"We can't communicate" is how most couples begin their first therapy session. They then proceed to demonstrate this fact by interrupting and talking over one another, not listening, blaming, attacking, and trapping one another with examples from the past. Each is sure they are right and waiting for the other to admit being wrong and apologize. While all of this is going on, their emotions get hotter and hotter. In a very short time they are each hurt and angry. This is a fairly common picture of what happens when two egos collide. It's the opposite of what is needed to stay in love and happy with one another.
Being soul mates depends on a way of communicating that goes beyond talking about the routine aspects of daily life. Sure it's important to keep one another current on things that need to get done, scheduled appointments, social events, and the latest happenings with the children and so on. Sharing these custodial details keeps the family enterprise running. But if your communication stops there, you're in trouble. What will keep you and your partner emotionally in sync and then passionately "in love" is communing together.
Communing together happens when you open up and talk about what's going on inside of you at a feeling level. Hopes and dreams, frustrated desires, doubts, fears, large successes and small victories, flashes of insight, moments of gratitude, unexpected joys and disappointments are all, when shared together, the stuff that bonds partners together as soul mates. Feeling understood and cherished, supported and encouraged comes when you reveal yourself without any pretense. It's here at this deeper level of sharing together that lasting passion begins, and it's also where couples often lose touch with one another.
The kind of talking and listening that you and your partner need to do happens when your judging, critical ego is out of the picture. Then and only then is it safe to share your inner personal experience. It's in the sharing of this inner private world that you reveal yourself and invite your partner to know you as no other does. This level of communing together is only possible when your ego is not part of the conversation.
By now you know that your ego, as a misguided way of protecting itself, likes to judge and blame; it likes to play things close to the vest, revealing as little as possible. Your ego cannot help you hold up your end of a heart to heart, soul to soul conversation. It is not cut out for the kind of sharing that will get you and your partner emotionally in sync, feeling understood, supported, and accepted.