As a relationship coach, I often get asked if I really believe it is possible to keep passion alive in a long term committed relationship or marriage. My answer is that, although it can be challenging, it's far from impossible. Like anything else worth having, it takes some time and attention to create a lasting relationship with a healthy amount of passion. You have to work at creating the magic; it won't just be there year after year if you don't.

The day-to-day routine can actually build intimacy, rather than destroy it, if we make time to be intimate and giving with our partner every day. It's a choice, like the choice of allowing your partner's idiosyncrasies to make him or her more endearing to you rather than drive you crazy. Following are just a few of the things you can do to keep the fire burning between you and your long-term love:

• Remember to appreciate and savor the little pleasures, the bonuses of living together. Take time each day to connect intimately with your partner: Deeply embrace and gaze into each other's eyes lovingly, feeling each other's energy. This can lead to sex or not, depending on your mood.
• Drift off in one another's arms; it's deeply satisfying. Even if you can't actually sleep that way, you can spend 10 minutes or so embracing before moving apart to sleep. Then when you wake up, savor that time also, linger to spoon or embrace just a few more delicious moments before getting up.
• Spend some time together remembering how your relationship began, those first glances, dates, kisses - how you fell in love. Revisit some of places where you had your "firsts" - first kiss, first date, initial attraction. This keeps those feelings of romantic love fresh and builds new positive memories as well.
• Have new and exciting experiences as often as you can. When you stay excited about exploring and experiencing life together, you stay more excited about each other, too. So travel together, skinny dip, kayak, hike in the forest. Even small changes from your regular routine, such as going to a new restaurant or reading poetry together, can help rekindle the passion.
• Take a sacred sex workshop or some kind of intimacy buillding workshop together. Or if money prohibits that, buy a book on the topic and practice some of the techniques together. Spicing things up in the bedroom can keep the sexual energy between you alive.
• Once a year do a retreat or vacation together, something that will nurture your souls or allow you to let loose and have fun. Ultimately, these kinds of experiences bring you closer together.
• Keep the energetic polarity between you. Women, worship the maleness of your partner, and men, worship the femaleness of your goddess woman. Women, learn to relax into your feminine essence and draw your man into your deliciousness. Then, let your man ravish you with his masculine energy.

Though some people believe that living together kills the romance, seeing someone only for dating and sleepovers in a relationship that's never going to culminate in living together or marriage can lack deep intimacy. It has a sense of unreality about it. It's like being on vacation all the time. It sounds great but for most of us, it would get boring and shallow after a while.

The real magic of a relationship is in the intimacy, and intimacy is built by sharing the good times and the bad, being there with each other everyday, experiencing the beautiful and the mundane, nurturing and loving each other through all of it. So living together doesn't have to kill the romance; just put a little work or play at keeping the passion alive.

Copyright © Pamela Ramey-Tatum