5 steps to make a couple
The romantic relationship is a moving process that goes through different stages. From merger to a lasting relationship, analysis of an obstacle course that requires openness and adaptability.
Since this reference work, we have counted the studies of couple therapists who have insisted on the evolutionary model of the state of love. Whether they update three, four, or six stages, this research all agrees that, from love at first sight with edmonton singles to connection to differentiation, love follows a timeline.
This is not to say that all of our love affairs unfold in one and the same scenario; each one enters the couple with their experiences, their weaknesses, their strengths, and it is on the meeting between these two stories that the nature and evolution of love will depend. Then, depending on the time they take before cohabiting or having children, depending on the attention they pay to their relationship, depending on their age too, the partners linger for a longer or shorter time on one or more. the other of the stages of the romantic relationship. Likewise, the transition from one phase to another is not final: there are times of regression, acceleration, stagnation …
However, all long-term loves go through identical stages. Based on the various existing studies, we have defined three. How are these steps the key to a happy and lasting relationship? How do you switch from one to the other? With what consequences? Analysis of the love story is seen as a journey.
Fusion
The signs: “You are the one I expected”, “We agree on everything”, “You and I are one” … Almost every relationship today begins with a passionate attraction. It is intense love, “symbiosis,” according to psychologists Ellyn Bader and Peter T. Pearson. For lovers, each estrangement is heartbreak and each experience shared the opportunity to discover new common points: it seems obvious that we were made to meet.
The advantages: this step is essential for the formation of the couple since it creates complicity. Marriage counselor adds that she is “one of the rare moments in life where you can mature without pain”: she allows you to get out of yourself, discover aspects of life that you don’t. had not considered alone or that we were afraid of. Passionate love gives wings.
The keys: make the most of this honeymoon, because it is as pleasant as it is fleeting. It would last between two and three years, on average. But after? The return to reality is self-imposed and this reassuring fusion gradually becomes suffocating, alienating. The need for air is felt.
The differentiation
The signs: “You are not who I thought”; “I do not understand that you can like this”; “You don’t know what I’m really thinking”. With the cohabitation, the sharing of daily life and the responsibilities to be assumed, the couple comes down from their clouds to confront reality.
The advantages: this step is fundamental since it allows you to find yourself, to reconnect with your own interests and life goals. Without this step, the merger ends up being experienced as a straitjacket in which everyone’s personalities are denied until the crisis.
The keys: air and communication. Getting fresh air means knowing how to get out of the couple to live out your hobbies, serve your professional ambitions. It means becoming “one” again, defining your territory which is not the same as that of your partner. To gain acceptance for this distancing, communication is essential: partners must dare to explain their desires and needs, in order to prevent this differentiation from being interpreted as an escape or a decline in love.
Disillusion and doubts
Sooner or later, most often after about three years, lovers will be forced to come back to earth and see reality in the face, discovering the imperfection of the other, his limits, his faults.
We descend from the summit of “passionate love” to enter the “tunnel of doubt” where we no longer see very clearly. Instead of putting the blame on the other and accusing them, we should then recognize with humility that we had placed them too high and that we dreamed of the impossible, a fulfilling love for ourselves.
Crises to go through
Cohabitation
Confrontation of tastes in decoration or cooking, money issues raised by rents and bills to pay, incompatibility of habits or rhythms of each: cohabitation gives love many opportunities to experience its first crisis.
The challenge: to communicate. At this young age of the relationship, partners often prefer to silence their dissatisfaction, for fear of upset or disappointment. On the contrary, it is by expressing their frustrations and listening to those of the other that they will find the adjustments to be made to improve the conditions of cohabitation.
Children
With the arrival of a child, then two, then love loses its exclusive object, the partner. The crisis threatens when conjugal love is denigrated for the sole benefit of filial love.
The challenge: to increase your love and attention to your partner so as not to leave your relationship short of affection.
Retirement
No more children at home, no more work that regulates the schedule, the partners find themselves face to face. In these “obligatory reunions”, the difficulty will be to relearn a well-established love to regulate its pace on that of the upset daily life.
Stability and commitment
The disappointment of the third stage can become the luck of the couple, an opportunity to take a more mature and realistic look at love because all adult love is a disappointment overcome. Everyone will realize that communication, the conflict itself, becomes a necessary instrument to allow adaptation to each other. Our imperfections will generate progress, we will make efforts, readjust ourselves, accept and respect every difference.
The couple then crosses the bridge of commitment and it is there that it is truly constituted, because what makes the couple is the will that it has to last despite everything, against all odds. It is these couples, who go through painful moments and hardships to get there.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
