If Romeo and Juliet Had Lived
Preface
Have you recently become involved with someone? You have so much in common.
This new person seems to understand you like no one else has. They release in you
passion you have never experienced before. You want this to last. This person is
someone you want to take home to meet your parents. Yes, you would like to hold on
to this infatuation passion, but you know that it won’t last. You are Romeo and
Juliet now and you wonder what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet had
lived.
Or you are past infatuation and you are beginning to see that you are a bit
over your head. You were recently Romeo and Juliet and you wonder what
happened and will you get it back. What’s next and what do you do?
Or you seem to be fighting a lot. You are trying to make a place for yourself
in this relationship and you don’t know how or how to stop the fighting. And at
what price will you have to pay to stop the fights and what will be your
relationship’s legacy once the fighting stops. Your Romeo and Juliet days seem at
some distance now and you wonder if you can even stay friends.
Or the fighting has stopped. You see your mate clearly for who he/she really
is. You know how to cooperate and make decisions with your mate. You have a role
and you know how to play it, but you are not sure that this is what you want. You
are sure that this is what you have. You know that you are not to be a forever
Romeo and Juliet and you are not sure that’s okay with you.
Or you have stopped expecting what you won’t get and you are not sure that
you can give to your relationship what it needs and deserves. You have given up
blame as a tool in your marriage, but you don’t know if you have anything to replace
it. You can accept that your Romeo and Juliet days are over, and you don’t know
what to do to make your marriage better, but you do know it is up to you not
someone else.
Or you have rediscovered each other. It feels like you are in a second
honeymoon period after years of marriage. You know it can’t last this way and you
wonder what will happen next. Though you know the Romeo and Juliet days are in
the past, you have just had a special moment. What does this mean?
Or you are both busy accomplishing goals that you share. There is little time
for you or the relationship. There’s the children, the job, the church, the little league
team that you coach, the shower you are giving for a friend. What is happening to
your mate and to your marriage during all this? It is even hard to remember that
you were once Romeo and Juliet. There is just so much to do.
Or the children are raised; the dream house is finished; the career goals
accomplished, the nest is empty, and you wonder what is the point of being married
now? Is there any reason to try to find whatever spark you had when you were
Romeo and Juliet? What is the point now?
Or you have seen most of your relationship history. There is not too much
more of it to live. What do you share now? You treasure the memories of all the
2
stages you shared together including the Romeo and Juliet one. You know that you
don’t have much time left. Each moment together is precious. There is now no space
for pretense.
Your mate has died or you are divorced. You were not prepared for this. What
do you do at this stage? This stage requires grief work and gives honor and respect
to the work done in all the previous stages. It becomes the foundation for the next
conception in the cycle of life.
If Romeo and Juliet Had Lived
John and his wife Jane once consulted me about their daughter, Jan, when she was
a wild rebellious teen. Jan grew out of her insolence and John and Jane attributed
that to me. John was a prominent minister. When he next consulted me he was
fifty-two and his daughter Jan was getting married. John came alone.
“I’m not depressed. I love my wife,” he began. “I’m not sure why I came to see
you. Except… well Jan’s getting married. She and her fiancé are so in love. Though
I don’t know anything about her sex life you can feel the heat in her relationship to
Tom when they look at each other. Jane and I aren’t like that. I think we were at
one time, but we are not now. We are warm, but not hot. We hold hands. She leans
into my chest in the movies, but I’m not sure when the last time was that we had
sex. My church is presenting a marriage enrichment program that says that couples
in their seventies should be having an active sex life. I watch movies, TV and
advertisements and I feel like I’m missing something. I’m not giving my Jane the
sex life she deserves.”
Of course I told John that he needed to talk to Jane about this, but his
concerns hit me right between the eyes. His words might have been my own. I
began to wonder if there weren’t stages of relationship development and that Jane
and John’s marriage were in the same stage as mine and Marietta’s.
The Ten Stages of a Lasting Relationship
In Create Your Own Love Story I tried to describe the various elements of love and
tell how to combine them in a recipe. The product hopefully helped couples
understand love’s laws and helped couples to become more effective lovers.
The primary deficit of Create Your Own Love Story was that it served as a
snapshot of what love looks like in relationships. But love in relationships is not a
static moment. The spirit of love that moves couples has predictable developmental
stages. A one-year healthy version of a loving relationship has love’s elements, just
as does a fifty-year marriage, but they look very different. The atmosphere or the
spirit that surrounds relatively young relationship is different from one that is
mature.
