How Can Couples Succeed with Love?
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Loving relationships begin with the fantasy bond stage, a term developed by Dr. Robert Firestone, to describe a romanticised connection between two people, which is often rooted in fantasy-based expectations, and not fully grounded in reality. It is a more accurate description of the first stage of the beginning of a healthy loving relationship, than the honeymoon period.
It is this fantasy bond, or more clearly the idealization of love, that brings us together at the start of a loving relationship as a couple.
Our deepest hopes, desire for love, and our imagination for love to work, are magnified at the start of a loving relationship. This intensified first stage of a loving relationship affects us with powerful brain chemistry, and the activation of the lust and attachment systems in the brain. This drives the emotional intensity of our sexual desire for another person, and the exuberant feeling of vitality. The intense desire for sexual intimacy brings us together as a couple - wanting to enter into a loving relationship.
The fantasy bond is where the intensity of the loving relationship is also driven by the novelty or newness, and the excitement of it, but the intensity of this will soon fade. It is then - that a new stage of the loving relationship will begin. Which next stage will differ depending on the couple’s relationship dynamic, attachment styles, and each person's personal growth.
There are many different stages of a loving relationship, some are:
The Fantasy Bond Stage
The Power Struggle Stage
The Dead Zone Stage
The Stabilizing & Conscious Love Stage
The Secure Stage
Each loving relationship stage requires different awareness and skills to navigate the challenges of each stage - successfully.
With each loving relationship stage after the fantasy bond, work and growth will be required by both couples, because to succeed with love requires:
Awareness of Self
A Clear Understanding of What Works in Love
Specific Communication Skills to Navigate the Heart’s Openness
Communication Skills to Resolve Issues Practically & Emotionally
Abilities to Build Connection and Respect
Self-Regulation Abilities & Attentiveness to Co-Regulate Your Partner
Compassion & Empathy to Validate Your Partner’s Emotions
Deep Listening & Relationship Repair Skills
Sexual Awareness & Keeping The Pleasure & Practice of Eroticism Alive Long-Term
Financial Stability
Predictability & Character
Pro-Active Abilities To Plan & Create An Incredible Life Together
Couples also need awareness of how to navigate the five attachment styles, which are powerful patterns of relating that are developed in childhood through our interactions with our parents or primary caregivers.
Our attachment style influences our adult relationships, overall behavior, and dramatically affects how we interact and function in loving relationships.
The Five Attachment Styles Are:
The Anxious Attachment Style
The Avoidant-Dismissive Attachment Style
The Ambivalent-Resistant Attachment Style
The Disorganized-Disorientated Attachment Style
The Secure Attachment Style
All people are in the spectrum for one or more attachment styles. Each attachment style affects our behavior, how we communicate, build trust and our emotional connection, and experience intimacy in a loving relationship. If a couple is unaware of their attachment styles, they cause loving relationship challenges, mostly with communication.
Individuals with a secure attachment tend to form healthy, balanced loving relationships, while the other four attachment styles can lead to communication difficulties, fear of rejection, emotional distance, conflict, and loving relationship instability.
Understanding your attachment style, and your partners, and receiving professional guidance on how to work with these as a couple, can prevent attachment styles from being problematic, and instead, help couples to use greater awareness and skills, to overcome attachment style related challenges.
It is true that a loving relationship can bring you more satisfaction, fulfillment, excitement and happiness than probably anything else in life, but this is only if you have the skills to build a deep connection, and the skills to be able to emotionally regulate each other.
A loving relationship contributes to your longevity possibly more so than anything else, but people can be easily sold on the latest supplement, health device, or nutritional or exercise advice that is trending, unaware that a deeply caring, loving relationship - dramatically impacts your health and life span.
The longest-running study on happiness, the 80+ year Harvard study on adult development shows very clearly that a loving partner, and close connected relationships with family and friends and community - is the key to our health, happiness and our longevity.
But we are constantly sold to by marketing attempting to occupy our attention. Buy a luxury watch, car, house, boat and plane, but to what degree do you value, and invest in building your loving relationship?
How committed are you to succeeding with love and becoming a great husband or wife?
What are - your Loving Relationship Goals?
We Can Help You to Build the Loving Relationship You REALLY Want, With Your Willingness & Commitment To Grow, Expand & Develop, To Succeed with Love.