From the Honeymoon Period to Power Struggle: Navigating the Stages of a Relationship
In this episode, we're talking all about the stages of a relationship - specifically, what happens when we transition from the honeymoon period of a relationship (fuelled by chemistry, romance and infatuation) to the power struggle (where all our flaws and wounds come to the fore).
WHAT WE COVER:
what each stage of a relationship looks like
why the transition from honeymoon period to power struggle feels like a bait & switch
how anxious-avoidant dynamics overlay onto this dynamic
how you can make the most of the power struggle stage & use it to grow closer as a couple
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
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Episode Transcript
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So there's been a lot of theorising books written on this concept of the stages of a relationship and while if you Google that, you'll get lots of different results, with some say five stages, others say seven stages, the names of the stages are different. It all kind of looks a little bit different depending on who you ask. But I think where there's more or less consensus is in the dynamics that usually characterise that initial stage. So chemistry and excitement and infatuation, followed by what can feel like this fall from grace into conflict and power struggle and competition, and what that can feel like, what it can bring up. And some things to bear in mind if you have been through this before, which almost everyone listening will have to varying degrees in some capacity, and how you can navigate this better, because, to put it bluntly, the power struggle stage of a relationship, which is what comes after this honeymoon period, will make or break you.
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It's the period in which most couples break up because it is a time where we get really triggered, where we experience a lot of doubts and uncertainty and fear and all of those wounds start to get touched. So knowing how best to approach that period in a way that can allow you to get to know each other better, understand each other better, accept each other, and ultimately grow through that experience into something deeper and more connected and come out the other side stronger for it. That takes some awareness and some tools and some knowledge. So that's what today's episode is going to be all about. Before I dive into that, a couple of quick announcements.
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The first being you may have heard me mention in recent episodes that The Waitlist is now open for healing Anxious Attachment, which is my signature programme. There are, I think, about 750 of you on The Waitlist, which is pretty amazing in the past couple of weeks. Enrollment for that will be opening later this month and being on The Waitlist will entitle you to a discount and guarantee you first access when doors open. So if you're interested in that, if anxious attachment is something that you struggle with and you're wanting some support and resources in building healthier relationships both with yourself and with other people, definitely jump on The Waitlist, which is in the show notes. The second quick announcement is just to share the featured review, which is I'm so grateful my husband found your podcast and shared it with me.
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We finally found the reasons we've danced the way we have for the past 25 plus years. We've learned simple ways each of us can ease the burden of anxiety and combat the desire to avoid. Your information has made us a more stable and happy couple. We're so thankful for you and your podcast. Thank you for that beautiful review.
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It brings a big smile to my face to hear that you've had those insights and that you've been able to translate those into action in your relationship and feel closer and more connected as a result. That is really, really beautiful to hear. If that was your review, please send an email to podcast@stephanierigg.com and my team will set you up with free access to one of my master classes. Okay, so let's dive into this conversation around transitioning from the honeymoon period to the power struggle. So I want to first start the conversation by setting the scene a little and to preempt what I know will be the inevitable questions around how do I know what phase I'm in?
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And how long does each phase last? I'm not going to give you anything prescriptive on that. Again, if you Google it, you'll get a whole host of different answers. I think that focusing on the micro, on the details, the minutiae of like, oh, if we've been together for seven months but we're behaving in this way, what phase are we in? I would encourage you to let go of needing to pigeonhole yourselves and more, just engage with the overarching tone of these phases because I think that there is enough of a contrast in them that just substantively.
0:04:46.27 → 0:05:10.07
You should have a feel for where you're at. Now, the honeymoon period, which is also referred to as the romance stage or the Hollywood stage of a relationship, is that initial period where we're infatuated by our partner. There's the chemical rush. We can't stop thinking about them, we idealise them, we put them on a pedestal. There's this intense attraction, chemistry.
