Episode 108: The Stages of a Relationship

Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now, your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. Today we're going to be talking about the stages of a relationship. I think that this is an important topic because I don't think that we really understand how marriage has moved through very natural stages.

So life is going to cause each of us inside the couple to change as we move through these different stages. And as we do and as we change and evolve as individuals, the marriage also needs to be able to evolve. And I think when we're in these stages or moving into a different stage, we don't really realize what's happening. And when we're in it, we can't really see it very clearly or know how to fix it or how to move through it.

I think we also have some expectations that are unrealistic. Like, I think it's unrealistic to be married for 20 years and then want to feel butterflies every time you see your partner. Right? You want to feel that. All the feelings of falling in love again after you've been together for 20 or 30 years. Like, I don't think that that's a realistic expectation once you understand where that whole butterfly feeling comes from.

And as we naturally move through these stages, no one told us that we really needed to reevaluate and renegotiate how we function inside of our relationship. Right? We come into relationship and we create ways in which we interact and ways in which we function, and that starts to feel good. And then we throw kids in there, and then we throw jobs and careers and businesses. Then we throw a move across the country in there or losing parents or someone we love.

Like, we throw life circumstances in there, and we're still operating on the old operating system because we haven't updated it. It's sort of like, you know when your phone is always saying, like, time for an update. I'm going to update it tonight when you're asleep. So imagine you're still on the first Apple operating system, but trying to run it as if it's where you are today or what you need from that device today, it just doesn't work.

And so I think that that's what's happening inside of our relationships. But once you can understand these stages, this is going to make more sense. Now, I know most of the people who listen to my podcast are in these later stages where they've Been married for at least 10 years usually, although not exclusively, and all the way through the empty nest years, and maybe you've been married for 20, 30, more than that years.

So I'm going to spend a little bit more time there. But we do need to talk about these earlier stages because I think it'll help give you some insight into kind of how you got to where you are. And hopefully you will give yourself a little bit of grace, because again, no one told you about this. So you're just sort of living and learning as you go. All right, so let's begin in the dating phase.

If you can think back to when you were dating the person who is now your spouse and how you are feeling and how you engaged and kind of who you were and what you valued, right? What you paid attention to, those times when you are dating and you're falling in love, it feels pretty effortless, right? Because you're learning about your partner, you're really approaching it from a place of real curiosity.

And I bet it feels easy to understand your partner. And I bet you might really feel understood by your partner during that dating phase. You probably agree on many things. You probably laugh at the same jokes and the same people probably annoy you, right? And this is us at our best. This is us trying to woo and keep our partner. So that's why when every once in a while, someone will ask me about, you know, their dating partner or something and how it's going.

It's not going well in the dating timeframe. I'm like, look, this is them at their best. It's not going to get easier, it's not going to get better just because you get married, it's going to get so much harder. So this is us showing up as our best, and that's why things feel much easier. This is also the place where it's easy to navigate being part of a couple and also being an individual.

Because you're not yet married, even if you're committed, you're not yet married, you may not be living together. In this phase, we get very focused on finding the right one, like the one that I'm gonna marry, right? And sometimes what we consider to be the right one, we base that on the good times, when we really should be basing it on the bad times, like, who is this person when the stress is really high, when there's a lot of challenges, right?

When they really get squeezed, what comes out, that's really what we need to base lifelong decisions on about a partner. But again, no one told us this. Falling in love is a documented brain state, my friends. Here's what I mean. Dopamine floods the body and the brain. And if you hooked up a brain scan to you when you're falling in love, it would look very similar to a coke or heroin addict either on drugs or seeking their next fix.

It is literally a documented brain state. Which, by the way, falling in love, that's what's happening when you're dating. It's also what's happening when there's an affair, right? So that's why sometimes we think it feels like a drug or something that we can't pull away from. Because literally, chemically in the body, that's what's happening. Also, once a person is in love, they're cautious. Critical thinking pathways in the brain shut down.

So all the red flags that we should have seen, that we did see, we explain away. So that's the whole dating, falling in love phase. Now let's move on to engagement. Now, this is still like you're living in the fairy tale here, right? Because now you have these big dreams about the wedding and about your future. So you're filled with love and you're filled with hope and how you think it's going to be.

