Relationship appreciation

One of the cliches of relationships is that, over time, you begin to take each other for granted.  It's portrayed as the inevitable cocktail of familiarity mixed with time.  Humans can adjust to everything, good or bad, and eventually regard even the most wild, amazing, or, alternatively, horrible things as normal.

What should we do about this information?  I mean, this phenomenon is true with everything in life... appreciation of family, friends, job, money, neighborhood, and even self.  Why would lovers/significant others/spouses be any different? 

I see two options.  A) Let it happen.  B) Try to stop it from happening.  Letting things happen is something I hear people talking about all the time.  Inevitability.  Fate.  If something was meant to happen, it's gonna happen.  It's human nature.  It's a sign.  It's a symptom of a deeper problem with the universe.  Strange that such a passive philosophy of life has squirmed its way into our strong free will, capitalist, free market, if you build it they will come culture.  Secretly, some of us are determinists at heart.  We wrap it in a different blanket though... we assume that if something isn't magical, it would be wrong of us to try to inject magic into it.  It would cheapen the truly magical thing, if it were ever found.

Magic, I say, is in the freedom to wrap and inject and infuse magic into everything around us.  Including relationships, including everything else.  We are makers of our own meaning magic.

Kellianne and I have a good system.  We have a built in "don't take each other for granted" system built into her every six week trips to NYC.  It never fails that we begin to miss each other so much that we remember just how lucky we are to have met and not only that but fallen in love and sought a life together.

What are the tools for continued appreciation of each other?  Here are a few that I can think of at the moment.

1. Continue to ask questions about each other.  Each person to remain an topic of great interest to the other.  This includes reviewing the past, imagining the future, creating hypothetical situations and playing them out.  A person is a deep deep world of emotions, stories, theories, reactions, responses, etc.  There is a tendency to think you know everything about a person the longer you know them.  But as life goes on, there's only more and more material to know, more and more changes and twists and mysteries to uncover.
2. Don't create topics that are off limits.  Every topic should be approachable.  If certain topics become declared off-limits by one of the people in the relationship, the other will feel misunderstood or censored and seek out other ways to express themselves.  Affairs usually happen because there's a part of one of the peoples' lives that they don't feel comfortable expressing, and when someone comes around that they can express this stuff to, a secret, stronger, connection is made.  What then?  Why not accept all parts of a person, even if one of the other can't entirely relate or contribute to that part?
3. Remember the whole of the relationship, and the whole of the people in the relationship.  I love going through old photos and things we've written, remembering parts of the relationship, days, conversations, moments, that might have been temporarily forgotten.  As the relationship continues this catalog grows and you might be tempted to only remember a shrinking selection of the past.  But I think it's the breadth and variety of uncensored moments and nearly forgotten times that conjure up the wholeness of the relationship and give it a vivid and powerful quality.
4. Challenge and surprise each other.  Ask for things that you have never asked for before.  Give things that you have never given before.  The thrill of covering new ground, even after many years, is always possible.

I'm still thinking about this... I'm curious to hear if any of this sounds right to anyone else.

I guess the main thing for me is to never think that I fully know Kellianne, or that she fully knows me.  To not be afraid of showing a new side, trying on a new face, or remembering an old face.  This relates to relationship appreciation and life appreciation in general.