about it? Get uncomfortable and do it anyway. Start flirting, try your best. Introduce that energy back into your relationship. Fail at it. Get rejected. Talk about it with your partner. Be vulnerable and work through the blocks and challenges that you have to disrupt the status quo between the two of you and birth something new. And this is the case with any of these issues. If you have an issue being silly around your partner, make yourself uncomfortable and do it anyway. If they reject you then it becomes an opportunity to talk about it with them. To tell them that this thing is missing and that you want to create a space in your relationship for it. The point is that just because it’s hard or uncomfortable or you are stuck in a rut doesn’t mean that it has to continue to be that way. If you introduce a pattern interrupt into  your relationship and start to bring more of whatever thing is lacking into it, only then can the relationship evolve and get better. This requires being brave and being vulnerable. Which, no surprise, was required at the beginning of the relationship which is where flirting came easier.