The 5 stages of love

It is estimated that the “falling in love” stage lasts from 6 months to 2 years. There are 4 more stages in the typical love relationship as outlined by Susan M. Campbell in her book The Couple’s Journey: Intimacy as a path to Wholeness. Based on interviews with over 100 couples, Campbell describes the 5 stages that every intimate relationship tends to go through.

The five stages of relationships

If relationships can be seen as a path, a discipline rather than merely a way to get our needs met, then we can navigate the journey in a different way. Each stage carries with it a Task and a Pitfall.

1.           The Romance Stage

This stage lasts from 6 months to 2 years and then ends as quickly as it began. We experience love in its most immature form - infatuation. We only see our partner’s light side. Our brain is drugged at this point with feel-good chemicals. We see our partner through rose-coloured glasses. We need the blissful feelings at this stage otherwise we may not bond at all.

The task at this stage is visioning and bonding. Seeing what’s possible in the relationship and forming the bond necessary to make it happen. How are we similar? Do we want the same things? Do we have a similar life purpose?  It is here that the intuitive voice comes into play telling us whether this is the right relationship for us or not.

The pitfall to overcome is that we can become so addicted to the feeling that we are afraid to talk about the differences. We don’t want to wreck the romance. We put our best foot forward and don’t reveal our negatives. We also don’t really want to see the negatives in the other person.

2.   The Power Struggle Stage

The drugs wear off and we wake up one morning next to a stranger. The highest percentage of first marriage divorces happen here - around the 3-4 year mark. The illusion that “romantic love will last forever” falls away. Feelings of disappointment and anger set in. We now only see our partner’s differences and flaws.

Also at this stage, a well known aspect of adult attachment style comes into play. Essentially, we have three primary ways we attach to people. Anxious (Pursuer), Avoidant (Withdrawer) or Disorganized (Rapid switching between the two). We all have combinations of Pursuer and Withdrawer within us, but we generally lean towards one.

The pursuer is quite aware of feeling disconnected and wants to immediately resolve the bad feelings. They often use tactics such as complaining, pushing, demanding answers, instructing their partner how to say or do something better.

The withdrawer typically suppresses and numbs out bad feelings, particularly those they don’t feel          can be fixed or solved.  They often use tactics such as dismissing, minimizing, pushing for the positive outlook, getting quiet/shutting down, blowing up in order to get space.

The pursuer wants to stay and keep talking whereas the withdrawer wants to be left alone. This has been dubbed by some as “the dance of death” in a marriage. The pursuer chases, the withdrawer runs away. After awhile, the pursuer sees no gain in this merry dance so stops pursuing. It is then that the withdrawer misses the attention and feels unloved. So the withdrawer becomes the pursuer until the other is won over. Once done, the partnership resumes its original roles and things return to the original stalemate.

The Power Struggle stage can last from a few months to many years. Some people stay stuck in this struggle for their entire marriage. They either break up and very often encounter the same situation in their next relationship. Or they survive through the pain and frustration of a stuck relationship that is no longer growing.

The healthy option is to navigate the power struggle stage and get past it. This is easier said than done and often needs professional guidance. It’s too easy for one partner to quit halfway because it feels like too much hard work.

The task at this stage is to own up to things about ourselves. The partner is often mirroring parts of ourselves that we have disowned, our shadow, parts of ourselves that have not been resolved. The job is to recognize that there are things we need to learn about ourselves. We need to face aspects of ourselves which the power struggle is forcing us to confront. There is an opportunity for both people to heal old wounds. We can learn to give the other person what they need and ask them for what we need. We can learn to be intimate but also be ourselves. If we are open to this and can see the relationship as a pathway to our own personal growth and spiritual development, then we are able to establish harmony by learning to fight fair and accept life as it is.

The pitfall to overcome is that it is hard for us to maintain the original romance. It can become a love/hate relationship where we want to win the power struggle rather than overcome it.  

3.   The Stability Stage

This stage begins with the experience of forgiveness. We give up trying to change the partner and making the relationship “work.” We learn from our conflicts and develop a way of working together. We learn that differences are not for fighting over but for learning from. Many couples don’t get to this stage. They stay stuck at the Power Struggle stage. 

