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A huge part of our work as relationship therapists is understanding how couples navigate transitions. Jay Haley, famed family therapist, noted that most psychological problems happen as the result of challenges effectively transitioning from one stage to another.
At the risk of oversimplification, as relationship therapists, we explore four types of transitions with couples:
Role transitions.
Remember, a long-term relationship plays multiple roles, such as emotional connection, administrative and financial collaboration, co-parenting, and sexual exploration.
These are the most frequent transitions, as a single conversation between two people may touch on two or three of these different domains.
People move in and out of these domains at different paces; we most often observe this when it comes to sex through desire discrepancy. Desire discrepancy is when one partner has a more immediate transition into sex (spontaneous desire), while the other partner depends on more time, space, and other variables (responsive desire).
Desire discrepancy is not limited to sexuality; it happens with every other domain that a couple might experience, such as emotional connection and administrative work.
Geographical transitions.
The different roles that we play happen in different geographical spaces, and require us to do three things:
Do whatever we need to do to leave a particular location.
Transit ourselves to the new location.
Do whatever we need to do to adjust to the surroundings of the new location.
The Gottmans address this through their exercise partings and greetings. They invite couples to spend 5-10 minutes before they part for the work day to talk about what they’re looking forward to about the day and what they’re most anxious about regarding the next 10 hours of their lives. They also invite couples to spend the first 5-10 minutes following work reconnecting as a couple about what they enjoyed about the day. They encourage couples to start with relational reconnection before moving into other roles the relationship might play (i.e. co-parenting, division of labor, etc.)
Julia and I are experiencing a much larger version of a geographical transition as we’ve ended our two year visa in The Netherlands and are officially stateside. I’m especially aware of the transition given that it’s 5 AM as I’m writing this and I’m wide awake; my body has no idea what time zone it’s in. We’re living in some temporary housing for the next four months before arriving at a more permanent location. Yesterday, Julia and I spent an hour walking around our new town to the grocery store and a local coffee shop. I cooked and cleaned the kitchen yesterday, but the kitchen is an extension of the living room, so Julia and I figured out that there’s really only room for one person to cook and do dishes. Julia identified homes for our various suitcases, developing a system that allows us to simultaneously find clothes and other basic necessities and not trip over said suitcases.
Relationship evolution transitions.
The function of a relationship changes throughout the lifespan. We’re thankful for our friend Ellyn Bader for her work with the Developmental Model for Couples Therapy. We’ll talk more explicitly about Ellyn’s work in future Substacks, but here is a brief summary of the five stages:
Bonding. A relationship develops around commonalities, from shared activities to mutual traits, preferences, and life goals. In long-term partnerships, especially those that involve sexuality, the first 18-24 months of a relationship are dedicated to exploring what those commonalities are.
Differentiation. At a certain point (the two year marker is an average time for this), you become disillusioned with your partner. You see and acknowledge some of the funkier, uglier parts of your partner, and disclose your own versions of those to your partner. The relationship has to determine whether these differences are detrimental to its long-term existence. If the couple determines the differences aren’t detrimental, and choose to continue the relationship, each person has to make decisions about alterations to their lifestyle and worldview they’re willing to make to accommodate these differences. This is where the bulk of couples therapy happens.
Exploration. While you are making adjustments that acknowledge the differences within the relationship, you are also trying to figure out how to maintain your own sense of personhood independent from the relationship. You develop your own friends, your own interests that don’t include your partner. As we’ll talk about tomorrow, in a best case scenario, you root each other on in this process, and eroticism develops from coming back together after doing the cool things that each of you independently do.
Reconnection. At some point, typically much later in the relationship and given the space to explore one’s individuality in the context of the ongoing relationship, you determine that there are common interests and preferences between the two of you. Perhaps these are similar to the initial commonalities that bonded your relationship, or perhaps they’re completely different. Couples connect around these commonalities with a different depth and energy, one rooted in a deeper knowledge of self and other.
Synergy. I highly recommend reading Peggy Kleinplatz’s Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers. Kleinplatz interviews folks who have been married for longer than 25 years and report high levels of enjoyment in the emotional and sexual components of their relationship. She describes the characteristics of these relationships and what makes them successful and connective. While couples at all stages can incorporate elements of magnificent sex into their relationship, synergy acknowledges the decades-long trial and error experiment that these couples have undergone, often experiencing high levels of conflict along the way.
And that’s before, as we’ll talk about next week, we get to the relational markers that our society acknowledges, most notably, weddings.
Stage of life transitions.
Last week, in the article Five Questions that I Wish Stephanopoulos Would Have Asked President Biden, I commented on one of the dumbest questions George asked the President: “Are you the same man that you were when you took the office three and a half years ago?”
I would have answered the question: “Of course I’m not, you numbnuts. Even in my 80s, I’m continuing to evolve and see the world differently.” I won’t be running for office anytime soon.
We are not the same people that we were three years ago. (And if you think that you are the same person, tomorrow’s Substack is especially for you.) We are consistently responding to events in our lives that are beyond our control and gathering new information about ourselves and the world along the way. Our bodies experience changes, sometimes in conjunction with a monthly cycle, and sometimes in conjunction with the ebbs and flows of aging.
And that’s before we throw other people into the mix, such as partners, our parents, and children. Children develop at much quicker paces than adults do, which impacts the larger family system.
New people enter into our lives, sometimes in the form of seven pound wailing newbies, and sometimes in the form of serendipitous connections with other people. People leave our lives, sometimes through relocation, and often through the permanence of death.
And the adjustments needed to make larger transitions, such as the death of a parent, impact the ways that we navigate the daily role transitions.
Tomorrow’s Substack
Transitions require a high amount of flexibility and openness, something that our brains, whose primary goal is to keep us alive, often struggle with. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how to develop more flexibility and openness in your life through the concept of self-expansion: the ability to seek out new experiences and perspectives, and to do so in the context of an ongoing relationship.
For Today:
Transitions also require some structures that can help mark the end of one experience and the beginning of a new one. As I mentioned earlier, take 5-10 minutes with your partner before you go to work today and tomorrow and ask the following questions:
What are you most excited about today?
What are you least excited about today?
What can I follow up with you on when I see you tonight?
And when you get home, give yourself a few minutes to settle in (shower, be in a dark room for a few minutes), and before you move into any other tasks, like parenting or housework, take 5-10 minutes with your partner and ask the following questions:
How did the thing that you said I could follow up with you tonight go?
What are you most proud of about today?
What are you most looking forward to about tonight?
One more thing. If you liked today’s article, please share it with others, and invite them to subscribe to Relationship 101:
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia