Do you feel constant love for your partner?

[anosognosia]

As I'm from a home of a narcissistic father with a subservient mother,
I'm used to turmoil and confusion and volatile emotional flairups in my intimate relationships.

I've done my share of dating men who made my fears come true - I sought out playboys, narcissists, a**holes. 

Now I'm seeing someone who is extremely stable - he doesn't do anything to make me suspicious. This of course makes me extremely suspicious, as if a grand conspiracy building up against me like two tectonic plates accumulating friction with a grand earthquake about to erupt.  I CBT my way out of that way of thinking at times and it helps get my fear of abandonment from 12/10 down to a 4/10.

In ANY case, I was wondering if anyone has ever felt NOTHING for their partner for a few moments? I have this new unfamiliar feeling that I sometimes feel nothing when I think about my partner.  Let's say I think about him 20 times a day. I would say 4 out of 20 times I just think about him (I wonder what he's doing, or his face just pops up) but I don't have that rush of loving emotion towards him. I just feel nothing.

Is that normal? 

[schrödinger's cat]

Very normal. At least that's what it's like for me (we're long past our ten-year wedding anniversary), and it's also what I've heard from other people. It's even normal to have a period of time where your partner gets on your nerves. It's a wave - up, down, up, down. Love is mostly a decision. Sometimes it's a feeling, and that's nice, but at the end of the day, it's mostly a choice to trust someone, to care for them, and to forgive them when they're occasionally being an idiot.

And anyway, after a while, love normalizes. You get so used to it that you don't consciously feel it anymore, at least not all the time. That's especially true if you live with each other, as we do. If we're apart for a while, I miss him. And sometimes, I think of him and I do feel warmth and love. But other times, I think of him and feel nothing. Not a bad kind of nothing. Just the kind of nothing you feel when you think of ordinary things --- things like your car or your coffee or your garden, or every other good and lovely thing that does you a world of good: but sometimes your car is just your car. Your feelings have normalized. The initial rush of wonder and bliss is gone.

You take things for granted. That has a bad side (if it leads you to ignore your partner.) But it also has a good side. It can be a very safe-feeling, healthy, comforting state of affairs. Much like it is safe and reassuring if you're able to take for granted that your coffee will wake you up, your car will take you places, and your favourite song will be uplifting.

[C.]

I've become quite pragmatic on this topic, my family and my ex often stated their "love" and we all had that feeling, but the behavior was not loving.  So for me love has come to stand for action, it's like an action verb and like said here the feeling ebbs and flows...So "good enough" love means using kind words and actions with your partner.  I recently had a bf where that was the case, I don't think that we were a forever match due to personality differences, but he had the discipline to always behave appropriately and I quickly and easily followed suit.  I think that those of us w/cptsd often became so skilled at "fawning" that being verbally and behaviorally appropriate is pretty easy to do.  I know that for much of my 20 year marriage I was not appropriate about 20%-80% of the time, but almost immediate to the separation I returned to my "real" self in terms of how I treat other people.  I think I'd built up so much anger and resentment at living with a self-absorbed NPD person I often lashed out verbally.  I'm not excusing myself.  It's an example to me that although I often had that feeling, it wasn't really love.  The actions I wanted to do told me so but I was as yet unaware.

[Widdiful Falling]

I constantly want the best for my SO, and I enjoy his company, and I trust him. But feeling warm and tingly all the time sounds exhausting. Certainly, I feel better around him than not, but after 5 years, I get more of a sense of belonging around him than butterflies in the stomach. I feel safe when I'm around him. I think this is how having a loving family might feel.