The task here is to accept responsibility for our own dark side. To accept what is in the relationship  for us to learn from. We need to own what we are blaming the other person for.

The pitfall to overcome is stagnation because of an avoidance of conflict. We’ve had our conflicts and we want to avoid future conflicts. The illusion of peace and comfort can come at the cost of further growth.  

4.   The Commitment Stage

Here we truly surrender to “what is” and to the acceptance of the human shortcomings of the relationship. We are no longer trying to change our partner but we are also no longer trying to be agreeable all the time. We are able to love the person but hate something that they do. We are able to challenge and question the other without returning to a power struggle stage. Here we focus on the ability to make choices within the relationship. We also accept that there are some things we are not going to have and we learn to value what we do have. We give up our picture of how the relationship should be.

The task here is the acceptance of the relationship as it is rather than as it should be. Also the acceptance of our own ability to make choices within the relationship.

The pitfall to overcome is the illusion of separateness. That is, we are doing OK as a couple so we don’t need to concern ourselves with the world beyond us. Too much focus on the relationship and forgetting about our relationship with the world.

5.   The Co-Creation stage

Here we learn that we are not separate but interconnected with all human beings everywhere. We are able to extend the feeling of human unity and offer it to others.  We can often engage in shared creative work aimed at making a contribution to the world. This stage can help to integrate our vocation with our relationship. That is, realizing our talents and our partner’s talents and blending them in a way that we can offer something to the world. This can be starting a business together, producing a creative work, volunteering or just blending our talents in such a way that we can offer people something worthwhile as a couple, such as safety, a listening ear or entertainment and fun.

Campbell says that out of the 100 couples she interviewed, only about 10 had reached this stage.

The task, as the name suggests, is using the dynamics of the relationship to create something that neither of us could create alone. On the journey we start as Me, then expand our identity boundaries to form We and finally we dissolve those boundaries and reform them to join with everyone else. The payoff is to experience that this is an addition to ourselves and to our relationship rather than a loss.

There is a pitfall even at this stage which is to focus so much attention on “the world” at the expense of the relationship.

The final step means to move outside our own little kingdom, however uncomfortable that feels, and to enter the greater arena of humanity where everything and everyone is connected and to fully participate in that.

There are many pathways to wholeness and one is through relationships. That is why marriage is a sacrament in religion – a pathway to God. We can use the challenges within our relationships to start an alchemical process which can transform the nature of the relationship. To move through the fire of personal desires and open up to the divine law within the sanctity of our own inner experience.

In this type of relationship, things may appear to be unfair, or not equal in the transactional sense, but deep within we know there is a reason why we are participating in this relationship – and it is ultimately selfish on a spiritual level. It’s all about us – our growth, our development, our ultimate higher good. And from the perspective of the spiritual universe, if it’s like that for us – it’s like that for the other. When that is no longer active, the bonds loosen and fall apart. That is when people realize they have nothing more to offer each other and they would be better off – both of them – pursuing another path. However if a relationship has achieved this level, the opportunities for growth are endless.

The conflict between security and freedom

In relationships, people generally tend to choose the secure relationship over the passionate, heady relationship. This is why most men do not leave their wives. While the affair is exciting and passionate, they do not want to give up the security of their marriage, families and associated social standing.

This is interesting as most motivational speakers tend to encourage us to follow our passion for a happy and meaningful life. Except in relationships. We are encouraged to follow our instincts for trust and security for long-term satisfaction. 

Overall, most of us compromise by opting for security at the expense of full self-expression. But it is unsatisfying and is often compensated for by a subconscious acting out of our personal urges in stealth. This is where the compromise for the security of social standing, a reputable persona and the rewards of that are often put at risk by the dark underbelly of a secret life, whether it be sexual acting out or the self sabotaging behaviour of addiction or compulsion.

