Want to Bring Back the Spark in Your Relationship?
“Most people aren’t really in a relationship with their partner—they’re in a relationship with their internal representation of their partner.”
If there's one area of life where communication truly makes or breaks the experience, it’s in our closest relationships. Love and marriage—those intimate bonds we build over time—are not just shaped by chemistry, shared values, or life goals. They're shaped, more than anything else, by how we speak to each other, how we interpret each other’s behavior, and how we filter experience. That’s where NLP—Neuro-Linguistic Programming—comes in, not as a gimmick or manipulation trick, but as a toolbox for transformation.
I’ve been studying and practicing NLP for decades, and had the privilege of learning directly from Richard Bandler, one of its co-creators. Something Richard once told me has always stuck with me:
“Most people aren’t really in a relationship with their partner—they’re in a relationship with their internal representation of their partner.”
That’s a staggering insight when you sit with it. We don’t respond to who our partner really is: we respond to the version of them that we’ve constructed in our minds over time, shaped by memories, meanings, mood, experience, and metaphor.
That internal representation is malleable, and once we learn to shift it—once we gain the flexibility to update that mental image based on new input—we begin to see our partner not through the filter of old arguments or disappointments, but as the complex, evolving, sometimes messy but always human being that they are.
That shift alone can save a marriage. It’s not about pretending things are perfect. It’s about updating the map so it reflects the territory.
One of the simplest, most powerful ways to use NLP in a relationship is through what we call representational systems: how we internally experience the world through visuals, hearing, and feelings. Some people process primarily through visual imagery; others through auditory language or tonal nuances; others through kinesthetic sensation.
Conflicts often arise when couples are speaking past each other, not just in content but in representational language.
If one partner says, “This just doesn’t feel right,” and the other replies, “But it looks fine to me,” they’re missing each other at a deep neurological level. When we learn to identify our partner’s preferred system and speak their language—literally—we begin to connect at a level that feels intuitive, even magical.
When done right, you’ll start hearing your partner say, “I feel like you really get me.” That’s no accident. That’s rapport through calibration, a core NLP skill.
Try this simple exercise: over this coming week, listen carefully to the kinds of sensory words your partner uses. Do they say “I see what you mean,” “That rings a bell,” or “It just feels off”?
Once you’ve identified their dominant system, mirror it in your language. If your partner says, “This seems cloudy to me,” you don’t reply with, “Well, it sounds fine.” You reply with, “Let’s try to bring it into focus.” You’re now pacing their internal experience, and that builds rapport at the deepest subconscious levels.
Another indispensable NLP skill in love and marriage is reframing. We tend to get caught in ruts: thinking patterns where a partner’s behavior is interpreted through a narrow, often negative lens. “He’s always late, so he must not respect me.” “She interrupts me all the time; she doesn’t care what I think.”
These are surface-level conclusions that miss the deeper reality. NLP reframing teaches us to challenge and change the meaning we assign to behavior, and to loosen the grip of old, rigid interpretations.
Next time your partner does something that irritates you, pause. Take a breath. Ask yourself: what else could this behavior mean, outside of my current story about it? If he’s late, could it be that he’s overwhelmed and trying to please too many people? If she interrupts, could it be enthusiasm, or even anxiety, rather than disrespect?
This isn’t about letting bad behavior slide—it’s about expanding the interpretive frame. Meaning is not fixed; it's fluid. Change the frame, and you often change your feelings about your experiences, too.
Anchoring is another technique I’ve used personally and Louise and I taught for years to couples looking to reignite connection (Louise used to have a coaching business working with couples in crisis and ADHD entrepreneurs, and back in the late 1990s we taught regular seminars/workshops on NLP together at Omega Institute).
It’s simple, elegant, and based on the way our brains wire experience. An “anchor” in NLP is any stimulus—touch, tone, word, gesture—that becomes neurologically associated with a specific state. Think of Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of the bell. We all have unconscious anchors. The key is to make them conscious and intentional.
Want to bring back the spark in your relationship? Sit with your partner and think of a moment when you both laughed hysterically together, or felt completely in sync, or first fell deeply in love. Close your eyes and relive that moment fully: see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.
