Romance is a Stage — About Relating

Romance is sanitized, socially acceptable lust. It’s also a minor stage in building a deep and meaningful relationship. Romance inevitably leads to conflict, and can lead to a depth that is quite remarkable.

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The Essence of Romance

Lucy in the Sky — Romance is a Stage

I want to say a bit about romance today, and how it is a stage one pro­gress­es through, rather than some­thing “in and of itself.” 

Before I get there, let me men­tion a few things, and remind you of some resources.

If you’ve been read­ing my stuff for a while, and many of you have been around here since the days of Into the Cen­tre, some of this will be familiar.

To begin with, there are four free book­lets avail­able on our web­site. Three of the four are about estab­lish­ing and deep­en­ing your under­stand­ing of ele­gant relating. 

One of the book­lets, The List of 50, recent­ly became a book called Find Your Per­fect Part­ner. The book­let is still avail­able — I’ve rewrit­ten it into a sum­ma­ry of the book.

If I were to put the three book­lets into log­i­cal order, it would be
The List of 50,
Build­ing Deep and Last­ing Rela­tion­ships, and
The Respon­si­ble, Com­pas­sion­ate Relationship.

The List of 50 came about when I was 32 — way back in 1983. Up to that point, I’d made a career of strange rela­tion­ships. Cer­tain­ly from uni­ver­si­ty on, I quite rigid­ly fol­lowed the path that leads from lust to romance. Which is not to say I could­n’t tell the difference. 

At 32, I became painful­ly aware of my past ten­den­cy to want to domes­ti­cate lust-dri­ven rela­tion­ships.

Let me give you one really blatant illustration.

I went off to uni­ver­si­ty at 17, and would say that I was book smart and life dumb. By that point, I real­ly had­n’t failed of much of any­thing I put my mind to, and on those rare occa­sions when I screwed up, mom and dad were right there to fix things. 

Despite hav­ing a full ride schol­ar­ship to any uni­ver­si­ty in New York State, I decid­ed to go to Elmhurst Uni­ver­si­ty, 20 miles out­side of Chica­go. This was the first time I was away from home for an extend­ed peri­od of time, and it did­n’t take me long to get into piles of trou­ble, some of which I ought to tell you about someday. 

Exam­ple: I’d saved up a few hun­dred dol­lars (remem­ber, this was 1968, and that seemed like a lot of mon­ey) so my first awak­en­ing hap­pened when I had to actu­al­ly buy text­books. I was quick­ly broke, and took a job at Wal­greens — a drug­store chain.

It was there that I met Irene.

I threw out the pho­to she gave me, but my mad web skills have found it online — her grad­u­a­tion pho­to. IMHO she was drop-dead gor­geous. I took her to my spring Fra­ter­ni­ty dance, and the music stopped when we walked in the room. I was deeply, head over heels, in lust.

I had no prob­lem bask­ing in the reflect­ed glo­ry of the woman on my arm.

So, here’s the reason I’m telling you this story.

I was at Elmhurst Uni­ver­si­ty to get a degree in reli­gion and psy­chol­o­gy — I intend­ed to be a Min­is­ter (which did hap­pen, albeit some­what delayed) — and one of the things I had decid­ed was that sex was going to wait until mar­riage. (I changed my mind a month or so lat­er, but that’s not part of the Irene story.)

A few days after the dance, Irene invit­ed her­self up to my dorm room. At one point, I excused myself to go to the john, and when I came back, Irene was undressed and lying on my bed. This was a first for me. Noth­ing much hap­pened, but that’s not the point.

What did hap­pen was that I stuck to my “con­vic­tions,” and took Irene home, despite what I real­ly want­ed to do. 

A day or so lat­er I went home to Buf­fa­lo for Spring Break. I spent a lot of time think­ing about what had hap­pened, and about what I want­ed to hap­pen, and I kept bump­ing against the “rules” I had set up for myself. Being rel­a­tive­ly self-aware back then, I was quite capa­ble of rec­og­niz­ing my “being in lust,” but I could­n’t quite fig­ure out what to do with it.

I can actually remember a very strange penny dropping.