And you're probably, if you said yes and you're engaged, you're excited about your future with this partner. Desire at this phase is still strong because you're planning a future together. So there's sort of embedded into where you are at in your life some degree of adventure and what's unknown ahead of you and even some spontaneity. So desire is still really easy. And many people view this phase of getting married as the finish line.

I view it as like the starting gate. And I think if we would have more conversations about that, like, this is when things really start. It's not like, oh, now you found your person, you can check that box, you can check that off your list, your life list of things you want to do. So engagement is also like, you're still like living in a fairy tale to a certain degree.

And that's why that time is going to feel very different than later on after 20 years together. Okay, next is when you're newly married. Newly married is when you are learning who your partner is in the context of marriage. Now there's going to be some things that you didn't notice before that now you're noticing. And there's going to be some things that your partner did that didn't bother you before you thought they were Cute.

Now they're kind of bugging you, right? Like, if you thought your partner was super charming and you love that they were always the life of the party, like now it might just kind of irritate you. I remember a long time ago, a friend of mine from college, she'd been dating this guy in college, and so I knew both of them and I thought he was hysterical. Like, I thought he was like the funniest guy.

And they got married, and I don't know, it was probably like a couple years into their marriage or something. I remember talking to her and I said, you must just laugh all the time. And I was sincere. And she goes, oh, yeah, all the time. And she rolled her eyes. And that's because the things that we. That sort of endeared us. This is where it starts to not be quite as endearing because it doesn't align with our expectations that we don't even know we have, much less be able to communicate that.

So sex is still going to feel pretty natural at this newly married phase. And we assume that it's going to be that way forever. And inevitably it isn't. I think you're going to stub your toe a little bit as you're learning to dance with one another, but you know that this is all new. And so you both give yourself some grace as you're trying to find your way through being newly married.

So this is where obviously you need to spend time together, where you create rituals together. Like maybe it's a weekly date night or it's how you do birthdays or your anniversary, like some kind of ritualistic thing that sort of bonds the two of you together. You might create things together, you might cook together, you might build a home together. Like the act of creation can also bond you together.

You'll realize how important communication is and how important compromise is. This is where you're going to get your real first taste of it. And this is the perfect time to get equipped with some real tools is when you're newly married. But when you're newly married, there's no real big problems. So you're not seeking answers to problems you don't have. So most people aren't out there seeking tools. Right.

Someone who's been married a year or two probably has not found their way to my work yet, but one day they will. All right, next comes what I call inner rhythm. And so this is, call it two to three years into your marriage where you two have learned how to operate and how to function together as a couple. This is the first time you're going to have to navigate being part of a couple and being an individual.

It's harder to then maintain your individuality once you become part of a couple, because now you can't just, like, make an impromptu decision to go have dinner with people after work without at least notifying your partner. Like, you now live in combination with another person. So you need to consider their perspective on your plans. So this inner rhythm, you're going to start to feel a little bit inflow in terms of your life.

And there's going to be hiccups, of course, but usually the hiccups don't last. But this is really the point where when you're two to three years in the giddy romance, the butterflies, all that, it does start to calm down a little bit. The chemical hormonal cocktail in your body is not so much dopamine. And you sort of settle into a more calm, relaxed, comfortable place with your partner.

And at that point, most of us don't think that that's a bad thing. We think that that's a natural thing that happens. Then we're like, let's have kids. So then we bring children into the relationship, and this is the first major change, major and lasting change for the marriage itself. So my dear niece, who has three children, when her children are young, she called it the fever dream.

And I think that there's. There's no better way to describe what is happening during that time is like you're still moving and you're still operating through your life, but you. Some of it, you just don't remember the details of because you're not sleeping a lot, you're stressed, you're distracted, you're worried, like being a new mother, particularly motherhood. So motherhood literally alters the human brain structurally, functionally, and in many ways, irreversibly.

That's from the book the Female Brain by Luanne Brizendine. This is going to be the most challenging time that you two have as a couple sexually, because women will have less interest in sex, not just from a physical perspective, but also because the positive feelings that she used to get from intercourse and orgasm, she is now getting just by taking care of her babies. If you looked at a mother's love like a mother looking at her child, call it a baby, an infant, young toddler years, and you hooked her brain up to a brain scan, it looks the exact same way as romantic love.

