A woman once told me that she has a secret way of trying to feel “in love” with her husband when they go out to dinner. She watches how someone else—a waitress, a friend they’re out with that night, an acquaintance who has stopped by their table—responds to his good humor and good looks. She watches that person laugh at his jokes or listen intently to a story he’s telling or (even better) flirt with him. Then she tries to absorb those good feelings and make them her own.

“It’s like the fact that they’re seeing him once in a while, not every day, let’s them see things in him I can’t, anymore,” she said. “So I try to borrow the positive energy. Maybe he’s doing the same thing with people around me.” She chuckled. “I hope so. I want him to remember what he once felt toward me, too. Does that sound strange?”

It didn’t sound strange to me at all. Chronic proximity to our spouses deprives us of the wider perspective that human beings need to be moved by the emotional landscape of their relationships. We see them too close-up for them to take our breath away, anymore.

It’s the difference between swimming in the sea every day during the summer and being moved by its magic and power from a perch on land during a winter getaway.

So many couples I counsel still love one another, but want to feel in love, again. After ten or fifteen or twenty years together, they haven’t forgotten the reasons they chose one another, but they long to feel the magnetic force that drew them nearly irresistibly together—the part of attraction that has nothing to do with reason, and everything to do with romance.

Date night may start you on the road back to love, but it’s rarely enough to complete the journey. If Saturday night takes you and your husband two steps forward, deciding who cleans up after dinner Monday night, seeing that warm pile of laundry covering the bed on Wednesday and feeling burnt out from work by Thursday can easily erase your gains.

If you really want to feel closer to your husband again in a lasting way (and vice-versa), you need to invest in a strategy to reawaken the emotional forces that drew you together, to begin with. If you think that means a couple years in couple’s therapy, think again. I’ve seen husbands and wives recapture in one month feelings that took a decade or two to lose.

You can start by telling your husband the idea behind 30 Days Back to Love. “What if,” you might ask, “there were a roadmap to getting to know more about each other than we ever have? Would you try it with me? It’s supposed to only take a little while each week for the next four weeks.” Tell him you read this short book and invite him to read it, too. And let him know that you could always start the journey and decide to stop short (even though—as your coach—I hope you won’t).

Presuming you bring your husband aboard, here are 7 simple steps to reawaken the loving feelings that brought you and him together, in the first place.

Name one thing about each other that you would never change and one thing that bugs you about each other.

Why identify something positive and something negative to get the ball rolling? Because finding your way back to love begins with reassuring one another about what’s good in the relationship, while getting to work on just one roadblock.

It’s harder to be honest about what isn’t working perfectly between the two of you. That’s because it means trusting one another even more with your feelings.

Feel free to blame me directly for the “complaint” part of the discussion. You can tell your husband, “Dr. Keith says this is all about really figuring out what makes us ‘tick’ as a couple. We’re supposed to think about what we tell each other, not respond to it. And no grudges.”

Keep the tone light, if you can—healing, not accusing. It’s even possible to have a little fun finding fault with your marriage. It’s like playing one another’s marriage therapist. Remind your husband he gets his turn, too, and that you’re planning to listen and not to get defensive.

You don’t need to identify the core conflict in your relationship. A key lesson I’ve learned working with couples the past 25 years is that focusing on one unresolved issue has a way of opening up others, each closer and closer to their hearts.

“I love how protective you are of me and the children,” you might say. “You’re so good at it, though, that I sometimes feel like you make them a little worried about whether they can take care of themselves.”

One woman I counseled put it this way: “I think it’s amazing how you’ve been able to change jobs when you aren’t feeling like your company values you. I just wish you’d tell me when you start feeling that way, so I could know you aren't happy and might make a change.”

Another said, “I like that we both make it our business to get home early enough to sit down together as a family for dinner most nights.” Then, after a pause, she smiled and added, “I like it a lot less that on the nights we plan dinners out together, you’re late a lot of the time.”

Assume that the thing that irks you about your relationship actually didn’t start with your marriage. It reflects something longstanding inside you or your partner, maybe reaching back to childhood.

This should take a little pressure off you and your husband and let you breathe easy. It means that your marriage is only the stage on which some pretty powerful dramas ended up playing themselves out. They’re most often transplanted into your relationship, not created by it.

“So, when you're overprotective with the kids,” you might tell your husband, “maybe you’re worried they won’t make good choices themselves or that they won’t be able to compete and succeed. Is that why?”

If you were the woman whose husband changed jobs without consulting her, you might say, “I wonder whether you think if you say you’re unhappy at work that I’ll judge you or pry too much. Maybe it feels like I’ll make it hard for you to make your own decision about what to do.”

This step is about knowing more about your husband (and he, you), not changing him.

It’s about taking a step back and wondering why your spouse has developed the personality style or behavior pattern that has created an element of conflict in your relationship.

You can probably guess where we’ve already arrived. Suddenly, you’re defeating the distance between the two of you. You’re getting more intimate emotionally with the person you married.

Find evidence in your early interactions as a couple (when you were dating) that proves that the positive and negative qualities you’ve identified in your spouse were evident back then, too.

I believe that couples fall in love with one another partly because they recognize each other’s strengths and partly because they intuit they have built-in, mirror-image emotional limitations to overcome.

Maybe one of them is a little too controlling, and the other yields too easily. Or maybe one of them is sensitive to being abandoned, and the other is so dependent that leaving the relationship seems out of the question. Yet they usually don’t get around to helping one another past these limitations for many years—if ever. Now, it’s time for you and your husband to take that leap.

