Four Stages of Love

I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. Since 1997, I've been coaching powerful, purpose driven, world changing leaders who are ambitious in every area of their lives. My Sex Love Power podcast and my YouTube channel are the go to resources for couples and individuals who want the vision of love they see in their hearts to manifest every day in the ways they collaborate, communicate love and make love. Let's go. So everybody asks, why does passion die in long term relationships? I know an expert on dead passion. No, I'm just kidding. I've asked my husband Kurt to come here today because I'm actually really proud of what we've created through our 27 year relationship. And he and I talk a lot about this, about what we've walked through and what we see in other couples and in the minds of other women and men, respectively. So, so we're going to talk today about the answers to those questions. Why is marriage so hard? Why is my marriage so hard? Is this something that's wrong with him, something that's wrong with me? Are we just not a good match? How do we get the spark back? So if you've ever wondered about any of those questions, this episode is for you.

Okay, so what we're talking about here are the four stages of relationship and just an overview of it and why it's important. The four stages are like a roadmap. So if you take the plane a little higher and look down at the ground below, you can see sort of where you, you are in your relationship and also maybe give some hope about where you're headed if you're in a spot where you're struggling. So there are, there are four stages of relationship in this model and of course this is a model and imperfect. But I think it helps.

We learned it from my mentor, Terry Real. He's the author most recently of US and other best selling books. And just a really robust model of the relationship skills that it takes to go through a lifetime together. One of the other things about looking at things from a 40,000 foot view is that you get to see, oh, we're not alone in this.

Okay, so the four stages in this model are love without knowledge, which is the initial stage of getting to know another knowledge without love, where you get to know them better, which is the reckoning between those two. And then finally a more mature state which is knowing love.

So that first stage we're all familiar with and this is something that people so often talk to me about, like getting the spark back or I just want to feel the way we Felt in the beginning. Often. This is before you had kids. This is, you know, for us. What was it like? We met in a church class, a year long class called the Quest, where we were doing all kinds of groovy things like washing feet. And it was before caller id, so. Right. You were blessing people before you picked up the phone because you really did have no idea who was calling, but there was a curly cord involved. So anyway, we met there, man. There was this cute guy in the class and he rode his bike everywhere. So he had these amazing legs and a dazzling smile and he didn't say much, but every time he said something it was either hilarious or, or it was really wise and sometimes it was both. So I definitely had that sense right away that the hot guy in the Quest class was somebody that I would be interested in if he ever approached me. But he didn't for quite a while.

Yeah. And for you I saw somebody young and beautiful and vivacious and, and just fun. I very much appreciated how sharp your mind was and that you like spoken parables almost and you know, had the relationship you had with your friends and you were committed to sort of good things and you were, you were reading to preschoolers one day a week or something like that, if I remember correctly. And yeah, I mean, just a, just a solid person and connected with you pretty quickly. So that's like love without knowledge. Right. Everybody kind of goes through that and then, and then you get to know somebody and the stage is called knowledge without love. After you've been with them for a while and you see the shadow or the dark underbelly or the patterns, their unconscious patterns or, you know, stuff they may have control over, stuff they don't really have control over, like ADHD or something like that.

Michelle's over here raising her hand or if they're an introvert like Kurt is, and so he just doesn't want to. I remember being in Turkey together a couple years into our relationship. We're on a bus and the sun is going down over the distant hills and I'm looking out the window and I'm like, Kurt, look at that. Isn't that beautiful? And I was probably into however many hours long natter about how beautiful everything was when Kurt just put his hand on my arm and gently said, can we just be quiet for about 20 minutes? And he was so kind about it that it really didn't make sense that I was so shattered. But I realized in that moment, like, oh, I don't even know that I'm having an experience Until I say it out loud to somebody else. He's an introvert. That doesn't work for him. So it's those inevitable places where we bump into each other's tendencies, even if both tendencies are healthy enough. You know, one of us is an extrovert and processes out loud, and the other one's an introvert and needs quiet. That's just the vagaries of living with another human. But then there are other things that are deeper and darker. And father of. You know, one of the kind of forebears of family therapy was named James Framo. And he said in the 1950s, he was picturing couple in bed together. And so, you know, in. In the 50s, that meant you were married. Probably we weren't married yet, but he said, everyone wakes up one day and you look over at the person next to you in bed and you think, I've been had. You recognize, like this. This doesn't work.

Yeah. And the stage is, you know, more difficult than actually we're making it right now in this conversation. It can be longer.