And her dopamine levels are elevated. And so this is one of those reasons why for a mother we get all of, we pour all of our time and attention and focus and love and energy into our babies, not just out of necessity, but out of those dopamine hits that we get. And that can create some challenges for the marriage itself. I think this is the most challenging time that you will have in your marriage and it's going to create new challenges that if you don't address them in your marriage, then those challenges are going to stick around for the next several decades and they're going to continue to impact your relationship.

But again, no one told you this, right? When you were reading the books about what to expect when you're expecting. There probably wasn't a lot in there about the ways in which you're going to need to renegotiate or reevaluate your marriage during this time so that you two don't lose the connection that you need as parents and as a couple. This is the time when most of us stop investing in our marriage.

We invest in our kids in a big way, but we stop investing in our marriage because there's only so much of us to go around. And most women during this time are pretty challenged with prioritizing their husband or prioritizing their marriage. They think it should be unnecessary because there's so much else to do with the kids. And they'll even resent their spouses if they need, if the husband needs anything from the wife because there's so much on the mother's plate.

And I think we also, very, maybe naively, but it also comes from a good hearted place of there will be time for us as a couple later, but right now we need to focus on the kids. But I don't know when that time is and there is no real clock on it. And sometimes that's decades later. This would be the time to add some structure to your relationship.

And that's like, you know, weekly date nights. And that can look any way. This is the time where a little bit can go a really long way in terms of keeping the two of you connected. Once you put the kids to bed, you have 10 or 15 minutes before you start getting ready for bed or you just fall asleep or you turn on the television for the two of you to connect, right?

It's 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the day. But if you didn't do that then that you're going to find yourselves being somewhat disconnected during these fever dream years. And both of you are probably going to be thinking, well, it'll eventually get better. This is just a phase but the problem is that that disconnection doesn't automatically go back to reconnection. That has to happen with some intentionality.

So this is often when we grow apart, we feel like neither of us are really getting our needs met inside the relationship. And because we're not getting our needs met, we start to feel some resentment towards our partner. And then those resentments start to mount. So this is a time that you got to get clear on your roles. Like you got to write down here's all the things that have to be done and here's who's responsible for doing those things.

And my friends, you got to make it someone's job to tend to the marriage. No one tells you that either, do they? Like, ideally it's the non front row parent. But someone is tending to making sure that we stay connected as a couple. Because when we are connected as a couple and we feel strong and we feel secure, isn't that going to make our children feel more secure?

Right. When their foundation is solid, don't they feel more secure? Don't they feel safer and long term? You being in a healthy, loving, connected relationship shows them what marriage and love can look like. But when we pour all of our efforts into them and we neglect our marriage, what we're showing them is that's what's going to happen as soon as you have kids, you lose that connection as a couple and that's what's to be natural.

And then they learn that love and marriage is filled with animosity or arguing or two people that don't even really like each other. Like we show them what love and marriage looks like. And then lo and behold, their marriages start to resemble ours. Just like some part of our marriages resemble our own parents marriages. And so the same thing is happening for our children. But many of us don't do that, right?

We don't prioritize any degree of our marriage when we're in the fever dream years. But then we get to a place of what I call breathing room. So for everyone, this is when kids are at a different age. It depends on your kids, it depends on you as a couple. But let's say that your kids are 7 or 8 right now. It's not any longer about, we need to make sure that we keep them alive.

Now they're starting to become a little bit more self sufficient. Certainly by 10, 12, 14, they're becoming more and more sufficient. But this whole phase becomes what I call the breathing room phase. Where there's a, there's, it's not as much intense focus on the kids, or at least not as much is required in terms of intense focus. But certainly it's still an enormous part of your life. However, if you didn't create structure in your marriage during the fever dream, you gotta do it now.

Like, you know, when we're telling ourselves this is just a phase, there will be time for us, there actually is time for you in that breathing room phase. But you gotta use it. And most people don't do that. This is a time to rebuild desire because it's not gonna magically just reappear, right? We've got to rebuild that connection. And when that starts to feel hard or we start to think, well, it should just magically be there, then that's when we start to question the marriage.

