The norms by which we organise our relationships are shifting. Photo / 123RF
The norms by which we organise our relationships are shifting. Photo / 123RF
Love, marriage, babies. Modern love is no longer conventional — and that is a good thing, right? Paul Little investigates.
Janet and John, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Valentine's Day is just around the corner and thoughts naturally turn to love and romance and those three little words: I love you.
According to whom you ask, love is many things: on the one hand, it's all you need, in the air and like a butterfly; on the other hand, it's no bed of roses, a battlefield and a dog from hell.
Or so it used to be. Actually, the seldom-heard next three lines of this rhyme might more accurately reflect the current (allegedly) anything-goes nature of relationships.
Sucking his thumb.
Wetting his pants.
Doing the hula hula dance.
These days you have women marrying bridges, zoophilia activism and all sorts going on.
So what, if any, are the predictable stages relationships go through?
Have they changed and how should we adjust our expectations of a relationship to accommodate the inevitable?
According to Google, there are anything from three to nine stages in relationships. Less algorithmically driven experts settle on about five.
Auckland clinical psychologist Nic Beets, who has been in practice as a couples therapist with his wife, Verity Thom, for 25 years, bases his work on a five-stage model for relationships developed by US couples counsellors Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson of the Couples Institute.
Nic Beets and Verity Thom.
Firstly, according to Beets, there is the familiar honeymoon period, technically referred to as the symbiosis stage.
"This is the 'I can't live without you' phase, when we are totally hooked into each other. We fall in love or lust and that actually has a bonding function," says Beets.
Less technically, that is also known as the lots of sex stage. "There is a lot of chemical stuff going on," says Beets. "The same hormones are released during orgasm as in breastfeeding."
Love is indeed a drug and "when you're high it's easy not to be bothered by stuff, so you overlook the differences with your partner.
"This is also the stage where people say things like, 'I don't have to tell you how I feel. If you loved me, you'd know.'
"That's a fantasy."
Love as the starter's whistle for the relationships race is a relatively recent notion. Beets notes this isn't even essential or universal, such as when two flatmates drift into a relationship, or in the case of arranged marriages.
Speaking of which, he says, arranged marriages can work. People going into them have more realistic expectations. "There has been some research in the US comparing arranged marriages, where they are consultative [that is, the couple have a say], with love matches, and divorce rates are no different."
The next stage is differentiation, when two people start to notice each other's differences and have to work out how to deal with them if the relationship is going to go any further.
"This is when a lot of relationships stall — people can be too frightened, so avoid conflict.
Alternatively their fear can make them hostile and they deal with conflict through competition and aggression. People have to deal with their differences and learn to do conflict well."
Beets doesn't like the word "conflict".
"Conflict is what happens in the Gaza Strip," he says. "Really, it just means we see things differently, and there's nothing wrong with that."
But this is where things are likeliest to go wrong. Most who come to Beets and Thom for therapy are struggling with this phase. But if they make it up the first two steps of the ladder, couples enter the exploration phase and start to deal with the world outside their own romantic bubble again.
"It's time to re-engage as an individual with the world. This phase is about being yourself independently in the world but still staying connected with each other."
If each wants to do their own thing — "She's into Gestalt therapy while EST and the rest just make him ill," as Lou Reed once sang — that's okay, as long as it's negotiated and incorporated into the relationship.
"The fourth stage is often a turning back towards the relationship — feeling I'm really solid in who I am and moving backwards and forwards between the wider world and the relationship."
The fifth and final stage is synergy.
"You don't get to that stage without having many years of work together," says Beets. "You can become very good at reading each other and being generous to each other. One of the things that's confusing in our culture is that couples who achieve that look like couples in the symbiotic phase — they are the old couple you see who are still holding hands."
This can puzzle outsiders because they haven't seen the years of work and dealing with conflict that have gone on in stages two to four and mistakenly think those two have been holding hands all the way through.
But do we need to prioritise long-term committed relationships as an ideal for which we should strive? Aren't they just a little … passe?
Not at all, says Beets.
