Why It Was So Spicy at the Beginning
What felt like love was recognition.
What the Body Knows
The first three months were electric.
She could not eat. She could not sleep. She thought about him constantly. Every message was a charge running straight through her chest. When they finally touched, her whole body opened like something had been waiting for years. She told her friend it had never been like this with anyone. She meant it.
By month seven it was quieter. Just quieter. He was still there. Still kind. Still showing up. Something in her body had gone looking for the old voltage and could not find it.
She started wondering if something was wrong.
Part Two: Recognition, not love
Something was right. Her body did not recognise it yet.
I see this in so many couples. The ones who come to me at month nine, year two, year five, saying the passion died. What they mean is the intensity dropped. They experience this as loss. The body experiences it as the absence of a signal it was trained to interpret as love.
What the body was reading as love was recognition.
Part Three: What the body learned early
The body learns early what it thinks closeness feels like. For some people, closeness was safe: warm arms, reliable presence, a parent who stayed. Their nervous systems learned that intimacy means ease. They can tolerate the quieter months because quiet does not feel like absence. It feels like home.
For many others, closeness was unsafe. It came with unpredictability. With intensity. With a parent who was sometimes there, sometimes gone, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrifying. The nervous system learned that intimacy means activation. Urgency. A spike in the chest followed by a drop. The cycle of reach and withdrawal, want and withhold, longing and relief.
This wiring does not announce itself. It feels like chemistry. Like desire. Like finally finding the person who makes your body come alive. The reason it feels so alive is that your nervous system recognises the pattern. The pattern is familiar, which the body reads as home.
Part Four: My own wiring
I had this wiring. I did not know it for decades.
During my marriage to Karim, I could not access what my body was holding. I took so much as criticism. I did not know how to adjust. After having two children, I could not bring myself to have sex, or if we did, it required significant stimulation to get anywhere near it. I would be emotional afterwards, and neither of us understood why.
My body was communicating what my mind had not yet processed. A violation I had no conscious memory of. My nervous system was running a programme I could not see: closeness equals danger. The programme did not care that Karim was safe. It did not evaluate present reality. It responded to stored history.
We divorced. The friendship survived and continues. My four children have him as their father and me as their mother, moving through the world as a family unit in a shape that confuses people. It works because the love was real. What was not working was my body’s capacity to be in it without the old alarm firing.
Part Five: The mechanism
Here is the mechanism.
The reticular activating system, the RAS, is a network of neurons in the brainstem that acts as a filter. Your brain receives roughly eleven million bits of sensory information every second. The RAS decides which fifty to one hundred and thirty bits reach conscious awareness. Everything else is discarded.
The RAS responds to what the rest of the brain has already marked as significant. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm and reward centre, does the early coding. Whatever has been associated with danger, closeness, or relief gets flagged. The RAS then filters for those flags. Whatever does not match: invisible.
When you buy a red car, you suddenly see red cars everywhere. They were always there. Your RAS was not tracking them. Now it is. This is the benign version of the same mechanism that runs relationships.
When a child experiences closeness as unpredictable, warm then absent, present then overwhelming, the amygdala codes intensity as the signal for love. The dopamine spike when the person finally arrives teaches the body: this activation is what closeness feels like. The RAS then filters for that signal. When it is present: this must be love. When it is absent: something is missing.
The new partner who is calm, reliable, present, who shows up without drama, who does not trigger the spike and drop cycle: the RAS does not flag them. They do not match the filter. The body scans for the old signal, cannot find it, and produces a feeling of flatness that gets interpreted as “the spark has gone.”
The trauma bond has stopped firing. The two events get confused for one.
Part Six: The neurochemical storm
Couples come to me saying they want the passion back. What they are describing is the reactivation of a nervous system pattern that felt like aliveness but was actually hyperarousal. The early months of a relationship are often a neurochemical storm: dopamine flooding the reward centres, norepinephrine creating the racing heart and inability to eat, cortisol suppressing the rational brain. This is not sustainable. It is the body’s way of bonding before the slower, deeper chemistry of attachment takes over.