So it's really in that breathing room phase that now we've sort of come up for air and now our partner feels super disconnected from us and we don't know how to bring it back. This is the time that couples should be working on their marriage, but often we don't. The average couple will wait six years in the struggle before they actually seek help. And so by then, now you have all the fever dream years and at least six years into the breathing room phase of where these challenges have been there and the resentments have been mounting and the disconnection grows wider now the marriage is in trouble.

So this is the place where it's going to require a great deal more conversation between the two of you. So if you haven't gotten good at really communicating and working through challenging times and repairing upsets, it's really going to bite you in the butt here. Because the decisions are much more complex as the kids get older and the arguments tend to stick a little bit more and the ramifications of those arguments tend to have a deeper result.

So it's really important. This is the time when you both are going to need frequently physical touch. And I mean non sexual physical touch. But if you're feeling disconnected, you don't want to touch your partner, and you've gotten out of the habit of holding hands or touching each other in, in non sexual ways, you're going to have more time and space together. And my best advice is to use it right.

So many people will just, they'll only go on vacation when it's a family vacation. God forbid they take a weekend away with their partner on a consistent basis. And so of course the relationship is challenged. You got to keep date nights, you got to have something that feels adventurous or spontaneous, like it can't just be the same thing day to day. One or both of you is going to become very, very bored.

When we take fun and adventure out of the equation. And I think we get so busy that we're like, who has time for fun when fun is an important part of staying connected as a couple. And if you don't turn back towards each other during this breathing room phase, the marriage will be vulnerable to an affair. This is when it happens. Okay, so your marriage is a living, breathing thing.

You are either moving closer together or you are moving further and further apart. And so the more that we don't take care of the marriage, it just becomes a heavier lift. The longer we wait, the heavier this becomes. And so this is certainly a time to renegotiate and to create new shared goals, a new vision together for your marriage and at least one common interest that the two of you can do together to try to reestablish that connection.

That can be going for bike rides, it can be walking the dog, it can be cooking together, it can be. But there needs to be at least one thing that you do together. Because if you haven't taken care of the marriage during these other phases, then what's going to happen during the breathing room phase is that you two are going to start operating more and more independently where you live under the same roof and you sort of function really well as roommates or co parents, but you do not function well as a couple.

Right. And the ways in which you spend your time starts to look very, very separate from one another. All right, now the last phase is the empty nest years. And I bet you had a vision of what your empty nest years were going to look like. And this probably isn't it. At least not if you found your way to my work. So the kids are now leaving home.

They're still dependent, but maybe not as dependent on you. Certainly not as they were when they were much, much younger. And here's the thing that I want you to realize and why this is so important. It's not just about the kids. It's also about you. Because you've poured so much of the last two decades into your children and into your family life and home life, that maybe there wasn't a lot of space for you as an individual, and now there is.

And sometimes that can feel really good. I think at first that sounds really exciting, but it's not always exciting. Sometimes it's terrifying. Sometimes it's just like it feels like an emptiness that you don't know how to Fill because you've been getting your energy from your children for so long that now to create energy for your own life within yourself feels like a foreign concept. And so then there's this feeling of just disgruntlement, just irritation in your own life, and you don't know how to bring that back.

You don't realize that you need something now for yourself and for you as a couple. So many people are discovering who they are at this new phase of life. Like now you're late 40s to mid-50s, you are not the same person you were when you got married. And so it's time to sort of reintroduce yourself to yourself and to one another, because you need to discover who you are as a couple at this stage in your marriage.

And so, of course, it's time to renegotiate again, because the things that worked for you 20 years ago are not going to be the same things that work for you today. And what you wanted 20 years ago is not what you want today. And that is normal. But we've got to be able to normalize that and talk about it so that we can renegotiate and create something new that is really healthy and productive for both of us inside the relationship.

If you didn't invest in your marriage, in all these steps that came before, and you just figured it would take care of itself, the emptiness years is where you start to feel really hopeless, because that distance is now so wide, and your partner feels like a stranger, feels like a roommate, and feels like not enough for what it is that you want in your life today. Now, the other thing that is very real and very relevant to our relationships is that in those empty nest years is also when our hormones are changing for both men and women.