There is always the dark side in us. Our shadow selves. What we are managing is the conflict between the opposites. The opposites that exist in our expression of the ego. Settling for security in a relationship and seeking for excitement in an affair is an attempt to satisfy both aspects of our nature. We cannot seem to balance the opposites in one relationship so we take aspects from another relationship to attempt wholeness. There are two journeys. One is the surface journey of attempting to find wholeness from an array of different experiences. The other is the depth journey of going deep enough to find the wholeness within each experience.

I recall watching a documentary about classical ballet, where the artistic director said, “you can change jobs and professions and try to find the varied aspects of experience to make you feel like you haven’t missed out, or you can follow one path to its very depths which will unearth all the richness and variety of all experience”.

The path to one’s authentic self is the depth path. We can search outside ourselves and find bits in all our outer experiences, with work and with people, or we can search within and realize that we actually contain all those aspects within our own being.

Staying ourselves while maintaining connection

Within relationships, the challenge is to balance our need for security and trust with our need for individual self expression. This is a large part of the work in relationship counselling. It is called differentiation while maintaining connection. It is the struggle to remain connected while holding on to our sense of self as a separate person and being able to tolerate the same in our partner. Being able to see them as a separate human being rather than as an object. It is accepting differences between us without judging them and seeing them as the enemy.

This is the main source of couple conflict - and the main source of all human conflict. It is seeing differences between us, feeling anxiety about those differences and then defending our positions. To be differentiated means that we can tolerate the tension that arises from differences and remain firm and grounded within our own individuality.

There is no true connection without experiencing the other as separate. There is a paradox at the heart of this dilemma as there is in all our dilemmas. To ultimately see everyone as One, we first need to see them as separate. First we individuate, become fully ourselves. Then we differentiate, recognize that we are different to other people and that they are different to us. We can then connect with them beyond the battleground of our personal lives. Finally we can unite with the All within the larger context of our lives.

True connection does not happen on a personal level. That is enmeshment and co-dependency. A fusion between us within our own little kingdom of the ego. But the ego eventually determines that the other is a threat to us because of our differences and therefore is a threat to our security. We only truly unite with others within the larger context of our lives, the larger kingdom, the transpersonal realm, where our true self does not see others as threats but as additions to ourselves.

It is not enough to just understand that our partner is different. We also need to have empathy for their difference. Otherwise their difference makes them the enemy. Where we see others as separate without this empathy, they are seen as wrong, evil, inhuman. This is when we go to war with them or want to exterminate them in ethnic cleansing. So it is not just becoming a separate person, it is being separate but maintaining our connection. 

When we are in the romantic stage of a relationship, we are fused with our partner. We are extensions of each other. We cannot see them as different. Then, as we move into the power struggle stage, we start to see their differences and are afraid of them because we see them as a threat. They could leave us. We might be abandoned. They could stop loving us. The opposites are at play here as well. On the one hand, we could be abandoned if we are too different. On the other hand, we could get swallowed up and lose our sense of self if we are too much the same.

This is not the stage where we see our partner as a separate person in their own right. We just see them as different and the differences are a threat. We fight about our differences. We take things personally because it is in the personal battlefield that we are engaging. And if we cannot see our differences with empathy, which takes us beyond the personal realm, bitter struggles ensue and finally we go through a nasty separation which affects not only our lives, but the lives of our children and often extended family and friends.

Standing back from the personal and observing our partner from a larger context with empathy forms the connection between us. A connection not built solely on similarities but on an acceptance of differences knowing that at the level of the All, we are all the same, human, entities plodding along on this human journey sometimes blindly and sometimes hurting others and ourselves.

This understanding is most important at the power struggle stage of a relationship. The way out is accepting our partner as a real, separate person and recognizing that our anger is about grieving the loss of our fantasy about them and the relationship.

The dangers of love are that it touches our very core and changes us in ways we are not ready for. We feel a lack of control. So we opt for our fantasy of love and use a myriad of defences to keep our allegiance to it.  

The truth can seem to hurt ourselves when it makes us confront something about which we’ve been in denial. We’ve used all the defenses because we do not want to see something as the truth, although at a deep level, we know it to be true. In the recovery movement, it is often said that recovery is in direct proportion to the degree to which we are able to be honest with ourselves.