Do you find the stages in a relationship a little... fake?

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wisdom right here

I dunno, would you stop listening to songs because they always have a beginning, middle, and end?

I'm still surprised by the various ways the different relationships in my life manifest. Maybe a lot of them do follow the same format, doesn't seem to happen to me though.

Maybe you're responsible for the 'fake' element, the going through the motions. Do something that doesn't feel fake, make things meaningful.

no, i don't agree with you, moog, i think i know the feeling, although the word might not be fake....i think i would say"ridiculous"actually. I chose my husband, told him within the first month we were going to grow old together, and asked if he minded. he said he wanted the same thing, we moved in together. being both on the spectrum helps bypass the ridiculous stages.

Okay, but I'm not sure which part of my post you disagree with.

If Jerry Springer had found out about my wife and I he would have devoted a week long special to us..... We have been married for 14 years now, but had an on and off relationship for 10 years before that... sometimes off for a few years.. love, dating and marriage do not follow logic and in our case went through a totally different set of stages...

oh, yeah, i was only referring to the part where you say it's the person fault if it feels fake...if you act all naturally like i did with an NT you'd be burning your chances at a relationship, so you sort of have to follow the steps if you want to date them...i think.

People talk about "growing old together"...

I guess the novelty and lack of experience of working with those emotions lead to 'young' love feeling much more intense and memorable.

I've mastered the first 3 stages.
Yes it seems hard to believe anybody could live such a cliche more than once without learning not to. I was recently reading something about the attraction>reality>disappointment thing.....they said that the warning bell was that in the attraction stage some people seem to lose sight of the fact that they hardly know the other person yet they think and dream about their new relationship as if all their hitherto unrequieted needs would at last be satisfied. This was referred to as "narcissistic needs." It would be interesting to know how many people are like that.

It seems to be a problem for me, because like I've said, I've never got over the disappointment after reality has set in. What seems to be missing from the list is reconciliation, which for me would have to take place before stability and commitment could set in. I've been surprised at how I can still find myself ignoring new partners' "faults" (i.e. stuff that I'm going to hate) right through the honeymoon phase, even though I've known about the problem since many relationships ago.

This is pure conjecture, but I suspect there's an evolutionary force at work here which drives people to be exceptionally tolerant so that reproduction can take place relatively unfettered. But modern humans may place more complex demands on their mates, we rarely just follow our animal instincts and get on with it.....possibly we think, intervene and romanticise too much instead of just seeing a sexual partnership as a way of producing healthy sons to help with the hunting and farming and care for us in our old age. But we can't turn back.....I for one want the romance, which is quite scary because I'd have a hard time defending the romantic mindset if you told me it was pure hokum. Isn't realism the only thing that works in the real world?

I also think that some of the problem is caused by the other partner, because they too frequently treat a new lover unsustainably well, which raises expectations. Granted, couples will give each other marvellous attention at first and then turn down the heat so that they can continue to deal with the rest of the world, but the "cooling off" process might not be discussed if the partners aren't aware that it's part of the process that needs sorting out carefully.

My only hope for myself is to redouble my efforts in hanging on to a healthy skepticism during the early stages of romance. I've had relationships in which that's backfired because if I voice my skepticism too loudly, it seems to have been taken as - well, being unromantic. And my attempts to hold back on having sex until we got to know each other were never successful. Early sex is just asking for trouble, if your sexuality is anything like mine (seems to create prematurely strong feelings of bonding and hypersensitivity to anything hurtful) - your disappointments are going to shake you a lot more.

But what I've gone and done is to either cave in and have early sex (presumably because of my own animal instincts and my failure to stand my ground), or to simply remain "platonic" friends for too long when there's been ample evidence that it's more than platonic - in which case the ladies have eventually moved onto other guys. I could have made things a lot better if I'd just talked to the women concerned about where the friendship might be going - probably I've been stopped by a feeling that the standard NT mating game doesn't work with that kind of openness, there seems to be some expectation for the guy to chase the girl and initiate sex after reading the subliminal signs without spoiling the thrill of the chase by bringing the couple's intentions out into the open. The other thing that stopped me was probably that I'm not good at leading discussions - I'm much more reactive than proactive, and tend to wait until somebody raises a topic before I give my views......that's probably why I've made well over 2000 posts here but have started only a handful of threads myself. Or maybe I'm just a coward.

You mean for the same reason I don't kill myself knowing my life will end someday?

My issue isn't so much that a relationship has a beginning, a middle, and an end--it's the crap that people do or believe in to get from point A to point B and their seeming unawareness that they can skip all the crap and still have a pretty good relationship with someone.

Yes, I should have made this an NT thing. Then I probably would've gotten a lot of "I don't get it either!"



It's pure hokum.

er.....no it isn't....at least.....oh damn.....see I told you what would happen.

^ word.

I guess that's why they say best relationships are friends first. It cuts out all the 'in-between' crap.

completely agreed. there is another way to cut out the in-between crap, but i would not recommend it for 99.999999% of the population, because the odds are much worse than any lottery. plus it violates most people's morals, i think.

the guy i've been with for 20 years started out as a one-night-stand. we had talked all evening at a party and we both noticed that we connected on a very intense level and we did not want that to stop, so when the night was over we made further contact. we were in an instant relationship, and we also became best friends very quickly.

it's been rocky, but we didn't ever have a disappointment phase, and i think it's because we didn't ever have a romantic phase. we have occasional fights that split the earth (there was despair - we broke up 8 times before we got married 16 years ago, and stable ever since), but we escaped that low-lying sense of irritation and disappointment that seems to be an undercurrent once commitment settles in.

with every other guy i dated, i hit a disappointment phase and bailed out quick.

I agree too I wish the in between stages could of been avoided just glad they are going away most of the time.

I have been with the same guy for almost 5 years. Those stages basically sum up our relationship. We fell in love fast. After 2 months of dating we got engaged and then shortly after that problems started which I would say was the reality setting in. Then we would start to argue a lot and disappointment on his end started to set in as it did with me. The commitment has always been there and it always will be the stability for our case I dont think will ever exist. He and I are very different and will have differences of opinion on a lot of things forever, but we have a lot in common that makes up for it. In a way every time we fight we go back to the reality setting in and disappointment stage but we always come back to the commitment stage.

Every other relationship I have been in before him never made it to the commitment stage. It may of felt like it but in the end it always ended up being in the disappointment stage. No other man could really deal with me or even try to make it work.

Long story short I personally believe in the stages and dont find them fake. I just wish there was a way to stay in the commitment stage and stay away from the others. I just dont think its possible.

Firstly, those steps don't always happen. In movies, maybe, but in real life, relationships differ.

Second, emotions are emotions, no matter what you expect. Relationships aren't logical.