My partner and I [both 33M] have been together for seven years. We love each other very much, but the last few years have been difficult, and to put it mildly, our life is far from what we imagined when we met in college.
We’ve had a lot of money and work problems, and now our lives have been painfully stagnant for a while. A few weeks ago, I felt attracted to someone else. Of course, I told him about it right after I realized it. It was a good conversation, open and kind, and he admitted that he, too, had been attracted to someone else, though he cut off contact with that person very quickly.
We agreed that it was time for us to spend more time together and focus on things other than problems to solve. The problem is that we realized that after all these years of focusing solely on the negative, we’re having a hard time having pleasant conversations; our discussions aren’t as smooth as they used to be. It’s painful because we love each other very much, and neither of us wants to break up. How can we get past all of this?