What memories do you have of the time you spent dating your husband that may reveal his underlying emotional needs?

You can explain this step to your husband this way: “Let’s try to figure out whether we picked each other partly to help each other grow. Take your pet peeve about me. Could you see hints of it before we even got married?”

One woman told me her husband had always been very jealous of men she dated before him. His possessiveness had made her feel special and loved, especially because her father hadn’t been very involved in her life. But twelve years into the marriage she felt controlled, not embraced. It wasn’t until then that she started wondering what had made her husband so possessive. Only then did she feel like she needed—and wanted—to know even more about him.

There are buried treasures of insight into your spouse’s soul that you have yet to unearth. Those treasures are the ingredients for new and powerful feelings of attachment and love. By the end of week one, you’ve started unearthing them. The two of you aren’t just looking at one another; you’re looking into one another.

Be your husband’s life story coach (and let him be yours).

Spending 30 minutes a day (15 minutes for you and 15 minutes for your husband) for one week sharing your reflections about the roles each of you has always played in the relationship—and why—can connect you to one another more deeply than ever.

What in your husband’s life history—going back to childhood—is the source of the positive quality you identified? What’s the source of the quality that has led to conflict?

Feel free to blame me for the archaeological dig: “Dr. Keith says that you get to a point in your marriage where you feel distant from each other, because you haven’t made the decision to really get close. He thinks you have to understand more about the life story of the person you fell in love with.”

Ask questions to uncover the truth. If your husband’s desire for control comes from the chaos he experienced after his parents’ divorce, have him describe the most chaotic events and how they made him feel.

Take the chance to reveal yourself as completely as you can, too. If your husband asks whether you were so demonstrative earlier in the relationship because you needed feedback that he loved you, try your hardest to answer honestly. Tell him where the need for that kind of reassurance might have come from.

Finally, design experiments with one another that allow both of you to abandon the stilted roles you’ve played in the marriage. If your husband has been a risk taker for fifteen years while you’ve been a stabilizing force, identify a few risks you’d like to take, with his support. If your husband has always been the disciplinarian in the family, while you provided warmth and support, think together about why you gravitated toward those roles. See how it feels to set some limits, while he spends some time gently inviting your kids to open up to him about what’s on their minds.

Maybe you’ll find out your husband doesn’t really like the conservative, safe profession he’s clung to.

Maybe you’ll understand the underlying self-doubt that kept him at his desk. Maybe you’ll help him decide to start thinking about a career change.

And maybe you’ll be able to share your own anxiety that kept you moving from position to position, just like you moved from one city to another as a child.

If you help one another grow beyond the roles you’ve each been playing in the relationship, and in your lives, you’ll both be growing. Just as important, you’ll be growing together.

Reveal one or more life story secret(s) to each other.

After two weeks and four steps, there’s a good chance you’ve started defeating the psychological defenses that have kept you at a distance from one another. You’re starting to see your husband (and he’s starting to see you) close-up.

Don’t stop now. Almost every wife and every husband keeps secrets from one another—some related to recent events and some related to much more distant ones. Choose a few and share them.

One of my clients hadn’t told her husband that classmates had made fun of her for being overweight as a child. Another never admitted that she had always wanted to act, not practice law. A third had lived through the loss of a childhood friend at age 10 and never shared how painful it had been.

Swapping secrets builds intimacy. Just be a little careful that the ones you share now aren’t too threatening. If you secretly feel attracted to your husband’s best friend, this probably isn’t the week to bring it up.

Take romantic risks with one another.

For some couples that have grown quite distant from one another, it may feel risky just to bring up the idea of having sex at all. For other couples who have continued to be sexually active, taking a romantic risk may mean sharing something you’d like to try together, but haven’t yet. It might mean booking a room for a romantic interlude at the local hotel where you’re attending a wedding over the weekend. It could mean buying new lingerie or getting him a gift certificate to go buy it for you.

Just telling your husband it’s time you and he got more adventuresome in bed is an act of courage and intimacy that can greatly reinforce the gains you’ve made getting emotionally closer.

Of course, there’s a chance that a fantasy you hear from your husband will make you uncomfortable. It’s okay to tell him if it does, but add that you’ll keep thinking about what he’s shared and that he can share anything else he wants to.

By the end of week three, you can already be more emotionally and physically connected than you have been in a long time. Remember that the road you’ve taken has been toward uncovering who the two of you really are, and reawakening the forces that drew you together from the start.

Write the story of the future of your marriage together.

While you’re continuing to reveal a few more secrets and take a few more romantic risks and think even more deeply about who the person you’ve married is—deep down—start thinking with him about where the fact that you love one another could really lead. What could your future together look like?

Don’t sweat the details or worry about all the reasons it might be tough to make changes. Let yourself dream together. Dreaming about the future together is what couples in love do all the time.

Can you see one of you changing careers? Can you see the two of you planning trips for one another to places each of you knows the other would love to visit? Would you consider adopting a child? What are the next pages and chapters of your marriage to write, so that when you read the story of your lives together, you see yourselves getting closer, even if you were once drifting apart?

Dreaming about the best possibilities for the next years of your marriage can make them real.

Seven steps. Four weeks. I know it’s hard to believe they can reawaken feelings of love that may have lain dormant inside you and your husband for quite a long time. But all marriages contain the seeds of rebirth within them, just beneath the surface of the relationship. Those seeds do not wither from inattention, even for a decade or more. They inevitably rise closer and closer to the surface. That’s why missing them would be a tragic mistake and why making them start to grow doesn’t need to take many months, much less years.