Relationships take work.
This point is a corollary to the last blog. To understand this point, I’m going to have to explain something I was taught in my psychiatry residency called the stages of relationship. I can’t take credit for developing these stages, and my research revealed several people with similar ideas. Credit is due to Marty Tashman, Susan Campbell, and Jackie Black for their work in this area.
The stages go like this: stage one is “romance”. We all know what this is. It’s in nearly every Disney movie ever made. All is wonderful. Your mate is in tune to all your needs and you’re nearly euphoric with love.
Stage two is called “disillusionment”. This is where your partner starts to lose some of their luster. They don’t do everything like they should; in fact, they’re downright annoying sometimes. Most casual relationships will die here.
The next stage is called “misery”. Oh, my God! You are chained to a direct descendant of Genghis Khan or Lizzie Borden. Your partner is one of the foulest people to ever crawl the planet. How in the world could you have ever been seduced into this relationship? The thought of one more day with this person is repugnant.
Ah, yes. The misery stage is aptly named. Nothing seems bearable. This is the stage that drops the bomb on most marriages (although many don’t get past disillusionment).
The next stage is called “maturing”. Finally, we get to what it takes to make a relationship work. Each partner has to mature, that is, they have to make changes within themselves that they can live with that make the relationship better. This is very hard. If you remember back to my blog about ego, you’ll know why. Every time you have to change something about yourself, ego screams NO! Then it cries, then it pitches a fit, then it screams some more. Ego always tries to make itself bigger, not smaller. But smaller it must be if you are to have a true marriage. This also applies to relationships with friends and family.
If you have persevered, if you have shaved off the big ego, if you have stayed with it through periods of darkness and despair, then you can emerge at the fifth and final stage of relationship. It’s called “relative happiness”. The key word here is “relative”. Yes, you will be happy. But it won’t be the kind of happiness you expected way back in stage one romance. It will be grown up happiness based on real life and real people, not illusions and self-indulgent fantasy.
You might be asking yourself if it’s worth it to go through all that to get to relative happiness. Well, based on my personal experience and the experiences of thousands of others who I’ve seen in all those different stages of relationship, I can say without a doubt it’s worth it. And it’s worth it for two reasons. The first is obvious: relative happiness. You’re happy with your partner in life, your friend, your parent, whoever, and you don’t have to tread that road again. Once you get to stage five, there’s no going back, baby. But here is another reason it’s worth it to make to stage five: you will be a better person for it. You will have carved away those parts of your ego that weren’t really necessary and found a balance between your needs and someone else’s. You will have learned a lot about yourself including what you can and cannot tolerate. And finally, you will see in real life the confirmation that all hard work is finally rewarded, and that the reward, though often unexpected, is almost always better than we imagined.
