It’s Just a Phase : Relationships: They meet, fall in love and marry. Then things get nasty. Should they split? Maybe not. Couples, like individuals, go through stages, experts say. At times, it’s best to tough it out.
They met at that safest of Southern California singles’ sanctuaries, a supermarket--Ralphs to be exact. He liked the laughter in her eyes. She noticed that his cart was teeming with healthy food. They caused a small traffic jam when they lingered to chat near the checkout counter.
But after they had lived together for almost three years, two of them as husband and wife, their symmetry began to shatter. There was no single great “issue”--no boyfriend, girlfriend, job loss, fight over pregnancy or huge dispute over money. Instead it was as if they were out of step. They lost their balance, and seemed almost to be speaking to one another as strangers.
“It’s a phenomenon we’ve observed over and over again,” said Barry Dym, a psychologist in Cambridge, Mass. “Couples fall out of sync with each other, and with their expectations.”
In the past, such couples might have used these rumblings of dissatisfaction as a signal to take their leave. Divorce may not have been painless, but for the last 20 years it has been widely sanctioned by mental health professionals and society at large--and, for many, it came equipped with the presumption that a new mate was waiting around the corner.
But now it appears that some people are coming to realize that the problems do not necessarily disappear with a change of partners. Experts contend that this is because couples go through cycles. And, they say, a growing recognition of the cyclical nature of intimate relationships is changing the way many men and women look at domestic partnerships.
“I don’t think that the life cycle of couples has been fully understood until very recently,” said Dr. Frank Pittman, a psychiatrist in Atlanta and the author of “Turning Points: Treating Families in Transition and Crisis” and the upcoming “Man Enough.”
Among couples, regardless of gender orientation, said Pittman, “there is a predictable, spiraling need for closeness and distance.”
Further, said Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr. Mark S. Goulston, an assistant clinical professor at UCLA Medical Center, couples almost require these cycles to advance in their relationships.
“There is a need to pass through the previous step in order to get on to the next one,” Goulston said.
Social scientists have long understood that individuals pass through measurable stages in the course of their psychological development. That couples could have a similar trajectory is not so much a revelation as a confirmation of a truism so obvious it was all but overlooked.
In the realm of couples, said Dym, cycles are “pretty much uncharted territory.”
Phoebe Prosky, a family therapist in Freeport, Me., has begun drawing road maps for couples in the form of articles published in professional journals. Prosky holds that intimate relationships can almost always be assessed as a three-step process. The initial stage of courtship--what Pittman called “temporary insanity”--is replaced eventually by a period of fault finding, when differences between the partners threaten to overwhelm the similarities that brought them together.
A “complementary relationship,” said Prosky, will use this stage as an opportunity to assess and appreciate individual differences.
“You learn something about each other, and about yourselves,” she said.
Resolution and acceptance can follow, Prosky said, providing a foundation for couples who are at once autonomous and intertwined. “The couples that I see who are the happiest are the ones who have spent a lot of time together--and a lot of time apart,” Prosky said.
But not all partnerships withstand this second phase. For many couples, Pittman said, the realization that being together “is not a constant state of ecstatic perfection means, ‘Oh my God, I must have married the wrong person.’ ”
The depth to which disappointment can plummet during this phase became an intriguing factor for Dym and his colleague Dr. Michael Glenn, a psychiatrist. Their conclusion that “our expectations are really out of joint, because we expect a couples-relationship to be a cure-all” is at the core of their new book “Couples: Exploring and Understanding the Cycles of Intimate Relationships.”
Following the period they call “expansion,” which launches a relationship, Dym and Glenn describe a phase they call “contraction.” (They concede that the name has unfortunate connotations for women who have been through labor.) Couples of recent generations have had particular difficulty with this phase, they maintain, because “we have fewer tools” to deal with disappointment.
“The last few generations weren’t raised with the idea of discipline,” Dym explained. “We were more like consumers. If it didn’t work--whatever it was--we threw it away and got a new one. Well, it was the same thing with couples. If the other person didn’t change, or didn’t conform to our expectations, we got rid of them.”
Goulston, at UCLA, concurred. In recent generations, Goulston said, “it has seemed almost un-American to compromise.” Very often, partners in relationships also lacked the capacity to “soothe themselves,” Goulston said. “What we have learned is to externally gratify. For some time now, we have confused gratification with satisfaction.”
For their parts, Dym and Glenn write from personal as well as professional experience. Both have been divorced; each is remarried. “I think we have been very self-analytical,” Glenn said.
But it was the ongoing chorus of anger and betrayal from couples in their therapy practices that made them wonder not so much why so many couples split up--but how so many managed to stay together.
Their answer seemed to be that successful intimate partnerships were those that could adjust their expectations to understand that, as Glenn put it, “sometimes things will be fantastic, and sometimes they will be awful.”
These couples, Glenn said, are “less quick to judge, and particularly to judge badly, just because they run into some difficulty.”
Taking a similar position, Pittman said that “there really are predictable stages in the life cycle of a couple in which, no matter how compatible they were before, they are going to be incompatible.”
Outside crises often are the catalysts for what Pittman termed “turning points,” or periods of “temporary incompatibility.”
In two-career couples, said Pittman, an obvious example is when a wife’s professional life is flourishing while her husband’s is foundering--or vice versa. One partner may decide that he or she wants to live in the country, while the other is wedded to an urban existence. Different philosophies of child-rearing can send men and women into open or covert antagonism. And there are emotional highs and lows that affect men and women separately--and therefore spill over into their life together.
“You have to be very aware of these periods of temporary incompatibility in which, for example, one person is celebrating and the other is mourning,” Pittman said.
Goulston, at UCLA, stressed, “There is a period after the honeymoon phase ends in which both people have to persevere and develop a sense of pride in staying together, which overtakes the sense of frustration about things not being the way they were at the beginning.”
But without context or explanation, couples often are inclined to blame one another for what Dym and Glenn describe as “narrowing and broadening parts of the road.” No single stage--certainly not the ostensible calm of resolution--can last indefinitely, they caution.
“And maybe if people understand these transformations, they won’t be so quick to be out the door,” Glenn said.
But for a culture weaned on the notion of knowing “how to get it right,” this concept may not be so easy.
“We’ve set ourselves up with the idea that perfect happiness is the objective, and that happiness is the end product of uninterrupted fun,” Pittman said. “That isn’t the way it works.”
On the other hand, family therapist Phoebe Prosky noted, “there are some couples who can make it happily together, and some who can’t. That is definable.” All the compassion and comprehension in the world, for example, will not salvage an intimate relationship that is marked by cycles of abuse.
Or, as Michael Glenn put it, “There’s a time to go and a time to stay. You have to know which is which.”
Remaining a part of a couple is hardly a revolutionary idea. But acknowledging the fluid and occasionally fragile chemistry of this basic human relationship does challenge the cynical notion that in a complex culture, the long-term couple may no longer be a viable species.
Or, said Dym, “It may not be that life’s purpose is simply and exclusively to be happy, but rather to be engaged in some rich enterprise with another human.”