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We can't keep our hands off each other. We want to talk to them all day, every day. We never want to be apart from them. And beyond that, something that's really important about this phase to realise is that our differences are really attractive and alluring, so the ways in which our partner is different to us increases our attraction for them. So, for example, if you're someone who's quite introverted or socially anxious and your partner is really charismatic and confident, then that's going to be super attractive.
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In this honeymoon period, we have a very positive sheen on all of their traits and particularly the ways in which they differ from us. So the person who is spontaneous in this phase, if we're a bit more structured and routine driven, their spontaneity is going to be really attractive and we're going to be really drawn to it. And see it in a very positive light. I'll come back to why that's important. Shortly during this honeymoon period, we're also on our best behaviour.
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So we are trying to get this person to like us, right? We are presenting all of our best traits and we are probably downplaying our more difficult side. We're probably not being very picky or demanding or speaking up about things. We're letting more things slide because we're leaning into all of this positivity in the relationship. And most importantly, most of our stuff isn't getting triggered in this early honeymoon stage.
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Now, I'll say with the caveat there that particularly if you're more anxious, you might still be experiencing some anxiety and overthinking and ruminating in that honeymoon phase just because that's kind of the tendency, and particularly in early dating, that can happen. But for the most part, the honeymoon period is relatively free of conflict and triggers because we're just enjoying this chemically fueled bondedness to one another. Now, I think it's important to say there is nothing wrong with this. I think when we have terms like love bombing and trauma bond and all of that being thrown around on Instagram, we can get a bit overly paranoid that oh no, how do I know if my chemistry with this person is actually a red flag in disguise and we're actually trauma bonding to one another? If you're familiar with my work, you'd know that I try and steer clear of those terms because I think that they do more harm than good.
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I think they put people on guard and on alert and make people very suspicious and wary of everything that they're doing. So I think that the starting point is the honeymoon period is pretty much universal. The vast majority of relationships will go through this initial period of chemistry and intensity and super attraction. And that is biological right, that is designed to facilitate this pair bonding thing that we do. What follows when that chemical rush inevitably wears off, and I'm sorry to say that it will inevitably wear off, is we enter what is called the power struggle stage.
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Now, for a lot of, again, more anxious people, this point of transition, and it doesn't have to be an overnight thing, often it'll cross fade from one to the other. But this transition is extremely hard because everything that I've just described about the honeymoon period, the intensity and the romance and the extreme levels of effort and best behaviour and attention and affection, is pretty much exactly what anxiously attached people would love their relationships to be like 100% of the time. Forever and ever, till death do us part. It's a nice idea and I'm sure that we'd all love that, but it's also not realistic. And so I think because anxious people really relish in that period of that honeymoon energy and they feel like it is the best thing imaginable and they make so much meaning out of it, or we have such an incredible connection and they romanticise and idealise.
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When they transition into the power struggle stage, it elicits a real panic. So let me just set the scene for what the power struggle stage usually entails. As the chemistry tapers off, we typically start to notice our partner as a whole, flawed, messy human. Okay? So whereas previously we were only noticing how wonderful they are and how amazing they are, and all the ways in which they're different to us are super attractive and complementary to how we are in this power struggle stage, we start to see their differences as threatening to us.
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So the person whose spontaneity was exciting and attractive, all of a sudden we see that spontaneity as unreliability, or as them not being dependable or them being flaky. The person who we were drawn to the charisma of, all of a sudden we find them obnoxious. And so we start to see the other side of the coin. Or as those rose coloured glasses come off, we see things a little more holistically. We see the whole person.
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And because we're not aware of the haze that we were in, we feel like there's been a bait and switch. We feel like this person has suddenly gone from being amazing, perfect, to having all of these flaws that they were actively concealing from us. And so that can feel really threatening, this sense of you're showing me your real self and you tricked me and you're actually this terrible person with all of these deficiencies. So a lot of conflict comes up here because this is not just an anxious thing. This is happening on both sides.
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In virtually all relationships will go through some version of this where the sheen wears off and we start to get irritable, we start to get critical, we start to compete with one another, we start to attack and defend. We have our first conflicts and all of these triggers and wounds that exist for us relationally start to get activated. And so this can be a very high conflict time. Now, you may recall at the start of the episode I said that this is the period when most couples break up. And for some couples that happens after six months.