"Long-term committed relationships are a place where our adult development continues to go on.
"There's nothing in the world that will confront you more with your own failings, limitations and strategies for protecting yourself as trying to live with another human being."
Conventional wisdom is that coupledom evolved as a great way to bring up kids.
Beets thinks kids are better off brought up by a group but also thinks there is no better way to force two adults to grow up than being part of a couple.
Senior psychology lecturer and Married at First Sight relationship expert Pani Farvid agrees "till death us do part" is still seen as an ideal, and that anything short of lifelong monogamy is perceived as failure.
Dr Pani Farvid at home in Auckland. Photo / Doug Sherring
"That's a cultural norm but it doesn't mean it's who we all have to be," says Farvid.
It has all got mixed up with morality. We may think we're less moralistic and prescriptive than we used to be but we're not. We're just a different kind of moralistic.
"It's no longer so important whether you're married," says Farvid. "But surprisingly, the ultimate goal seems to be a committed union with 'the one' and everything else falls below that."
The trouble with our cultural, hetero-normative standards, she says, "is they tend to pressure us into some kind of mould that might not be suitable for all of us. We need to rewrite the rules of love and romance and let go of the idea there's one perfect way to do them."
Not that she's espousing romantic anarchy; there are still going to be rules.
"I'm not talking about someone being able to say, 'I want to be in a relationship and cheat on you because that's what suits me.'
"Relationships have to be ethical, consensual and mutual."
However, the norms by which we organise our relationships are shifting.
"The way we've done sexuality, marriage and gender shifts," says Farvid.
"Certain norms limit the possibilities of particular options or human actions. I'm always surprised at how strong a hold the romantic ideology has on us.
"If you're a young woman and culture tells you that you should be married with babies by 30 and it hasn't happened or you're not interested then you might feel deficient as a person or a woman.
"The mould we're supposed to follow is very narrow and we should have more options, more possibilities, more diversity."
Our progress through all these stages and phases is complicated by another newly identified phase in individual personal development, driven by social and economic forces: emerging adulthood, aka prolonged adolescence.
As Farvid explains: "When the baby boomers were 18, they were considered adults and supposed to settle down, marry and have kids after school or uni.
"But in the late 20th century, with increased travel, tertiary education, migration, increasing work fluidity and increased cohabitation and sexual permissiveness, when you're 18 you're now considered an emerging adult and you are expected to stay in that phase until about your mid-20s."
The result is that the "kissing in a tree" stage of development has been prolonged. "For a lot of the people I interviewed for my PhD on casual sex, the ultimate goal was to settle down but they were delaying the process.
Oh yes, sex. "In many marriages or long-term partnerships the three things that are most difficult to deal with are sex, money and how to raise children," says Farvid.
"With sex, you have two individuals, so it's very much about mutual negotiation and working together so both people are happy, something we could do a lot more work on as a society.
"There is very little education on how to have a harmonious sex relationship in long-term relationships."
Farvid says the idea of relationship stages is useful in general but "there are no hard and fast rules".
One of the most important thing about stages is that they are just that — temporary ways of being.
"If people don't move on, it's all over, rover," says Beets, adding that you don't have to both be in the same stage at the same time.
"People are often not exactly at the same stage.
"Arguably one person takes a step in development and creates pressure for the other person to take that step, too."
How can we use this knowledge in our own relationships?
"I think we need to educate our young people that when the 'drugs wear off', the easy part is over and there's a bunch of hard work you have to do," says Farvid.
"It's about dealing with difference and doing conflict well. We need to get the idea across that it's okay for intimate relationships and conversations to be uncomfortable — it can still be constructive."
"This pair bonding thing we do," says Beets, "we do seem to be wired for it. There are people making polyamorous relationships work, but they are very small in number.
"Trying to deal with differences between two people is hard enough; with three or four it's even harder."
So, it's hard at any level.
"There are people who want to avoid dealing with things, because it's painful and difficult, but they're missing out on the growth. You don't get the benefits without doing the work."
For most people, then, the secret of a successful relationship can be summed up in those three little words: get to work.