My father-in-law was widowed and living in a nursing home. He had
Parkinson Disease and his palsy was so severe that he needed help with many
aspects of daily living. Marietta and I planned to visit him in the assisted living
part of the nursing home. He had asked us to wait in the lobby for him. He wanted
to take us out to lunch and he was bringing a friend. When we arrived we told the
3
front desk attendant that we were waiting for Reverend Mundinger, would she
please let him know we were here, then we sat on a comfortable couch. I picked up
as old Newsweek and Marietta grabbed a Time. Ten minutes later the elevator
came down, and opened discharging the eighty-year-old Reverend and his eightyyear-old friend, Mary. They were arm in arm looking at each other like hormonally
charged teenage lovers. When we stood up their eyes finally unlocked from one
another and they came toward us. Mary was Marietta’s mother’s name too.
“But that’s not just why I’m fond of her,” he said. “I don’t have anything bad
to say about your mother, but I haven’t felt this way since I was courting her. Oh
we had a wonderful marriage, but that fire we had when we began seemed to dim as
time went by. I never thought I would feel like I once had about your mother until I
met this Mary. We have a lot of fun together.”
Our meal was a pleasant one. We enjoyed getting to know the Reverend’s
new friend. When we got to desert, he ordered a chocolate cake and told the waiter
to put a candle on it. When the cake came, Reverend Mundinger said, “Please set
the cake here between me and Mary and bring us two forks.”
“What’s the candle for Daddy?” Marietta asked.
“It is for two things,” he said. “One is for our three month anniversary and
the other is to celebrate our engagement. We want to be married as soon as
possible. Are you ready Mary? One, two, three blow,” and their collective breath
blew out the flame and pushed the candle flat on the cake. And the Reverend’s
announcement blew us away too.
“We have consummated our relationship physically,” he said looking coyly at
Mary and smiling. She smiled back a bit embarrassed.
“This is why we must marry I just don’t believe in sex outside marriage, but
before we were together that way for the first time, we prayed and asked God to
bless our union and to consider us married in His eyes, but I want a real marriage
as soon as we can arrange it. Her children have several concerns (as did we). I
hope you won’t stand in our way.”
For many reasons the marriage did not come about, but Marietta and I were
sad that their relationship was not consummated in marriage. The Reverend and
Mary seemed to me very much like two headstrong teenage lovers convincing their
parents that they were ready for marriage. Their gaze, their holding hands and
clinging to each other, his announcement of their desires made Marietta and me feel
very old, yet they were thirty-five years our senior.
The age of the people in a relationship does not determine how the couple will
act. Rather it is the age of the relationship. In general systems theory there is a
law that explains this phenomenon. It is called ‘Synomorphy.’ The point of
synomorphy is that the norms of a system at one level of that system’s hierarchy
apply similarly at all the other levels of the system. So the death birth cycle of the
seasons on the planet are similar to the birth death cycles of a star or solar system.
So the developmental phases a person goes through Freud described are reflected in
Groups, (Shepard and Bennis, 1959). And all relationships follow a similar
developmental path regardless of the age of the parties.
4
Freud claimed that individual development had five stages, but that was
when a person’s average life expectancy was forty-five or so. Eric Erikson (1950)
added three more stages to Freud’s, observing that humans had the capacity for
development for their lifetime and for the middle twentieth century adult that
meant some seventy-plus years.
If group development follows a similar script to individual development, then
so should relationships follow such a similar developmental path. Therefore the
Erikson stages of development should apply to couples. This is the thesis of this
book.
If Create Your Own Love Story was a snapshot of love, this book is a movie
going from beginning to the end. Many couples as they age feel that something is
wrong when they pass from one developmental stage to another. How many couples
become dissatisfied with their relationship when “the fire dims.” Our culture is so
sexually oriented that if a couple’s sexual frequency shifts the parties often leave
one another and divorce. They become frightened and angry at what they lost and
they expect and demand that the relationship stay in the courting phase or what I
will call here the conception phase. They become disillusioned because of this
naturally occurring event. They get divorced, have affairs, buy a new red
convertible sports car, take up golf, or take up cigars and whiskey or somehow
detach from the relationship that the believe has failed them.