When the storm calms and oxytocin begins to replace dopamine as the primary bonding hormone, the body enters a different register. Warmth instead of fire. Safety instead of urgency. Ease instead of ache.
For some couples, this transition is welcome. For others, especially when one or both partners have a nervous system trained on intensity, the transition feels like death. The body mourns the charge. The mind produces a story: we have lost something. We are no longer in love. I need to find someone who makes me feel alive again.
The affairs start here. The restless scanning. The fantasy of someone new who will bring back the voltage. What they are chasing is the activation of their own nervous system. The new person is just the trigger.
Part Seven: Tolerating safety
I work with this differently.
I teach couples what is actually happening in their bodies. I give them the felt sense vocabulary so they can track their own arousal, their own contraction, their own opening, without needing a story about what it means. I teach them that the quiet months are the arrival of something their nervous systems have never experienced: intimacy without threat.
For many of my clients, the hardest thing is tolerating safety. Being in a room with someone who is not going to leave, not going to explode, not going to withdraw. The body scans for danger and finds none. Instead of relaxing, it panics. Where is the signal? What am I missing? If I cannot feel the charge, is anything real?
This is the moment I hold. By staying with it. By teaching both partners to notice what the body is doing right now. By building capacity, slowly, for a new kind of closeness that does not require cortisol to feel alive.
Part Eight: Three minutes
In The Beginning, my twelve-week programme for couples, we start touch dates at three minutes. Three minutes of one-way, non-reciprocal touch. One person leads. One person receives. No switching. No reciprocity. For the full twelve weeks.
People think I am joking. Three minutes?
Three minutes is where capacity lives. The body that has learned to armour against touch, to perform desire, to dissociate during intimacy, to override its own signals in order to please: that body cannot sustain thirty minutes of genuine presence. It will check out. It will perform. It will leave the room while appearing to stay.
Three minutes of real contact is more than most couples have had in years.
We build from there. Slowly. The structured touch dates increase in duration as capacity grows. By week twelve, something has shifted that neither partner can quite explain. She is no longer scanning his face for signs of impatience. He is no longer wondering if he is doing it right. The bodies have learned a new signal: this is safe. This is real. This does not require intensity to be love.
Part Nine: What comes after the spice
If you recognise what I am describing, you are not failing at your relationship. Your nervous system is running a programme it learned before you had any say in the matter. Programmes can be changed. Understanding helps, and the body needs a different experience. Slowly. With structure. Until the new pattern becomes the one the RAS tracks.
The passion transforms. What it transforms into looks like a hand on your back that you lean into without thinking. A silence in the kitchen that does not need filling. A touch that is three minutes long and contains more than years of urgency ever did.
That is what I work toward. The thing that comes after the spice.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette
Ways in.
Try the cards. My daughter built an app. Ten cards free to start: couplecards.netlify.app/free. The full Intimacy and Communication Cards set is here.
Trust and Repair. Fifty cards for the moment the air changes between you. The conversation couples need when something has been said or seen and neither of you knows where to start. Trust and Repair Deck
Work with me. If you and your partner are running this loop and want to actually shift it, I work with couples twelve weeks at a time inside The Beginning. Five-minute touch dates. Structured, slow, deliberate. The body learns a new signal. The Beginning
Sources
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. HarperCollins, 1990. The estimate that the human nervous system receives roughly 11 million bits of sensory information per second while conscious awareness processes around 50 to 130 bits per second.
Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron et al., Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2005. Dopamine, norepinephrine and cortisol activation in the early phase of romantic love. helenfisher.com
Acevedo, Aron, Fisher & Brown, Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2012. Long-term pair bonding and brain reward activation. helenfisher.com
Feldman, R. et al., Oxytocin during the initial stages of romantic attachment. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2012. Oxytocin levels and pair-bond formation. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The reticular activating system (RAS) as a sensory filter. Standard neuroanatomy reference: see Principles of Neural Science (Kandel, Schwartz, Jessell).
Research on trauma bonding and limerence as nervous-system patterns rooted in attachment wounds. See literature on intermittent reinforcement and dopaminergic conditioning.
Thank you for articulating these important reminders so clearly and with great nuance.