I want­ed this woman, bad­ly, and had no par­a­digm that would allow me to have sex with her. So, as he final­ly comes to the point,

I decid­ed that my log­i­cal choice was to mar­ry her.

I tried to sanitize the lust into romance, in order to get what I really wanted.

Irene was Roman Catholic, and that would­n’t do for a Protes­tant min­is­ter, so I went back to Illi­nois with three or four books under my arm, intent on con­vert­ing her. (I’m actu­al­ly sit­ting here laugh­ing as I write this. Yikes! What an arro­gant lit­tle guy was back then.) 

I hand­ed her the books. She looked at them, and got real­ly qui­et. She then said, “But, I’m just here for the sex!” Shocked, I end­ed the rela­tion­ship on the spot. (See lead pho­to of me, in the wig.)

Nuts, eh? Yet, I think it’s still pret­ty common. 

Many of my clients are in rela­tion­ship with some­one for exact­ly this rea­son. I hear a lot of, “When we first met, I was real­ly turned on by him, but now I’m not so sure.” 

The piece they don’t get is that this is a part of the natural progression of relationships. 

The lev­el of sex­u­al “charge” goes down over time because the object of our desire, empha­sis on object, becomes a real per­son. As this de-objec­ti­fi­ca­tion process esca­lates, a real sense of futil­i­ty can set in.

Any­way, romance is a stage that emerges out of the mias­ma of lust, emo­tions and hormones.

Romance is lust, sanitized.

As such, it’s sim­ply a stage that the wise “tran­scend and include.” In excel­lent rela­tion­ships, both romance and lust are play­ers in a much big­ger play. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, most peo­ple get bogged down here, and nev­er move past romance to some­thing more useful.

I got a neat Face­book post­ing today, from an old friend — she gave me an update on the last 10 years of her life.

She wrote,

“I have been part of ser­i­al romances in the past 5 years. I do see the val­ue of them as heal­ing tools though, re-open­ing those old wounds for deep­er heal­ing to take place. I kind of think of it along home­o­path­ic lines ‘“ ‘like cur­ing like.’ I don’t know if you agree with this philosophy.”

I have no idea about any of the dynam­ics of her ser­i­al romances. I just thought her com­ments were high­ly appro­pri­ate, giv­en this article. 

Romance, as we’ve not­ed, is a stage. In the ear­ly going of this stage, the norm is to be star-struck and half blind. You look at the per­son you are in romance with, and you only see what you want to see — a con­fir­ma­tion that this per­son is your per­fect match.

I got anoth­er e‑mail from a semi famous rela­tion­ship coach. He was announc­ing his impend­ing mar­riage — after know­ing his intend­ed for less than six months. 

He passed the rela­tion­ship by some of the coach­es he trains, and got the expect­ed range of response. Some were hor­ri­fied, oth­ers danced jubi­lant­ly around the altar of, “Ain’t love grand!” Any­time any­one raised a ques­tion about the rela­tion­ship, the coach default­ed to, “She is my soulmate.” 

Which is anoth­er way of say­ing he’s deeply enmeshed in romance. 

None of this is to say the rela­tion­ship will not work out — time, and only time, will tell.

The important thing in any relationship is not the places where we agree. The growing edge is always in how we deal with the confrontation that comes from differing opinions.

Let me show you how this goes. In North Amer­i­ca, approx­i­mate­ly 50% of all mar­riages end in divorce. An even more inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic is that 75% of sec­ond mar­riages also end in divorce. 25% of third mar­riages end in divorce, so obvi­ous­ly we get more clever with practice. 

The rea­son, I think, for the 75% fig­ure is that most peo­ple come out of rela­tion­ships blam­ing their part­ners for the fail­ure. They there­fore go into the next rela­tion­ship and do the same dumb stuff, and then are amazed when that rela­tion­ship tanks too.

Romance leads to conflict, or, said differently, conflict is a stage that follows romance — 100% of the time.

What we do when con­flict hits varies. One choice, the sta­tis­ti­cal­ly most preva­lent choice, is to leave. This is what my friend calls ser­i­al romance. Oth­ers call it ser­i­al monogamy. You get to a wall marked “Con­flict,” and you’re giv­en the choice of door num­ber one, door num­ber two, or door num­ber three.

