The Phases Leading to a Meaningful Relationship

Posted by admin on August 14th, 2007 in Advice / How To, Love, Relationships

Love and Relationships (Part 2): The Phases Leading to a Meaningful Relationship

When does a relationship become meaningful, and what does that even mean? That mostly depends on the people involved and what they’re looking for out of the relationship. It’d be useless to discuss any specific activities that occur at any stage in a relationship that might be indicative of it’s progression, and unlike how all of us weened into the world through video games would prefer it, there’s no level summary after you kill the miniboss telling you how efficient your efforts have been or how many secrets you found. In most cases, you’re in the dark constantly, a soldier in the trenches. However, like a soldier, you can look at a map of the terrain, kind of figure out where you might be, and hopefully decide in a direction to take.

Countless upon endless masses of stories come out regarding the beginning of a relationship, how two people meet, how they fall in love, how they get married, etc. ad nauseam. Everybody knows the formula: mutual initial attraction, misunderstanding or obstacle causing one person to feel lukewarm, pursuit by the other person, reversal of positions, and climactic romantic coming together. Nobody needs education on what the proper etiquette of courting is, and those who don’t follow it do so for their own reasons.

However, the education being given, through romanticized stories, sober lecturing, or otherwise, on what to do after the initial courting, is dreadfully lacking. More than half of the population grows up in a single-parent or divorced family. There are essential questions untouched by popular culture:

How to keep a relationship together through difficult times
How to maintain romantic fidelity
How to deal with jealousy and envy between partners
How to deal with not liking elements of your partner’s personality
How to create fairness and equality in a relationship
How to create freedom in a relationship

You’ve heard it a million times to some degree, every relationship goes through phases. I’ll cover the basic ones here before moving on to greater detail and breadth.

1. Chase where boy and girl (or girl and girl or boy and boy) play an elaborate game of cat and mouse. They may switch roles throughout this phase, but basically one pursues the other until both pursue each other.

2. Honeymoon, where everything goes wonderfully. There isn’t a care in the world, everything is forgiven, and magically, everything works out, often with a lot of physical bonding, but more importantly this is where more intimate characteristics of a partner are first revealed.

3. Awakening, when the lust has lost its prior appeal and the dust begins to clear to reveal our two love birds in their natural state, with all their virtues and faults. This is a crucial stage where the couple decides, despite what faults there may be, if they will remain together and work things out, or if they will part ways. But if they do decide to commit to each other through the good and the bad, they lead their relationship onward.

But onward to where? This is where common knowledge for the most part falters. The word mortgage and children are thrown around by many who come to this stage, trying to create some semblance of what their peers and bosses are doing. This is where the relationship really begins. You and your partner will not agree on what to do at this stage.

Let me repeat that: You and your partner will not agree on what to do at this stage. It’s simply a fact of the world, no two people have a completely cohesive uncompromising agreement on what plans and actions should be made at this point, except possibly two people raised in a brainwashing cult from birth. However, it is this exact conflict that will shape your relationship into the next phase.

4. the (more) Meaningful relationship. All sorts of stuff happens here, but you can be sure it’ll have a mix of the honeymoon phase, the awakening phase, and even the Chase phase, as well as a whole lot more.

A relationship is just as likely to fall apart at any one of these stages, or at least the seed of destruction can be sewn, which is why so many view love as a hard game to play. From a logical standpoint, it makes little sense to invest more bullishly into a scenario unless success will ensure a lowered risk in the future. But relationships of love were not made to be exercises in logic in the conventional sense of the word.

Every problem you or anyone will have in a relationship will stem from trying to squeeze the reality of the relationship into a preexisting assumption of what the relationship should be like. Mainly, these problems are things like “I’m definitely NOT doing this.” or “My partner BETTER do this, or else.” Speaking bluntly at those readers who may be thinking, “Are they saying don’t try to build the relationship I want?” Not exactly, don’t force your relationship into a certain mold of what you think it should be, taking hard stances on the dynamic of the relationship, namely what you are willing to provide, and what you are expecting to receive.

So what the hell should you do instead? What activity constitutes “not forcing it” but still doing something about it? Simple, communication. I know what you’re thinking, “I’ve heard that communication shit all my life, forget it.” I agree, most people, often sentimentals simply repeating what they heard once anyway, will say the word “communication” as if the word were some magic nectar they were dripping down from the heavens to the less than worthy. In Part 3, I’ll do the best that I can to explain what is meant by communication.

POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

Love and Relationships (Part 1): An Introduction

Love and Relationships (Part 2): The Phases Leading to a Meaningful Relationship

Love and Relationships (Part 3): Communication

Love and Relationships (Part 4): Independence vs. Relationships

Love and Relationships (Part 5): The Couple’s Accountability System

Love and Relationships (Part 6): Finding the Right Person

Love and Relationships (Part 7): The Clueless Lover

Love and Relationships (Part 8): The Relationships Virgin

Love and Relationships (Part 9): Don’t Give Up!

Finding the Right Person

Don’t Give Up!