But. But what Framo said. Let me finish what he said, because he said, that's the first day of your real relationship. Because this stage, however long it takes, is where you actually start to truly have a relationship. It's not just a romance.

And so this is where the work starts. It's also where the relationship can start to shut down. I mean, this is a place where the work is done. Right. Knowledge without love, where you're coming to terms both with the person you are with and also, ideally, the. Your own. Who you are in the world, your own patterns, your own unconscious patterns, your working out things in yourself that make it such that you are unavailable for intimacy or connection or relationship or reasonableness.

Yeah. You've got adaptive parts that come out and they want to blast the other person, or when you get scared, they want to retreat. You know, we could talk about some of ours. Like, I was a debater in high school, and, you know, as Kurt said to my debate partner's husband at their wedding, you know, never marry a debater, as good as these two are. Like, I would just go legal on him, you know, talk circles around him, trying to reason my way through disputes that we had. And that doesn't work.

Right. You know, among other things, was avoidant. Very unsettled by intimacy and connection and doing what I could to avoid it. Back off, back her off, get myself out, while at the same time being terrified of being alone. So those are two things, obviously, in direct opposition of each other that don't make for connection. So again, this is the stage where you work this stuff out.

Well, you start to see it right in the. In the knowledge without love. It's where you get disillusioned with it. But this is a really tricky one in our culture because we don't like disillusionment. The American story is always of victory after victory and happily ever after. You know, I think that line comes from European fairy tales, but really it's this notion that there's some finish line that after you cross it, you're in the golden zone. And we tend to think of the wedding day as that, oh, I found you. And if you picked well, then everything's going to go smoothly. But that's never ever the case. If it looks really smooth and you haven't gone through stage three, which we're going to talk about next, the reason it looks smooth is because you found a way to get the disharmony to disappear under the rug. You don't really repair and you just ignore, withdraw, and numb out to the disharmony in your relationship. A truly healthy relationship cycle includes repeated iterations of harmony, disharmony repair, and then you have a period of harmony, and then there's another disruption. And disruptions can look like one person's behavior. They can look like a stressor that hits the relationship, like the arrival of a child or man, one of your children being in adolescence or two of them being in adolescence. What do you think? Yeah, yeah. Or the loss of a child, heaven forbid. And you know, you can refer my last podcast episode for more conversation about that and what happens for people then. But we. Life happens to us, and that's what causes this knowledge without love stage. So we have a couple choices in this stage. We can settle and that is that numbing out. Okay, we're just going to go into the roommate zone and try to numb to the discomfort of who you really are. And what a poor choice I actually made. We can stray, saying, yeah, I still need aliveness, but I'm going to get it from somewhere else. We can split. We can say, okay, we made a bad choice. You're not the one for me, I'm not the one for you. Let's figure out how to parent our kids in two different households and we'll go find somebody who's a better match. And I'm not saying that's a bad choice. Sometimes knowledge does outweigh the love. But that's the question we ask in the third stage. Right? Right. The reckoning in the reckoning.

So stage three is the reckoning. And that is where I think it's an honest look at sort of the imperfections, like the inherent imperfections, like in the human condition. Right. And in us as individuals where I, where I come to terms with and look at my imperfections and work on them. And it's. And then in the relationship, the, it's sort of like the serenity prayer for the relationship. Help me to change the things I can and come to peace with the things that I can't change. Change the things I can and come to peace with the things I can't change. Help me to understand that. So, you know, some things inherent. And I married somebody who is ADHD and is not always going to be tracking things the way I track things. So that's like inherent. Michelle married an introvert and does not process information the same way that she does. That's sort of inherent and it's something to accept.

Well, and can we get really raw? We each married an addict, right.

So, yeah.

So that's not going to change the fact that we're both addicts. But what we have done is turn and look that in the eye and say, oh, yeah. So given that, how we adapted to our genetics and our family histories and our own lived experiences, we both develop these brains that have grooves built for them to go down that track, to use compulsions to get out of the moment, to not feel. And so that did make messes between us. But we've learned to adapt to those and to get into a way of life that has us look at ourselves every day instead of having to look at each other and go, here's the ways that you hurt me. Today we look at how am I living today? So the reckoning, as Terri teaches it, is that moment where you weigh, you kind of put it on a scale. These are the ways you're hard to live with on the one side and on the other side, these are the things I love about doing life with you. And if you decide like, yep, I know the ways, you're a pain in the ass. And we've worked on those enough that I can see that the love outweighs the difficulties. And this is what a friend of mine says. Long term love really is about learning to accept your partner's foibles. And I think that's, that's very much true. But there are different ways to accept them. Right. There's that tamp down way that we see a lot of couples go through where the sex is definitely dead. And really, the cherishing is pretty far gone. But they found a way to use misery stabilizers. Another Terry. Real term. You know, whether that's food, drink, entertaining their pets, their kids, kind of a third leg that stabilizes the stool so that even though they don't really like each other very much, they're not very close, they don't repair. They can stay together and just do life.