Aging is also a great fear of individuals in our culture. There is very little
respect given to the advantages of the later stages of personal development. Most of
us use some form of denial to avoid facing and learning life’s lessons. For example,
some of us at sixty hold on to our thirty year old children as if they were ten years
old and still needed us desperately, as they did when we were their thirty-five year
old parents. Others have plastic surgery. Others may buy a motorcycle. Few of us
have the good sense to value the age we are.
Few couples are aware and grateful for the gifts that their history gives
them. The task of this book is to outline the nine stages of relationship
development, to describe the developmental task at each stage and to invite couples
to experience the joys of each stage.
The seeds of this theory were planted in my mind by Yvonne Agazarian. She
introduced me to isomorphy and to Shepard and Bennis notion that groups had
stages of development like people. Bob Newbrough taught me about Erikson’s eight
stages of development. I suggested to Pat Otis that these eight stages could be
applied to groups. From that she developed her yellow brick road talk that used
Dorothy and Toto, the tin man, scarecrow and the lion to explain these eight stages
of group development. Next I applied the same concepts to couples, and voila.
I was not however the first person to have thoughts of applying Erikson’s
theory to couples. Judith Wallerstein in her book, The Good Marriage, used
Erickson’s notion of developmental tasks and applied them to couples. Yvonne
Agazarian when talking about groups and group development in her book, System’s
Centered Therapy for Groups, 1997, leans on Shepard & Bennis and she talks about
defenses that must be overcome at each stage of group development.
5
In her book, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, McWilliams (1994) clearly lists a
number of important defenses that separate humans from their essential spirit. My
marching orders for this book are to spread out the McWilliams list of defenses
across the various stages of relationship development and demonstrate how the
couple will have to overcome a certain set of defenses to reach the next stage of
development.
First I will give the reader a brief overview of my theory. Then I will discuss
each stage and the work the couple must accomplish at each stage by telling stories
of hypothetical couples I’ve seen in my practice. These stories are not true stories in
the sense that the characters are real or the events I describe happened, but they
are true composites of the stories of several couples I’ve seen. The dialogue comes
from words I have heard spoken in my office and words I have spoken myself.
My goal for this books it to mark a couple’s journey as they proceed through
life together. To many of us it seems as if we are the only people who have felt this
way in a relationship. We feel alone and ignorant, inadequate and silly. But the
relationship path is a well-worn one. Many have gone before us. Because
relationships are sacred often we don’t hear the intimate details of the relationships
of our parents, grandparents or great grandparents. But they have been on the
same road as we are on now.
My mother called me one day on the phone. She said, “David, why don’t you
come visit more often. I think you should come to see us. We’re not getting any
younger. I don’t know exactly what’s going on with your father, but I think he is
depressed.”
I went home, partly because it was time for another visit home and partly
because of my mother’s implicit request to investigate my father’s depression. This
was the first time anyone in my family had ever given me a platform that suggested
that my Ph.D. might give them something of value. I had just begun my clinical
practice and I had no firsthand knowledge about the pitfalls of doing therapy with
my own family.
So with some enthusiasm for the task I went to Arkadelphia for a visit. After
I arrived home, had a good night’s sleep, I said to my father at breakfast. “Dad,
later on this morning I would like to come down to your office to talk to you.” His
head popped up. His face looked surprised and he said, “Sure son, that would be
fine.” I had never volunteered before to come to his office to talk with him. I had
always gone there only when summoned by his disapproving angry voice.
As I helped mother with the dishes I spoke of my intentions. “Mother, I’m
going down to the office to talk to daddy to see what I can find out about his
depression.” She looked at me as if she was about to say something, then she shook
her head looked back down at the dishes and said, “Well then go take a shower and
shave. I don’t want you going downtown looking like that.”
My father didn’t seem himself. There were things happening to him that
none of us understood at that time. On an earlier visit to my downs syndrome adult
sister, Betsy, and me in Nashville I heard him say, “My life is complete. I have
funded Betsy’s trust. I’ve raised my boys. I’ve given my son Toney my law practice.
6
You, David, are doing well. If God came for me now I would be ready.” As I made my
way to Dad’s office what I didn’t know was that he probably had colon cancer. He
would be diagnosed with it seven months later and he would be dead within a year.
On this day he would finally get the best of me in our oedipal triangle.
I bounced through the front door of dad’s law office. “I’m here to see Dad,” I
announced to the receptionist. ‘Is he busy?”
“No, go on back,” she said, “he’s expecting you.”
The door was open and I walked right in. My father was standing behind his
desk. “To what do I owe this pleasure,” my father began acknowledging my rare
interest in his attention.
