RULE 49

Make time for romance

This can be so hard if you get bogged down in work and kids a few years into your relationship. But that’s when it’s most important. The less time there is for romance, the more you need it.

You can’t expect the passion and the excitement in your relationship to last if you’ve abandoned the romance. That’s the bit that stokes the fires, so you need to find some way to keep it going. Flowers and romantic dinners for two in glamorous restaurants are great, but the time and the budget may not stretch to that. So you’re going to have to get a bit more inventive. Come on, you know your partner well enough by now to have a pretty good idea how to romance them.

If you can get out of the house and away from the kids, why not go for a romantic woodland walk or a picnic in the park? Or buy fish and chips and eat them straight from the paper in some pleasant corner of town? If you live in a tourist area, why not go on one of those tourist boat trips or have an evening at the funfair? It can be very romantic if you both enter into the spirit of the thing.

And between those possibly rare excursions out of the house, there are plenty of ways of being romantic at home. The simplest (and cheapest) of them involves whispering sweet nothings and holding hands on the sofa. Or how about having your dinner in the garden or on the balcony? Cook a favourite meal – it doesn’t have to be fancy – and maybe put a cloth on the table or break out the best glasses, and have your romantic dinner for two al fresco.

There’s a place for romance that doesn’t lead to sex, as well as romance as a form of seduction. You can have plenty of fun with both. All the ideas I’ve just suggested can go either way. Then there are the more seductive ways to romance your partner (and of course making love at the end of it is never compulsory). You can give each other candlelit massages, or collect a few rose petals from somewhere (I don’t know where – you have to do some of the thinking here) and surprise your partner by running them a bath and sprinkling the petals on the water. Or watch a favourite romantic film on DVD with a bag of popcorn and pretend to be teenagers in the back row of the movies. Or read aloud to each other (erotic or not, as you both please). Or simply have a really early night with a glass of wine in bed, or a mug of cocoa, and talk and touch and do whatever comes naturally.

Right, that’s my bit done. It’s your turn now. Here’s your homework: come up with at least one romantic activity a week, whether it takes 30 seconds or all day, and make sure it actually happens.