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The early stages of a relationship are filled with passion, admiration, and excitement.

Although that initial spark feels real, we all know it doesn’t last long. The novelty of being in a new relationship eventually wears off and the challenges of being in love slowly kick in.

The truth is relationships are hard and sometimes it feels like we’re just spinning our wheels. As the euphoria fades, the challenges increase.

But relationships don’t have to be this hard.

We may not be able to regain our euphoric love, but we can do something better: we can make way for a more emotionally mature love that is characterized by awareness.

It involves being conscious of the highs and lows and improving the relationship when it gets stuck in the low. Because let’s be honest: one of the main reasons relationships die a slow, ugly death is our inability to recognize when we are lazy.

The highs start to gradually fade, and we may not even take our partner’s alertness into consideration. We think that being lazy is a normal and expected part of any relationship that’s meant to last. Some of us may even think that the relationship is doomed or we’re destined to eventually fall out of love and seek another relationship that brings back the warm, fuzzy feeling of passion.

Being lazy in a relationship may be normal and expected, but it doesn’t signal the end of it. For me, laziness signals transformation. It’s an opportunity to enter a new phase where intimacy, love, and passion still exist. We move from euphoric love to conscious love. We pay attention to when we are lazy and become extremely alert. It’s a gentle push, a gentle nudge, in the right direction.

But to get there, we need to find the root cause of our laziness and understand what it means. If we don’t know when we are being lazy, we’ll never know how and when to make things right. We’ll just go about our day as normal and think that love is supposed to be boring. Somehow, we’ll convince ourselves that the erosion of fancy emotions is inevitable, and so we succumb to denial and stop making an effort in our relationship. In other words, we get too comfortable.

Here are 14 signs that prove we are being lazy:

1. We take our partner for granted.

2. We neglect their needs.

3. We neglect our own needs as well.

4. We minimize communication.

5. We stop listening and pull away instead.

6. We undermine our partner’s emotions.

7. We think other relationships are more fun.

8. We stop getting curious about our partner.

9. We become aggressive or lash out when faced with a problem.

10. We avoid difficult situations, emotions, or conversations.

11. When things go wrong, we rely on our partner to make things right.

12. We stop making an effort to spend quality time together.

13. We feel resentment toward our partner.

14. We think we’ve done all that’s needed.

If we want to transform our relationship into a healthy, conscious one, we need to understand that stability doesn’t mean indifference and comfort doesn’t mean distance. Without continuous, intentional effort, we can never be happy or create happy relationships. We need to actively invest in all the things that keep relationships thriving.

When we stop pursuing our partner and making an effort to keep each other happy, we feel the difference between the present moment and the initial stages of dating. However, if we keep “dating” our partner, things will only get more real.

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