Romantic relationships require different things at different stages… Most people are not aware of these stages and even less that what the relationship needs evolve. Additionally, the partners have different needs themselves as the relationship progresses and as life unfolds… To treat all of this as a static phenomenon is highly ineffective and dissatisfying in all. Give yourself and your relationship the right kind of attention.
In a nutshell, there are 3 stages of relationship according to Harville Hendrix and Hellen Hunt’s Getting the Love You Want:
~ The Infatuation Stage ~ The Power-Struggle Stage ~ The Conscious Stage
In each of these stages, the partners experience each other very differently, and how they choose to show up and invest in the relationship determines its success…
Some partners are naturals at being in relationship and hardly notice that they are investing in its success. They just invest in their relationship, their partner and their love.
Yet others, consider relationships an enigma. They struggle finding a partner, keeping a partner, and/or creating a radiant and successful relationship.
Of course, most people and most relationships fall somewhere in the middle of that range.
Regardless, they all go through at least the first two stages to varying degrees…
STAGE 1: The Infatuation Stage
In this stage, the partners meet and they fall in love. They are attracted to each other because a there is a sense of familiarity and comfort about each other…
This is when they show up with their social mask, showing what they believe to be socially acceptable, how they believe they should be in a romantic relationship, and what the other might want… They show up with their best foot forward, they do all the nice things, and give all the time and attention…
This is where the Love Cocktail starts coursing through the body, that makes the partners want to spend as much time with each other as possible, can’t but think of each other, have a hard time sleeping and eating, and experience other disruptions to life as they know it… Though it feels amazing, this natural high is not sustainable…
Eventually the partners need to get back to regular life, and they want to share that with their newfound blessing. So, they make a higher level of commitment.
They decide to be exclusive, then to move in together or get engaged, then possibly get married.
Depending on the nature of the partners and what they’ve created so far, each higher level of commitment can be triggering…
STAGE 2: The Power-Struggle Stage
Once the partners start making higher levels of commitment, that’s when they enter, and revisit, the power-struggle stage. The higher level of commitment invites them into a twilight-zone of sorts.
Where they feel so comfortable and familiar with their significant other, that the unconscious mind gets a little tripped up. It can no longer experience their partner as this other person that they love, but rather experiences them as an aggregate of their own caretakers growing up…
Any unresolved issues, wounds, sensitivities, internalized messages and believes, and such are part of this equation…
So, when the partners are trying to create their new life together, they both want to make sure past hurts, disappointments, frustrations, and limitations don’t repeat themselves…
They are both on the lookout to get their own needs and preferences met… Which are usually in conflict, they are seemingly in opposition, because of the nature of the attraction in the first place! Have you heard that opposites attract? Exactly.
This creates the power-struggle… They partners get stuck trying to be seen, heard, valued, appreciated, and getting whatever else they need above all else. Otherwise, they experience a sense of existential death… As this is too painful, the partners keep looking out for themselves first…
They might not even be aware of this- even those that “sacrifice themselves” are still doing it for themselves… Ouch!
At this point the relationship can be so painful, that it might not make it. Sometimes the partners figure it out enough that they minimize the pain making it tolerable to stay. They still struggle though, and question the relationship and the partnership from time to time…
Then there are others, that decide they want to have a radiant and successful relationship and that are willing to put in what it takes to make it happen. Yay!
STAGE 3: The Conscious Stage
As soon as that decision is made, the couple enters the conscious stage. They now know that their relationship, its status, and its flavor is a choice.
With this comes a sense of freedom and empowerment, for then the partners can create anything they want…
Investing in learning more about the nature of their power-struggle, how they loop and recreate dissatisfying patterns, is key. For understanding what is driving their dynamics helps them be proactive at addressing the root causes, healing and reprogramming as needed.
It is a gorgeous and satisfying investment that creates a deeper and more meaningful connection between the partners. This is the first step in creating their epic love affair. Bringing intentionality into their interactions, their lifestyle, and their collaboration in a magnificent culmination of the expression of their love.
What’s needed at each stage
As with anything for something to thrive it requires tending…
The Infatuation Stage – To enjoy dating and progressing to seeing each other and then to going steady (like that language? LOL), the key is to show up as authentic as possible… This is the time to be open, vulnerable, and passionate. Show all of you the best you can. This doesn’t mean sharing your darkest secrets, fears, and tribulations on the first couple of dates…
Get a sense for each other first. Then you can share your history more in depth… Without knowing your heart, your details might be scary to the other… In context and with your essence anything is surmountable… Keep it light and fun, but super authentic.