I was still a bit intimidated by my father in his office so I said, “Dad sit down
over here in this chair across from me so we can talk.” He obliged.
“So son, what’s on your mind?” Dad began.
“You Dad. Mom tells me you’re depressed.”
“Oh nonsense son. I have no reason to be depressed. I have a wonderful wife,
my sons are grown, and Betsy is taken care of. God has been good to me. I have no
reason to be depressed.”
“But Dad you are depressed. I got my Ph.D. so I could tell if someone’s
depressed. And you are.”
“Well I don’t mean to be. I’m sorry I’ve caused concern to your mother. I
don’t know. I don’t want to be depressed. I’ve never given much truck to depression
to tell the truth son. I just don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. And I sure don’t
want you to have to feel sorry for me.”
I had predicted this response from him. I was afraid that I could not get
through his seventy plus years of defending against his feelings. “I don’t feel sorry
for you Dad, but maybe I can help. I didn’t go to school for all this time for nothing
and people pay me good money for my attention.”
I knew I was losing the battle and that my attempts to reach him were at
best feeble. He was quiet for some time. I have never been very good with silence
and in this situation his silence was like quicksand. I was just about to give up
when I saw a mischievous grin come to his face and he said, “Well son maybe it’s
the blood pressure medicine. You see I haven’t been able to please your mother for
some time. I just don’t seem to want to or to care about sex. All a man is good for is
to make a woman happy and I’m not able to do that for your mother anymore.”
I was stunned, complimented, excited and overwhelmed. I felt I had to
receive my father’s intimate secret with more than empathy. I had to give him an
answer.
“Well Dad there are many different forms of blood pressure medicine. Some
do seriously affect one’s sex drive more than others. You should tell Dr. Bailey. He
can change your medications. And besides Dad I learned from my sex therapy
practicum that the penis is crude and often ineffective sexual tool when compared to
the tongue and fingers. There are many things you can do to please mother
sexually without having an erection.”
7
Talking this way to my father felt awkward and yet it felt liberating.
Suddenly I felt as if my Ph.D. had no bounds.
“I will talk to mother,” I said in my reassuring therapy voice. “She can tell you
what kind of attention she likes and doesn’t like. You need to talk to her after I do.”
I proceeded straight home. I was excited to think I could help my parent’s
marriage. All I had to do was to tell mother to tell him what she enjoyed sexually.
Mother was vacuuming the rugs in the den when I got home. “Turn off the
vacuum cleaner mom. I think I have the solution to Dad’s depression.”
Mother complied. The vacuum cleaner whine diminished to nothing. She
stood behind the upright vacuum with both hands on the handle looking at me with
interest.
“It has to do with sex,” I continued. “Dad is disappointed in himself because
he can’t please you sexually anymore. I told him to consider a medication change
and that the male penis was not necessarily the best sexual instrument and that
you could tell him what he could do that you would enjoy.”
“You told him what?” Raising her voice at me for the first time in years. Her
hands changed grip on the vacuum handle. She was now gripping it as if it were a
baseball bat. “I haven’t enjoyed sex since I was fifty. I’m not interested in having
his body on mine. There is nothing he could do to please me that way.”
The point of the story is not that I had stupidly violated my family’s
generational boundaries, although I had. Nor is it that my dad set me up, although
he did. The point of this story came to me as I was reading Wallerstein’s work.
There she quoted a woman saying that her husband had been sexually wounded in
a previous marriage and that she tried very hard to be responsive to his sexual
interest. This was harder for her after menopause because she was not as
interested in sex as she once was. I remembered my mother’s comment “I haven’t
been interested in sex since I was fifty.”
Wallerstein’s subject and her husband were beyond procreation and
childbearing. So were my mother and father at fifty. The focus of the relationship
had to shift for my parents at that age and at that point in all marriages couples
must make an adjustment.
Documentation
In Create Your Own Love Story, I documented my theory with a literature review of
social psychological research.
Most of the time we social scientists like to have data based research as the
foundation of our theory. We use data points that are transformed into numbers
that are turned into percentages that are so profound that they reach what we call
statistical significance. When we have statistical significance we have evidence that
helps prove a hypothesis.
There is not statistical research on this subject of relationship stages. Judith
Wallerstein wrote her book The Good Marriage using anecdotal evidence to describe
stages of relationship. Her stories were much like my stories that introduce and end
each chapter. She seemed to attend, as I do to Erikson’s developmental stages, but
8
she does not explicitly name each stage.