Okay. And so. And then there's another aspect to the reckoning. Earlier, we talked about sort of these inherent qualities like ADHD or introverts versus extroverts. But then there often it. Frankly, it's the woman who is talking about wanting more from life and more from the relationship and begins to take actions and steps toward that.

This is the reckoning with yourself. This is not the weighing, you know, are the pluses and minuses of being with this person weighing out on the positive side. But this is really turning and facing oneself. And. And I had to do that to say, like, wait, wait, wait. This wasn't the life that I really wanted. This is the person I want to be with. But we're not having the relationship with each other that I think we both deserve. So I looked at myself and the ways that I was tamping myself down and started to address those. I stopped eating addictively, and I cleaned up how I used spending and the computer and online courses and, you know, my ceaseless personal development and me more available for the kind of passion and presence that I wanted. And then it kind of showed Kurt where I was inviting him to go and where he needed to make a choice. Was he gonna do that with me? Not because I was threatening to leave, but because it was just. I mean, I'd love to hear your take on it. Like.

Well, I was, you know, avoidant and resistant. And ultimately, though, I had my own personal reckoning with this and realized that sort of in the integrity of your moving forward with your own process on living more honest and with greater integrity and more fully. I needed to either drop out. And so I decided to get on board. Now, you know, other couples could. This could play out in different ways. And so that's. Again, it's. Everybody has their own journey of reckoning. But ideally, I think people become engaged again with life and with who they are here to become.

I think that's really well put because it's. This isn't just about, like, making it work with this other person. I think that marriage is a crucible that turns you into who you were meant to be, often in much the way That a rock tumbler makes gems beautiful, it kind of bangs off their rough edges. It is not a pretty process. The reckoning, the going through that knowledge without love stage and certainly doing the work that we've done with like a dozen different therapists and many hours of beautiful processes, but really looking at every facet of who we were taught to be in the world, who we really want to be, and how our patterns can either amplify each other in their intensity and the painfulness or actually heal each other. So we've been growing up together for a long time. I think my introvert husband is nodding.

So at this stage, you know, and we're talking about our own experience, but at this stage, how it plays out for a couple, they're living, they're much more accepting of sort of the imperfection. Who they are as individuals, who their partner is, how the relationship is. Now for us, we're working on this together and we would hope that for others as well you may have a different reckoning where you have to recognize like this person isn't going to work on this. But there's a lot of great things. And so that's my reckoning. But we, and what I think we wish for others is that you recognize the imperfections. Again, the imperfections. But that we're working on. And what that does is it just opens up, it opens up a lot of grace between you as individuals and where you're taking the things that you think you can self righteously admonish in the other or whatever.

You know, hopefully not self righteously, but. Yeah, right, right.

No, but legitimate.

Hey, here's how this affects me. Right?

Like, and you still have whatever, you're tired and hungry and you have a, you know, a friction or fight in the kitchen. You don't take it as seriously. Like you can get over it. Like that whole. The cycle of repair that's both macro and micro. Like you can go through those cycles five times in one night.

We love to.

Yeah. So it's, it's like.

But it's complete. It really is. It's like, okay, we're past that, right?

Yeah.

By the time we get to the hot tub together, we either have cleared everything or we clear it then. So it really is recognizing like, oh yeah, this is a little deal and we're not going to major in minor things. We're majoring in something bigger.

Yeah.

And that's knowing love. That's that place. And you know, there's kind of three components to having that kind of intimacy. One is Empathy, where you understand, like, oh, yeah, I always leave the dishwasher open because by the time I've gotten the dish, I've moved on to a different thing. And so I don't even remember the dishwasher's open. But that bugs Kurt. It's hard to live with me. That's an example of empathy. And then you have vulnerability, which is revealing yourself. So if my feelings get hurt by his tone of voice or the expression on his face, I tell him, ouch. I feel kind of hurt by that. Which is not to make him wrong for it or try to control him, but just show him my tender heart. And then the third piece is accountability. It's demonstrating that you give a hoot, that you have the impact you have on your partner, even when you don't mean to, even if you couldn't help being how you are, it matters to you, how it impacts them. Yeah.