The Power-Struggle Stage – Once you start moving into more serious territory, you will find that you will start to experience conflict. Such is life. This is the beginning of the power-struggle. So don’t get too serious too quick. Learn each other a little more before you jump in with two feet. Once you start experiencing conflict, know that this is actually a wonderful thing…
Conflict is happening for you (so you can continue to evolve), is not happening to you… Recognize your pattern in there if you can (or get help!), and bring a ton of compassion for yourself and the other person. Armed with curiosity, resilience, and compassion you can start creating a conscious relationship…
The Conscious Stage – Just making the choice to address your patterns, makes you a conscious person. Woot! Bring this understanding to your relationship. Share what triggers you without blaming the other, without making them responsible or wrong, without putting pressure on them. It’s not their job not to trigger you.
In a more committed relationship being intentional at not triggering each other and compassionately addressing triggers when they do happen is how you create a sustainable and wonderful relationship.
And, working at meeting your own and your partner’s needs on a consistent basis is how you heal and reprogram yourselves making you less triggerable in the first place.
At each stage there is a specific focus that when tended guarantees more harmony, peace, joy and love in your life.
Wishing you all the joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: Do you need support taking yourself, your relationship, and your life to the next level- actually living a healthy, happy, harmonious and overall abundant life?
Copyright (c) 2023 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication? Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
Often times partners don’t know how to nurture their relationship… They are at a loss for how to show love, how to create connection, how to sustain and deepen connection. But though challenging, stimulating and ever so rewarding, creating the relationship we desire doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it can be quite simple… The key is to action love… We know that love is a feeling and a noun, but we might forget that it is also a verb…
We have to show up with our love in our thoughts, in our choices and decisions, in our speech, in our responses, and in our actions and habits. And, of course we have to invest in doing loving and nurturing gestures.
Our lives are so hectic that when we look at this it might feel like a lot of work… You might find yourself thinking, Who has the time to put in this much into a relationship?
The thing is, this is the wrong way to look at things. Nurturing and enriching our relationship is not work. This is the tending and watering it needs to flourish…
It’s funny how we have all of our maintenance schedules to run our lives- like oil changes, teeth cleaning, replacing filters and such, but we consider giving our partner attention and love “work”, too much effort, and too time consuming… Talk about having our priorities backwards and a messed-up mindset!
Loving Thoughts, Choices, and Decisions
By now, I’m sure you know that we are electro-magnetic individuals, spirit beings living in a human body… This simply means that we are actually primarily energy, beyond the meat suit or bag of bones we observe…
This also means, that as energetic beings we are impacted by energy and impact with energy. And, this means that the electric current generated by our nervous system, impacts our heart beat, which in turn impacts the magnetic field generated by our heart… Then, this field in turn impacts everything around us and beyond…
Getting to the point, all this means that what you think, creates a current in your brain that has a cascading effect to manifest your relationship and your life.
Your thoughts, generate feelings and your estate. You can choose how you look at something, what meaning you assign it, how you interpret it, what you make of it… You can choose to have loving and understanding thoughts, and give grace and compassion, or you can choose to pass judgement and blame, and to criticize and control…
You can make decisions that are considerate, thoughtful, generous, nurturing… You can choose what kind of partner you want to be and show up with your Loving Self…
Loving Speech and Responses
It is hard for us to have wonderful and productive conversations if we don’t use our communication tools and skills, if we go in with a messy mindset, and if we are trying to win and be right. We can have much better conversations when we show up with love and compassion. When we try to understand the other not make them wrong…
We get much further, increase connection and intimacy when we are mindful of how we show up to interactions, how we choose to address things, and how we choose to respond.
I know it’s more difficult to do when we are triggered, or get triggered mid interaction, but this is where the tools and skills come in to mitigate and support you in doing all this much better.
There is never a good reason to just let our partner have it. Or to unleash our wrath on them. Or to go for the jugular. Why on earth would we want to treat the most important person in our lives, our Life Partner, this way? It truly makes no sense…
Even when they have done something wrong, hurtful and the like. It still behooves us to show up with our Best Self, so we can properly address the wrongdoing, our feelings and our needs…
Nothing good ever comes from adding insult to injury… If we are triggered, then we soothe and take care of ourselves first, then we properly and effectively address the thing… Everybody wins…
Loving Actions and Habits
As you might be able to infer, when we operate from a higher estate, when we take the high-road, life is truly much easier and more magnificent… This allows us to stay operate from our Higher Self, our Loving Self, our True Essence… No longer from our little, victim, symptomatic, ego driven self… This is massive!
When we choose to flow from our awesomeness, all the relationship work is fun, exciting, rewarding, easy, desired… It is no longer “work”, it is just being in a relationship and playing with our partner…
From this place is easy to be nice, to do loving behaviors, to show up warmly, to be supportive, to do things for our partner, to build in Connection Habits. To prioritize the relationship and our partner.