I think that there are, nonetheless, databases that can be used to support our
exploration of relationship stages. I feel obligated to find whatever scholarship
might be available. In Nashville, where I live, I see songwriters writing love songs
constantly. These songs are filtered through a process that begins with publishers
continues to agents, producers and performers, then through record companies
radio disc jockeys and eventually they collect numbers of people who buy or listen to
these songs. Songs that survive this process and become part of the culture’s art are
called “hits.” To get this far the songs must have touched some chord of passion or
truth in the hearts of millions of people. Therefore these songs can teach us
something about relationships. One of my particular favorite songwriters is Carole
King. She is known for the brilliant poetic truths that are part of her hits. I used the
catalogue of her hit songs as data points that describe aspects of each stage of
relationship development.
Introduction
There are many different versions of the stages of human development. Freud’s
(1915-1917) five stages of development (the oral, the anal, the phallic, latency and
genital) were the product of intellectual man’s first attempt to describe life’s path.
He was followed by many other scholars. Among them are Erikson (1977), Piaget
(1952), Kohlberg (1976), Loevinger (1976), Kegan (1982), and Ivey (1986). The most
popular version of adult stages was Sheehy’s book, Passages, (1974, 1981), and New
Passages, (1996). She described nine stages of adult life. More serious
academicians have also plowed this fertile ground. They include Smith, Cardello
and Choate (1984) Levinson et al., (1978), and Gould (1978). I have found all of
these versions of human development useful. I am particularly taken by Kegan’s
(1982) Helix model described eloquently in Michelle Thomas’ Introduction of
Marriage and Family Therapy (1992). However I find these scholarly versions to be
too complex for this book. I remain wedded to the poet scholar, Eric Erikson’s eight
stages. Erikson proposed eight developmental tasks. Embedded in each task was
the tension between two opposing motivating forces. At Erikson’s stage one, age 01, the opposing forces are trust versus mistrust. At stage two, age 1-3, the opposing
forces are autonomy versus shame. For stage three, age 3-6, the opposing forces are
initiative versus guilt. At stage four, age 6-12, they are industry versus inferiority.
Stage five, age 13-22; Erikson proposes that the forces of identity and role confusion
oppose one another. Stage six, age 22-30; the work is to resolve the conflict between
the forces of intimacy versus isolation. At stage seven, age 30-50, the problem is the
internal conflict between generativity and stagnation and finally at stage eight, age
50-death, the work is to resolve the opposing forces ego integrity and despair.
I have added two other stages of development to Erikson’s, one on either end
of his eight stages. My first stage is “conception.” Erikson for good reason omits
this stage and begins with birth, but for couples this stage is an important part of
their life together. The opposing forces at conception are excitement and fear.
Erikson stops at death. Perhaps he is right to do that, but for relationships death
9
can come to the relationship in the form of divorce or breakup or the death of one
party. The relationship then must negotiate this additional boundary, this
relationship developmental task I call “termination.” The opposing forces are
holding on through the power of grief or letting go and accepting the inheritance
given by the end.
There are many different ways to explain the motivating engine behind
human development. The question is: what pushes us forward from one stage to the
other? I am persuaded by Kegan’s (1982) version. He suggested that we have two
conflicting wants, one is the desire for stability or predictability or familiarity
otherwise known as homeostasis or the status quo. The second he calls the desire to
actualize, to change to become more than who we are. These two forces are always
in tension. Sometimes the child or adult wants to push the envelope of her capacity
and at other times she wishes to take comfort in the known, to keep things as they
are, safe, and secure and predictable. For all of us this seesaw might teeter-totter
from year to year, day to day, minute to minute, from comfort back to challenge.
Kegan (1982) also described another dialectic with two opposing forces
particularly relevant to relationships. He calls these two forces agency and
communion. Almost every social thinker from Marx to Etzioni has made the same
observation. All of them use different words to describe the concept as if to prove
they had a new idea. But this idea is older than the Bible and can be spoken in
common sense English. It is one of the forces that drove Daniel Boone to explore
the wilderness to be alone, autonomous, independent, his own man. It is the force
that pushes a young woman to join a silent convent, to explore her spirit with no
distractions. This agency or autonomy force is juxtaposed the normal human need
to be together, to be part of a tribe, a couple, a family, a group, a community. It is
the desire to merge with; to connect, to be part of something more than just one’s
self. In human growth and development these forces swing back and forth like a
pendulum. In one stage or set of stages we are serving the need for autonomy.