And so at this point, hopefully, ideally, maybe we are into that fourth stage that Terry Wheeler calls it knowing love.

Yeah.

Which again, like, I think, you know, I think sort of is a blend of this sense of. Oh, I don't know, like a larger calling of who we are as individuals. And personally, I believe there's a higher process that we're involved with, whether that's God or whatever you want to call it, which is perfection and idealism. Wonderful. And then there's the inherent imperfections of the human condition, and it's sort of living in the presence of all of that at the same time with another. And maybe, just maybe, we're stumbling into the fourth state.

I don't know. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, is this fourth stage isn't happily ever after. Right. It's reckoning after ever after in a certain way. It's facing. Not reckoning in the Terry. Real sense of that weighing, but it's facing ourselves every day. It's the iterative process that for us is inside the 12 steps. It's like step 10. You go back every day and go, how'd I do? What am I proud of today? What would. If I had to do over again, what would I like to do differently so that I would have a different impact on other people? And one of the things we talk about a lot is that really our sense of what we're here to do is some combination of pleasure and service to enjoy this life. Almost like we're little Mars rovers that God sent out. Like, tell me what it's like on Earth. You know, feed back to me what it feels like to give Birth, to lose a child, to be married to another human, to stub your toe, you know, And I think that the divine just goes awesome to all of it. And the more intense, the better. You know, the divine is just like, yes, please, tell me all about it through our senses. And so, so we're here to do that, to be wildly alive. And we're here to ameliorate the pain that others experience, the pain of the people closest to us. And maybe to be able to show others what aliveness looks like feels like a part of our calling together. So anything we can do now, not to say like, oh, we found the way. We've got our ducks in a row. Our marriage is easy now. You can be like us, but more like, man, we get it. We know how hard this is and more power to you. And we're in the trenches with you every day. And we're in the conversation about, like, what. What does help us be present to the mess and present to the myst, the majesty of this wild, alive thing of being human with another human. All right, he nodded again.

That's a take.

I love you so much.

We did it.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode about the four stages of love. Just to recap real quick, first we have the honeymoon of love without knowledge. Then we have that dip of knowledge without love, and that's when our real relationship begins. And then there's the reckoning, that place where we weigh, is it worth it to me to work on this with this person? And there's a lot of choices people make at that stage. And I hope that the map gave you helps you see how to kind of discern. And I have other episodes on how to know when to stay and when to go. And I also definitely want to direct you for this stage where you are reckoning, where you're looking at, how do we create the love we deserve inside this relationship that's not what we deserve, but is with the right person here. I know I have episodes on the five losing strategies and the winning strategies in love. And those are really potent for looking at yourself in this phase. After we go through the reckoning and really decide, oh, yeah, you're the problem and I'm the problem, and we're the problem, and that's not a problem. Then you enter into knowing love, and that's not at all like a finish line where everything's rosy. It's just a way of grappling with, in an ongoing way, the vagaries of living with another human and using that as an alchemical process of turning the lead between you into the gold of what we call legacy love. The kind of love that is far from perfect and never will be because you're both human, but that feeds you both in a way that lets you serve the world either through inspiration or contribution or whatever you do, it gives you the fuel to do the other things that you do with the most authenticity and verve possible. My episode on the Hundred Year Marriage talks about one of the natural outflows that we've discovered, which is that the more you create a really juicy partnership that contributes to your own ongoing growth, the longer you want to be here, you want to stick it out. And there's so many advances now in what we understand about what helps human bodies thrive for longer than that. There's a lot we can do if we're off our misery stabilizers. If we really have choice about how we eat, drink, move and sleep, we can do a lot about how long we stick around. So that ongoing conversation, I think, is intertwined in this one, and I look forward to hearing from you, your thoughts and feelings about that and learning what your biggest questions are, whatever stage of love you're in. Thank you so much for listening, for being with me. Hit me up with a DM on Instagram. That's the best place to communicate with me directly. And I wish you so much love, love. I'd love to hear what you're going to take away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? Drop me a DM on social media anytime. Links are in the show notes. You know, reviews are really what help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thanks in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app before you move on with your day. And and hey, have you subscribed? Hit that subscribe button in the app so you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Michelle Lisenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I'll see you on the next episode. And until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.