The 4 Crucial Stages That Can Make or Break Your Relationship
There are three brain systems for human mating: lust, romantic attraction, and attachment. Dr. Helen Fisher’s research defines the way we understand human relationships today. Any brain system can initiate a partnership, and each phase has its own set of hormones and emotions. Because each phase evolved for reproduction, it brings distinct benefits as well as obstacles to lasting intimacy.
Your relationship may move through one or all of the stages outlined below, and often phases blend. In the healthiest long-term relationships, partners experience lust and romance deep into attachment. By learning more about brain chemistry and evolutionary function, you can discover how to make the best of the different phases. You can also watch for signs that indicate the end of a relationship.
Stage One: Spark Definition
The initial attraction you feel is lust. Lust covers everything from attraction at “first sight” to the decision to initiate sex. (For some partners, these moments may not be so far apart!) This stage is driven by estrogens and androgens, hormones that regulate sexual development.
According to Dr. Fisher, sex drive motivates people to select genetically fit mates. While this purpose would not limit someone to one mate, chemistry drives people toward long-term attachments, as well.
What first attracts people to each other? Scientists have studied the ways people are programmed to assess genetic fitness. People make these judgments quickly, so signs of genetic fitness are physical. For instance, women prefer symmetry in their partners. One study found that we are biased toward people whose height matches our own. Most of these traits must be observable when you first meet someone, whether they are a co-worker or a stranger across the bar.
Benefits
Sexual satisfaction sustains relationships. Women who have regular sex experience improved self-esteem, decreased depression, pain relief, and more. A happy person makes a better partner.
Advances in endocrinology also teach us that sex releases oxytocin, a bonding hormone that leads to partnerships. Scientists learned this from the rodents known as voles. The prairie vole mates for life, but the related montane vole prefers one-night stands. Can you guess the difference? The prairie vole’s genes direct the release of oxytocin during sex!
Challenges
This all sounds great for your relationship, so how could this stage pose a problem? There are obvious issues if you don’t feel attracted to your partner or you are sexually incompatible. But strong lust can also prevent relationship growth.
While our partner’s physical appearance matters, we only need our partners to be attractive enough. Our partners do not have to be the most physically attractive to provide other qualities, like kindness or sense of humor. If you are driven by lust in this stage of the relationship, you may not see that you and your partner are misaligned. For example, you may have political differences or conflicting attitudes about raising children.
Reflection
To take your relationship to the next level, learn more about each other. Let yourself feel swept away, but keep your core values in mind. What matters to you most? Ask yourself if the great sex you’re having is blocking your ability to see yourself or your partner clearly.
Stage Two: Romance
Definition
Romance consists of sharing past life experiences, tastes, and values with your partner. You may feel nervous on dates. Maybe you trade endless texts late into the night, feeling a burst of energy every time the phone lights up.
Dr. Fisher and her team define romance by feelings of exhilaration and craving. These feelings occur because of heightened dopamine, a neurochemical that activates the same reward system in the brain as drug use. The body requires dopamine to make the hormone norepinephrine, which is responsible for the high heart rate and flushed skin that romantic love and the fight-or-flight response share.
Benefits
Most art about love concerns this relationship stage. When people say they’re “in love,” they’re usually referring to this stage. The choices you and your partner make at this stage will depend on your attitudes about romantic love, which could be influenced by your culture, your parents, or past relationships.
While experiencing the excitement of new love, you may casually date or you might call your lover boyfriend or girlfriend. Whatever you choose, romantic love feels full of potential. In fact, it feels so eletrifying that polyamorous individuals refer to a new experience of romance as “ New Relationship Energy.”
Challenges
According to Dr. Mark Knapp, most relationships won’t progress beyond this stage. What gets in the way? For one, the body experiences romantic love as a stressor. As the stress hormone cortisol rises, the mood stabilizing neurochemical serotonin drops in response. Thus, the passion of this stage comes with fear and anxiety. Some people have a difficult time tolerating these emotions, especially if they have unhealthy stress coping mechanisms.
An extreme version of this anxiety is known as limerence. Dr. Dorothy Tennov, the psychologist who coined the term, defines it by longing, compulsive thoughts, and emotional dependence. Yikes.
The majority of people do not experience this extreme romantic attachment, but those who do may be influenced by the patterns of their earliest caregivers. With limerence, the object of affection might be an idealized version of someone involved in unhealthy attachment or trauma. Romance becomes an overwhelming desire to “fix” the insecure attachments or abusers of the past.
Reflection
Even if you are not experiencing limerence, an unhealthy dynamic can be at play. Our limbic system consists of the parts of the brain that control our most ancestral emotional responses, especially ones like feeding and nurturing that keep us alive. Our earliest caregivers teach us what survival looks like, so they have a big impact on our limbic system’s development even if they are unstable or imperfect. We become attracted to people whose love is familiar, not necessarily people whose love is best for us.