Then we tire of being on our own and the pendulum swings back. And in the next
stage or set of stages we serve the need to be connected, to be part of a team or a
community. Then we get bored and begin to feel that in our merging with another
we have lost our sense of self and the pendulum swings back to autonomy.
There are several models of how humans work other than Freud’s. But
Freud first suggested the notion of defenses. He said that we use defenses to
protect our self-esteem from the wounds of shame. We wear defenses like clothes.
As we grow we outgrow our old defenses, we take on a new set of defenses. With
these new defenses come different, more complex struggles. The object of individual
development is to be uniquely one’s self without the need for defenses.
Defenses provide cover for our authentic selves. They help us hide from the
world who we really are. They protect us, but at the same time they confine us. Just
as children wear different clothes than adults so to do adults need different
psychological defenses. As we grow older our defenses are more subtle, less obvious,
more ritualized and polite. Sometimes people and couples arrest development at one
stage and we stop growing psychologically. Each stage of psychological maturity
10
with its own set of defenses has its developmental tasks or ordeals. Some of us
don’t overcome these developmental challenges and we continue to re-take these
developmental tests until we pass and proceed to the next stage with its new
challenges and its new defenses or we fail the tests and remain arrested at one
stage.
At each level of development we depend on a different set of defenses. For
most of us we never completely give up our original set of defenses. We often still
use them, but as we grow from one developmental stage to another we become less
dependent on the defenses of the previous stage. Thus the task of development at
each stage is to be able to cope without having to be habitually dependent on that
stage’s set of defenses. Once this is accomplished we go on to the next stage and
struggle with learning and overcoming a new set of defenses. There are many
different descriptions of defenses Freud’s, Erikson, and Vaillant’s (1977).
The description that is for me the clearest and most comprehensive is Nancy
McWilliams’s in her book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, (1994). As I describe my ten
stages of relationship development I will weave into the discussion McWilliams’ list
of defenses. McWilliams describes what psychoanalysts consider to be the basic set
of human psychological defenses. I have arranged these defenses to go with each
development stage of relationships. I have added to this an assumption that
relationships are one of life’s playing fields where we engage our defenses and test
ourselves with developmental tasks to complete. Intimate relationships then
become our teachers, therapists, theater, and arena where we express our current
developmental skills and flaws and move toward the next level of development. In
committed relationships, we often do this together with each partner serving as the
other partner’s helper, playing partner and opponent.
Understanding relationships stages is important to couples at any stage
along the continuum. It becomes most obviously relevant when your wife wants a
face lift or your husband wants a sports car. At midlife we recognize that aging is
changing us. What we often see is that our relationships are changing too. It is too
easy for us to consider the problem to be your wife’s sagging breasts or your
husband’s beer belly.
If we understand the stage that our relationship is passing through, we can
reframe our relationship and see what we have accomplished together and what our
current relationship challenges are. Understanding what is happening in this
context makes the red sports car less threatening. Bellies and breasts become
irrelevant, facelifts beside the point.
Here it is assumed that every relationship has a transcendent spirit or
atmosphere that is separate from the people in it. Consider a city. Is it simply the
sum of its population? In addition to its people, a city has a routine, a time when
the streets are clogged with traffic, a time when the streets are relatively empty, a
history that is told over and over, symbols that represent the city’s identity, news
organization to inform the public, etc. Each city has a different feel and pace. New
York City is different from Oskaloosa, Kansas. Both are different from Los Angeles.
So too is the atmosphere inside the homes of different couples. One marriage is
11
different from another. If we can assume that a relationship then is distinct from
the mates inside the relationship then we can begin to describe the theory of
relationship development taking it as a given that a relationship is a distinct
independent entity.
This book describes ten stages of relationship development. (See Appendix 1)
They are: 1. Conception; 2. Contracting; 3. Authority; 4. Evaluation;
5. Accountability; 6. Intimacy; 7. Work/Mastery; 8. Generativity; 9. Integrity; and
10. Termination/Mystery.
At each stage a particular style of thought emerges, along with a form of
government and decision-making. Each stage has its own peculiar metaphysical
base. It’s own economy. It’s own primary emotional climate. Each stage has its own
dialectical tension that resolves into a paradox when one moves into the next stage.