This is where we show our partner that they are important to us and we value them…
Lovingness and Nurturing Gestures
And then we get to step it up! Then we truly Action Love… Then we sprinkle all the nice gestures, we woo, we flirt, we date, we play, we spoil, we cherish and so on…
This is where we create the brand of us. This is what makes us special. This is where we treat our partner us our King or Queen. This is where we go all out. This is where we show up with our love and Being Love…
For then, everything we say or do comes from love and is loving…
Wishing you all the joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: Do you need support taking yourself, your relationship, and your life to the next level- actually living a healthy, happy, harmonious and overall abundant life?
Copyright (c) 2023 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication? Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
If you are like most people, you think that you can think your way out of your problems, situation, and issues… And you are right but not in the way that you imagine… Your circumstance is not a logical puzzle to be resolved… It is actually a creation of your habitual thinking that can change as soon as you change your perspective…
When you change your perspective, your feelings also change. With new feelings you create a different circumstance for yourself… Use the power of your thoughts to change your life…
I know that this is a significant shift in most people’s approach to life. Most are still muscling life to the ground to make things happen. They are grinding away, using old school principles to create the life they want… They are measuring success by old standards, as with the dollar as if it was still based on the gold standard…
But what if success and riches are actually measured differently now? What if they are measured by energetic currency? And, that this currency is what makes our life amazing… That this is where all the abundance is… Peace, harmony, joy, beauty, love, freedom… And, yes, this translates to financial riches as well…
The Key Is What We Focus On…
Remember what we focus on grows… We can get stuck in whatever state of being we are in if we are not mindful and intentional about it:
~ Some are stuck in not feeling well, being ill, and working the system. This person’s mindset, habits, and state of being, their feeling state, is riddled with pessimism, victim mentality, blame, jealousy, and envy. Their negativity bias is strong and they are in survival mode…
~ Others are more positive and empowered, they are accountable and responsible, they take charge of their situation and work hard to create what they desire. They believe in themselves, they are disciplined, and have strong will power. They operate from motivation…
~ Then, we have others who are like the motivated counterparts above but don’t operate from effort and grind. They are much better at self-regulation, they generate energy and wellbeing with ease, they flow and operate from inspiration. They have higher levels of awareness and impact…
Depending on where we are on our journey, we tend to operate more from one or another of these estates- Victim Self, Motivated Self, Inspired Self…
These states are fluid, we are not stuck in any of them per se. We can operate primarily from a motivation state but can get triggered and drop down, or we can access a great feeling state and get inspired and move up…
The more we move up in these states of consciousness, and the more we practice at being in the higher states, the better we feel and the better our life and relationship/s become…
Change Your Relationship and Your Life
To create the changes we want all we have to do is be mindful of what we allow to rent space in our head. Thoughts create feelings. Feelings lead to the habits and actions we take… This is how we create our life…
If we clean up our thinking we generate better feeling states that are more empowering, motivating and inspiring… These lead to better decisions and behaviors…
~ This is how we take better care of ourselves
~ These is how we show up better to our relationship/s
~ This is how we do meaningful work
We can generate better feeling states in other ways as well – movement, exercise, physical intimacy, pursuing our interests and the like, with self-love and self-care practices. These are challenging to do though if we get in our way with our thinking and can’t bring ourselves to do these things you see…
Same was for generating good feelings within ourselves. We can just grab the sense of these feelings that are already inside of us but that we are not attuned to… They are just a part of who we are, just because we are… They are part of the Universal Consciousness, Unity Consciousness, Love Consciousness. But most walk around blind to this truth…
We can easily access good feeling states if we so desire, choose to, and practice tuning into them.
We can easily access better feeling states by letting go of making a case for our limitations, for our circumstances, and for what we believe is possible… When we are open and Align, anything is possible…
Depending on where you are, clean up your thinking to move ever so slightly into the next higher level of consciousness. That is really all it takes. That tiny shift is a shift, and it starts to make the magic happen…
~ If you are in victim mentality – maybe start to see how you contribute to your situation…
~ If you are in the grind – maybe start to see how replenishing yourself makes work play…
~ If you are in inspiration – continue to cultivate this and share it with others…
This is how you create your radiant and successful relationship, and meaningful life…
Wishing you all the joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: Do you need support taking yourself, your relationship, and your life to the next level- actually living a healthy, happy, harmonious and overall abundant life?
Copyright (c) 2023 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication? Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT has been in the mental health profession in varying capacities for the past 20+ years. She is the Founder and Director of metrorelationship.com a psychotherapy and coaching practice specializing in working with busy professional and entrepreneurial couples who are struggling getting on the same page and feeling connected. The work helps couples create a radiant and successful relationship and meaningful life by becoming a strong partnership and increasing their connection, intimacy, and fun. Emma is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Relationship Strategy™.
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