Stages of Relationship Difficulties and Growth

Relationships usually evolve through various stages, starting with limerance and infatuation, then through dificulties then eventual growth. Where is your relationship currently?

Stage 1 - Pursuing and Romance (usually first 6 to 12 months)

 -  You are both feeling exciting, feeling loved and supported, and are awakening to new possibilities and potentials in each other

-  Your focus is on enjoyment (dates), intimacy (getting to know each other), and pursuing and/ or impressing each other (showing your best self)

-  Much time is spent on your relationship

-  Your day to day normal life is obscured or slightly forgotten

Stage 2 - Settling in and emerging Shadows

  - As you share more and more life together, less effort is made and time allocated to your relationship

- Unconscious patterns begin to emerge in each of you

-  Taken-for-grantedness start to become more of the norm

-  Power struggles begin

Stage 3 - The Struggle or Sad Resignation

 -  Stage 2 patterns entrench and escalate

 - You tend to polarize as power struggles can worsen

-  You start to feel like strangers and lose that loving feeling

-   Power struggles turn into either arguments and withdrawals, or

    resignation and giving in

Stage 4A - More of the same

 -  Duller routines become more of the norm

-  There are more regular or worse arguments or fights, or 

-   One partner avoids by being over-involved in work, hobbies, drinking etc 

-   There is a sense of sad resignation and diminished expectations for the one giving in all the time 

or Stage 4B - End

 -  One partner ends the relationship, or

-  One partner looks elsewhere, has an affair, and then ends the relationship

or Stage 4C - Real Love emerges  

 -  Each of you look at your own patterns, and how you are contributing to the problems

-  Each of your takes action to let go of your patterns and/or adopt new healthier behaviours

-  Each of you takes a stand for those things that are dear to you, and manages the anxiety that goes with this

-  Real respect grows for each other as you witness your partner taking these steps.

-  Real appreciation and love emerge in each other, a far deeper truer form than ever felt before.

Stage 5C - Ease and Flow

 -  Each of you begins to appreciate and support the essence of each other, and compassion start to bloom

-  A genuine mutual creativity develops

-  Conflicts may still appear, but become absorbed in a larger version of yourselves.