Being honest with yourself and healing the past can be one way to reinscribe healthier limbic attractors. Many people report more satisfying or lasting relationships after receiving therapy. Therapy can be part of a self-care regimen that allows you to mitigate relationship anxiety with healthy coping. It can also help you attract the right people for long-term relationships.
Stage Three: Attachment
Definition
During the attachment stage, the brain releases oxytocin, the same hormone that plays a role in lust. Attachment is calmer and more secure than the romantic and lustful stages of relationships. Because attachment evolved to ensure that people stick around long enough to parent, many shared behaviors are associated with this stage. This can involve moving in together, sharing assets, or co-parenting.
Benefits
Attachment is a maintenance phase that begins about one to two years into a relationship. In early attachment, passion can still be very strong as the apprehension of romance abates. Neurochemically, dopamine is released as cortisol decreases, meaning we experience more pleasure and less stress. Arriving at this stage could strike a very pleasant balance between passion and security. Attached couples may feel like they can weather any storm together.
Challenges
Just as early life patterns can direct romantic love, they can interrupt the peace of secure attachment. The work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth paved the way for the theory that our maternal ties inform our adult attachment styles.
In other words, separation or unstable care from a mother in childhood can lead to insecure attachment in adulthood. If attachment is insecure, it generally presents as either anxious or avoidant. When two people with insecure attachment patterns are drawn together, an anxious and avoidant type may fail to understand each other and receive the love they need.
Another challenge disproportionately impacts Millennials and younger generations. Smith and Rhoades write for The Atlantic that relationship milestones tended to be more straightforward in the past. Now, the order of relationship events is more flexible.
As a result, couples are more likely to slide through milestones like the decision to live together or have children than they would have in the past. Milestones may become things that just happen, due to convenience or pragmatism, not monumental decisions or rituals. Still, a National Marriage Project study found that couples who ranked their relationship milestones as clear decisions were more likely to have higher marital quality down the line.
Reflection
Most major milestones are likely to occur in the attachment stage. If you and your partner are facing a decision, these studies suggest that intentional discussion and planning will improve the relationship’s chances of lasting. “Communication is key” may be a cliche, but it applies here for couples seeking longevity.
Building awareness around trauma can also help couples understand each other’s attachment patterns. Depersonalization of that trauma can then help partners trust each other.
Stage Four: Bonding
Definition
While Dr. Fisher’s research encompasses three brain systems, there’s a difference between a three-year relationship and a fifteen-year relationship. We’ll call this lasting attachment bonding.
A relationship that lasts more than five years exhibits a shift from passionate to compassionate love. If you are in a bonded relationship, you have probably participated in a commitment ceremony like marriage with your partner. You likely live together, and your children are older and may have their own independent lives. You know each other well, and the people in your social network recognize this.
Benefits
Like in the early attachment stage, passion can still be part of a bonded relationship. However, love becomes a buffer against stress rather than a stressor. You can rely on your partnership to provide this comfort.
A long-term relationship, especially marriage, can encourage fewer risk-taking behaviors, healthier habits, and social connection. In fact, over a century of studies have shown that a strong connection between aging couples improves physical and emotional well-being.
Challenges
Other studies show that continuing relationships will only provide benefits if the people involved have positive feelings about them. One report in The Journals of Gerontology found that relationship quality was more positive over time for people who had multiple partners. If individuals had the same partner, negative relationship experiences increased.
This evidence not only implies health benefits would be lost; it indicates that some long-term relationships may not actually represent the healthy bonding of this final stage. When this happens, it could be that people compromise their values or pleasure at a previous stage, resulting in some forms of satisfaction at the expense of others.
What might cause a long-term relationship to cease being satisfying? Even though desire is a part of many stable partnerships, couples often report losing that eroticism. If you aren’t having sex, the oxytocin- and dopamine-driven reward centers are no longer activated. Therefore, the partnership may be comfortable but no longer feel rewarding.
The Belgian therapist Esther Perel has made her name by explaining how security can douse desire. And yet, as she concludes in her 2013 TED talk, erotic couples know that passion fluctuates and there are methods to rekindle the spark.
Reflection
Perel proposes three ways couples can balance their sense of responsibility with desire. First, they have sexual privacy. They do not share everything with their partner. Second, they understand that foreplay is the core of sexual pleasure and “starts at the end of the previous orgasm.” Little daily flirtations or expressions of care can be part of the process that stokes desire. Finally, erotic couples create a space where they can lose control and play a role that is different from their role in work or at home.
Make the Most of Every Stage
In one episode of the podcast How to Fail, Elizabeth Day interviews the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. He explores the prevailing cultural perception that the end of a relationship is a failure. Instead, he encourages listeners to view romantic relationships as ways of learning what they need to know. These may last or they may end, but the ends are not always tragic.
At the same time, he writes elsewhere that we should not expect a lasting relationship to be perfect. Our partners will “frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us.” A relationship at any stage may fail to meet our expectations in ways that encourage us to grow.