So for women, our estrogen is declining, as does our testosterone, which is the rocket fuel for our sex drive. So that's one challenge. But the other, with the estrogen declining, means that all that caretaking that we did and wanting to tend to everybody else and please them and make sure their needs are met, we're not really interested in that anymore. We're finally interested in pleasing ourselves. But that can be very disorienting for our families who have never seen us that way, and they don't understand what's happening.

And for us, when we're feeling like, hey, it's time for me to please myself, that can make us feel very selfish. So then we feel guilty or we feel a little rebellious about it. Like, I've put my life on hold for 20 or 30 years. Now there's time for me. And so now it comes through, like, with a little bit of aggression, and that can create some upsets.

So women's oxytocin during pre menopause and post menopause is also down, which means we're less interested in emotions and we're less interested in keeping the peace and keeping harmony in the family. Right. We might really want to dive into something new, because at this point in women's lives, as their hormones are changing, it doesn't mean that they're slowing down. It's actually a difference between men and women. Where men, their hormonal changes cause them to slow down a little bit and become a much gentler, kinder version.

Where women's changes in their hormonal cocktail make them sort of dial up what they want to create and what they want to do in their lives, which I think is really exciting. But if you don't understand that dynamic, then it just feels like a lot of change all at once that you're both trying to navigate and wade your way through without any real understanding of what's happening. And so men's changes, their testosterone and vasopressin are also declining.

The oxytocin, which has a calming effect on the brain, that is increasing. And that's what's ushering in this kinder, gentler man who you might see become a little bit more affectionate or a little bit better of a listener, maybe a capacity for greater intimacy because they're past that phase of trying to prove themselves and trying to climb the ladder and know where they are in the pecking order.

They really, at this point, they really just value their family and the people that they love. And I think what I would tell you about those empty nest years is that it's not over. And it doesn't have to be over for your marriage either. Just because it doesn't look the way that you thought it would, or because you might have lost your way in the process. You can find your way back to one another and have a much richer, deeper, more meaningful relationship that isn't focused on making sure that everyone else is tended to.

This is the time that you do have for the two of you to come back together, should you both want to be able to do that. I think you know one another better than anybody else does on the planet. I think at this point, you've been through a lot of challenging things together, and I think you've built some amazing things together. There's probably human beings on this planet that would not exist had the two of you not decided to come together and try to love one another the best that you can.

So it's an important time to see if you two can find your way back to one another if you lost your way. And I want to begin where I started with, which is you got to give yourself some grace. Because I bet as I went through this, you were like, nope, we didn't do that. Yep, we didn't do that. We made that mistake. Yep. Didn't do that either.

But how are you to know. How are you to know that this would be the outcome of really struggling in your marriage and maybe ending it after 20 years together because you didn't take care of it along the way, doing the things that you needed to do? It's easy to see in hindsight, it's just not as easy to see when you're in it. And because at the beginning, we're not seeking answers to challenges we don't have, we're just doing the best we can.

You are doing the best that you could, and so is your partner. And so here we are, and now we get to figure out where we go from here. So regardless of where you are on this continuum, it doesn't get easier if you keep putting it off and waiting to see if the two of you can reconnect. And, you know, how you know if the two of you can reconnect after feeling disconnected is you genuinely try.

You get equipped with real tools. You apply those tools consistently. You get equipped, like, you know how we're talking about how you didn't know what you didn't know. Well, now you know. So now what are you going to do with this information? So let's get you equipped with real tools so that then you can apply that to your marriage so that then you can figure out, can we reconnect and not go back?

This is about going forward. Can we connect as a couple, given who we are today as individuals, can we evolve this relationship to a new place that feels good for both of us or not? And if you do genuinely give it your very best shot and it cannot evolve beyond where it is and that doesn't work for you, then, my friends, you do have an answer that you can make peace with, but the way that you know is that you genuinely try.

Okay, until next time, please take really good care if you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a Truth and Clarity session with a member of my team. On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage.

Go to clarityformymarriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarityformymarriage.com.