Door # 1–The wide first door is marked “EXIT.” It does­n’t mat­ter what excuse you give for exit­ing. “I’ve learned all I can from this rela­tion­ship,” is no dif­fer­ent from “I can’t stand the pain of this con­flict, so I’m leav­ing,” as far as the actu­al result goes.

Door # 2–Of the 50% who stick it out, 40 to 45% choose apa­thy as their way of deal­ing with the con­flict. The pic­ture I get of this is typ­i­cal of what most mar­riages looked like pri­or to the 50s or 60s — when divorce became social­ly acceptable. 

This pic­ture is like “Father Knows Best,” where the moth­er waltzes around in a house­dress, and dad comes home, and retreats to his home office or den, there to dis­pense wis­dom, and to sighed deeply, over the foibles of his family. 

You might say that the 70s ver­sion of this is Archie and Edith, sit­ting 3 feet apart, watch­ing TV, and often being miles apart in under­stand­ing, com­pas­sion, and self-aware­ness. In oth­er words, there is no open war­fare — there’s a polite silence you could cut with a knife.

Which is not to imply that with­in that 40% to 45%, there is no fight­ing. Most of the cou­ples I see are still caught in the loop of think­ing that their part­ner should be what they want them to be. They come in to ther­a­py to get me to change their part­ner back into the per­son they were in lust, then in romance with.

All relational fighting is specifically about this: getting the other (person or situation) to change so that “I” don’t have to.

Door # 3–Acceptance and Curios­i­ty–The remain­ing 5%, the peo­ple who choose ele­gant and full-bod­ied relat­ing, rec­og­nize that the point of relat­ing is self-explo­ration. That’s why I love my friend’s expression,

“… re-open­ing those old wounds for deep­er heal­ing to take place.”

Yet, to accom­plish this, you have to be will­ing to stick around — to work through the pain points in your own per­son­al­i­ty — as opposed to pre­ma­ture­ly leav­ing. “I can’t do this any more” is often code for, “I am unwill­ing to con­front this about myself.”

The conflict that is a part of romance is this: the more we trust our partner, the more of ourselves we are willing to reveal — and what’s left to reveal is the stuff we tried to hide.

In the ini­tial stage of romance, we only or most­ly show what we per­ceive as the “good stuff.” 

If we are naive, we see our part­ner only through the eyes of romance, and think the way that they are pre­sent­ing them­selves is the way they actu­al­ly are. This is naive because peo­ple in romance are pre­dis­posed to show the stuff that will keep the oth­er per­son around. 

As time goes by, lit­tle bits of the oth­er stuff begin to trick­le and slip out. Ini­tial­ly, this is chalked up to the oth­er per­son hav­ing a bad day, or being off their feed, as the observ­ing part­ner des­per­ate­ly looks for a way to excuse the behav­iour — as opposed to inte­grat­ing the behav­iour into their view of the other.

Even­tu­al­ly, the part­ners grow so com­fort­able with each oth­er that the oth­er shoe drops. The “oth­er stuff” becomes a flood of behav­iour that is the oth­er side of the per­son­’s personality—the oth­er side of the oth­er per­son­’s “good stuff.”

Typically, at this stage, clients tell me, “My partner lied to me!”

What’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing is that the part­ner is final­ly telling the truth. Each of us is who we are, not who we pre­tend to be. If one choos­es door three, accep­tance and curios­i­ty, this new mate­r­i­al can be incor­po­rat­ed into how we see our part­ner, and we can begin to notice how we make our­selves uncomfortable.

For me, I spent decades try­ing to get my part­ners to become who I want­ed them to be. In 1983, with the advent of the List of 50, I decid­ed that from that point on I would only hang around with peo­ple who were not in need of fix­ing, but were rather peo­ple who were intense­ly inter­est­ed in being self-responsible. 

A month after writing my List, I
surrendered my need to fix — to be right.
Old soul, slow learner, that’s me.

Next arti­cle, we’ll talk a bit more about how con­flict can lead to self respon­si­bil­i­ty and self under­stand­ing in a rela­tion­ship built upon accep­tance and curiosity.

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