As you reach the emotional peak of that memory, nod your head in a way that signals your partner to touch you in a specific way—a squeeze of the hand, a hand on the shoulder—and repeat it a few times. Your partner is setting an anchor in you.
Later, when things are tense or disconnected, your partner can fire that anchor—the same touch in the same way—and bring flooding back to you some of the emotion linked to that memory. Then reverse roles and repeat the exercise only this time you’re setting your partner’s anchor.
While this simple exercise doesn’t replace deep work or honest communication, it can shift a state instantly and open the door to connection.
This even applies to places. Never fight in the bedroom, for example; the space itself will become an anchor for anger, when it should be one for sleep and love. Find a place in the house where you don’t spend much time — a hallway, for example, or the garage — and go there for your arguments.
Another Richard Bandler gem he shared with me was about changing the internal “movie” we play when we think about our partner.
“People get stuck watching the same lousy loop of past pain,” he told me. “Change the movie, and you change your marriage.”
NLP’s submodalities—the subsets of the modalities (sight, sound, feeling) qualities of our internal representations—are the keys to that change. If every time you think of your spouse’s mistake, for example, you may see a giant, vivid, color movie in IMAX with Dolby sound: no wonder the emotion still hurts.
Try this: pick a negative memory that keeps surfacing. Now imagine that memory as a movie screen in your mind. Shrink it. Drain the color. Make it black and white. Turn down the volume. Add a silly soundtrack like circus music. Watch it play backward at high speed. Now, when you think of that memory, it’s no longer loaded with the same intensity. You’ve permanently shifted its emotional charge. You haven’t repressed it: you’ve re-coded it.
These tools don’t replace honesty, vulnerability, or emotional maturity. But they help create the internal space where those qualities can emerge. They unstick the patterns that keep couples spinning in circles. They empower us to take responsibility not just for what we say, but for how we perceive and interpret what’s said to us. They offer a way out of the maze.
A lot of people come to relationships expecting the other person to meet their needs, fulfill their fantasies, or heal their wounds. That’s a setup for disappointment. NLP doesn’t promise perfection, but it gives you the tools to become more conscious of how your own mind is shaping your experience of love. It puts you back in the driver’s seat.
If you and your partner are willing to play—willing to experiment with these tools and see what works—you may discover new dimensions of intimacy you didn’t even know were possible. You’ll speak to each other in ways that land. You’ll fight less often, and when you do, you’ll recover faster. You’ll stop reenacting the past and start co-authoring a new future.
And it’s fun. That’s the part people often miss. These aren’t grim psychological techniques or re-experiencing horrible times like in some dysfunctional “therapies” that involve screaming or hitting pillows. They’re playful, dynamic, and often hilarious.
You can collapse an argument by anchoring a moment of joy. You can shift a stubborn belief with a silly metaphor. You can interrupt a pattern of criticism by pacing and leading into curiosity. As Richard likes to say, “Change doesn’t have to be hard—it just has to be ecological and effective.”
If you’re interested into digging deeper into Richard Bandler’s work, his own books like Get the Life You Want or Using Your Brain for a Change are packed with exercises you can do alone or with a partner.
My book Living with ADHD: Simple Exercises to Change Your Daily Life is about using NLP to rebuild and strengthen relationships and repair from life’s woundings. While it was written with ADHD people in mind, 95% of its content is universal. Similarly, my book Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision is about how to use NLP for political communcation and is a good primer in NLP itself.
I also wrote Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being about using an NLP technique called “bilateral therapy” to overcome past traumas that haunt us, including PTSD.
There are also studies showing how NLP-based interventions improve communication and reduce conflict in couples therapy settings. John and Kathleen LaValle run introductory and advanced seminars through their company, PureNLP, that are excellent.
NLP won’t solve every problem, but it will give you a map and a set of tools for navigating the terrain of love and relationships more skillfully.
In a world that often teaches us to communicate through blame, sarcasm, or withdrawal, NLP offers something radically different: conscious connection. And that, in the end, may be the most loving act of all.