After four decades as a couple, Hervé feels the routine gradually settling in his relationship.

The opportunity for this listener from Europe 1 to ask for some advice from Catherine Blanc, sexologist and psychoanalyst in Paris, who answered him on Monday in the program "Sans Rendez-vous".

This is a question that so many couples are confronted with, at one point or another in their history: how can we not let the routine take over the daily life of two?

This is the problem that arises in the couple of Hervé.

This listener from Europe 1 is confronted with the gradual installation of the routine at the end, all the same, of forty years of relationship.

In Sans Rendez-vous, Catherine Blanc, sexologist and psychoanalyst in Paris, gives him some advice to avoid seeing the passion weaken in the next forty years.

Hervé's question

"With my wife, it will be forty years that we are together. We have already experienced a lot. But now, the routine sets in and we would not like our relationship to tear up. Do you have two or three? advice to give us to reinvent our life together? "

Catherine Blanc's response

“What I find great is that the routine sets in after forty years. It's great and it's more up to us to ask him for some advice because the routine usually sets in much sooner. It's quite natural. It's not a misfortune, it's not a disease. Quite simply, we never stop building codes and habits on which we find ourselves, on which we complement each other. So we organize our life in the sense of comfort and not in the sense of arousal, because arousal is not comfortable. It is always discomfort since there is always the risk of it. There is no response to our excitement. In general, we organize ourselves to provide comfort. For now, let's congratulate Hervé! "

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Routine is part of life, that does not mean that there is no more feeling ...

"Of course. Besides, watch how much we install our children in the routine through meals and bedtime rituals. This routine that they keep wanting to shake up, staying a little later in front of the television , telling an additional story is of course to create new things, but they are in the comfort and security of knowing that the parents are there. It is absolutely necessary. It is especially not a proof of lack love: parents do not put their children to bed because they no longer love them and want to get rid of them, but because they take care of them and their good health.

It is not a proof of disenchantment.

Simply, it draws attention to the difficulty we have of creating things, that is to say of getting out of our own habits, our own codes, of seeing life differently.

I had planned to eat pasta on Monday and all of a sudden, I was unsettled.

I had planned that I was going to eat pasta and not eat pasta, all of a sudden it was a little worrying.

Eating a product that you do not know, receiving people who invite themselves at the last minute ... No matter how much you love them, this little rush is a little disturbing.

It questions this ability to disturb ourselves. "

How to reinvent the life together after 40 years?

"Obviously, the counselors are not the payers and there is no question of appropriating the lives of others, as is often the case in love or in sexuality. We will look through pornography, in through the history of the neighbors, which could all of a sudden be a little exciting, because the neighbors risk adventures different from ours. In any case, it does not start with the other. is how, myself, I am going to listen to my own desires. What would I want to do in absolute terms? It does not mean that I would be able to do it, but what would I want to do, to show to the other?

In the end, we may have been together for forty years, we got used to showing off from a certain angle and we do not allow ourselves to foil the idea that the other has of us.

We know that I'm like that or that I like to do that, or that I like this or that condition and changing would risk destabilizing the other who could say to himself 'But what's wrong with you?'.

I believe that we must dare to confront this criticism or this questioning because obviously, that will also mean assuming this possibility.

The first piece of advice I could offer Hervé is to tell yourself not what to do as if to authorize it, but what he does not dare to do, say or try to do? again, even if it means crashing.

Because that's what's interesting, especially when we've been together for forty years.

We can risk it. "