Couples whose grown children have finally left home – empty nesters, if you will – are visited by twin blessings that can quickly come to seem like challenges: a sudden surfeit of privacy and an unfamiliar excess of time. After years of wearing the armour of parenting, to find yourselves a couple again – alone together and at a loose end – can be daunting and a little embarrassing.
This juncture also provides a golden opportunity for a reset, but to reinvigorate the romantic side of your relationship you may first have to find it. Don’t worry: it’s probably exactly where you parked it two decades ago.
According to the marital therapist Andrew G Marshall, the host of The Meaningful Life podcast and the author of The Happy Couple’s Handbook, the first step has more to do with you than your partner: you have to learn to reconnect with a younger, more curious self. He mentions the biblical notion of “putting away childish things”.
“The childish things are the very things that you need to get back in contact with, the things that really spoke to you,” he says. “They might not be romantic things; they might be very much individualistic things. You’ve got to get back your libido – and I’m using the word ‘libido’ not in a strict sexual sense, but as in energy for a project.”
This could mean taking up a long-abandoned hobby or passion, or something you have never tried before – anything that helps you consider yourself in a new light. “Grow a beard, get a piercing, get a tattoo,” he says. “Whatever it is that you’ve always wanted to do, but you thought other people wouldn’t like, now’s the time to do it.”
The next step is to redirect that newfound curiosity towards your partner. “I would be inclined, for Valentine’s day, to ask your partner: what is it that I don’t know about you that I really need to know?” says Marshall. “After 30 years, you think there’s nothing that you don’t know about them. Well, the truth is, you really only half-know yourself, so what hope have you got of knowing them?”
This is important, not only because of what you have never known about your partner, but also because of what has changed in the intervening decades. “When it comes to romance, and certainly when it comes to sex, you’re probably working on a set of assumptions that you sorted out 30 years ago,” says Marshall. “You’re not going to the same restaurants that you went to 30 years ago, you’re not wearing the same clothes; why should you have the same sex and the same attitude to romance?”
These might well sound like difficult conversations to embark upon after so many years of avoiding them. To make it easier, Marshall recommends one of those sets of couples “prompt cards” you can find all over the internet. “You have to pick a card and it will say: ‘What’s your secret sexual desire?’” This means no one has to take responsibility for conducting a sweeping martial inquiry. “If it’s done as a bit of a game, and you can have a glass of champagne, that kind of thing, you can make it fun.”
If any of this sounds more silly than helpful, it is important to remember that it can be both. “I would be looking for silliness,” Marshall says. “Either give each other silly presents for Valentine’s day, or do something silly together, rather than romantic. You want to get into that play space again, where you are like two kids playing together in a sandbox, rather than all these adult expensive meals and stuff.”
Be as silly as you want to, and as experimental as you dare, but bear one thing in mind: your grown children have left home, but they may still have keys.