0:11:46.50 → 0:12:52.59
For others, they can spend a lifetime in the power struggle stage. And for whatever reason, socially, culturally, people can get married and live a whole marriage in the power struggle stage without ever resolving it and just triggering and reinforcing those wounds. So to make matters worse, or to add fuel to the fire, when we overlay attachment onto this base dynamic, as I said, some version of honeymoon followed by power struggle will likely exist in all relationships, even between two secure people, because it's just part of that life cycle or trajectory of a relationship as it matures. But when we have an anxious, avoidant kind of dynamic, one person being more anxious, the other being more avoidant, this power struggle stage can really be amplified. You might have listened to an episode I did a few weeks back, you may have listened to an episode I did recently on perfectionism in anxious avoidant relationships.
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And I think that that can really come to the fore in this power struggle stage whereby the anxious person feels like they have to be perfect and to the extent that anything goes wrong in the relationship, it's because they've done something wrong. And so they need to frantically overwork to restore the connection, to return themselves to the former glory of the honeymoon period. And on the avoidance side, as their stuff starts to get triggered in this power struggle stage, as they start to see their partner as imperfect, they take those imperfections as a reason to leave the relationship, as a reason that the relationship is not good, is not working, is not right. And so they start to distance, they lean into that sense of judgement and criticism of a partner as a way to keep themselves safe from the vulnerability of progressing and doing the work, of navigating those wounds and those dynamics because it's vulnerable work. So what we see is the anxious person is intensely triggered by this transition from the honeymoon period to the power struggle stage and the tapering off of that initial intensity chemistry effort almost obsessiveness with each other, which is their ideal way of being in relationship.
0:14:18.29 → 0:14:58.77
Coupled with the transition to a power struggle stage where their partner is being potentially quite critical of them and making them feel like they have indeed done something wrong and that is the cause of the issues in the relationship. So it becomes this double edged sword. So what do we do with all of this? I think in a more macro sense, the honest answer is this power struggle stage is where the work of building healthy relationships has to take place for a lot of people. Where we need to learn about our wounds, where we need to understand our triggers, our projections, the stories we tell ourselves, the ways in which we participate in unhealthy dynamics in our relationship.
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And doing that work is what will ultimately allow us to emerge through the power struggle into the subsequent stages of relationship, which for reference are stability, commitment and what's called the bliss phase in one particular framework, but really maturing into a deeper connection and commitment and sense of trust and safety and dependability. But most people don't get there and that's the honest truth. So knowing that this is a really important phase in your relationship and that it is an opportunity, right? As I said, the power struggle will make or break you. It is that simple.
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So you can either use it as an opportunity to reenact and reinforce all your deepest wounds, to play out that script and that scene once again, and use it as evidence of everything that's wrong with you or with other people with relationships. Or you can use it as an opportunity to rewrite that script and do things differently and create a new version of relationship for yourself. So something that's really important in allowing you to approach it with that mindset of okay, this is an important phase of my relationship, rather than something to resist, is knowing that it's coming. So if you're in a new relationship, you're in that honeymoon period, or maybe you're between relationships at the moment, maybe you're in the power struggle stage right now. Know that it's completely normal.
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Know that the honeymoon period will come to an end. Much as you'd like to resist that, that doesn't mean that the romance has to die out. It doesn't mean that you stop putting in effort that you settle for a lacklustre relationship. But just know that the tone and the character of your relationship will inevitably mature into something different and that's okay. See that as an opportunity to deepen your connection and nurture it, rather than scrambling to get back to what your relationship was at the start and feeling like your inability to return to that starting point is some sort of personal failing or I did something wrong or a reason to start from scratch with someone else and try and cling to it with the next person.
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It's unrealistic. So just be aware of that and prepare yourself for the fact that that will come to an end. So enjoy it while it lasts, but also don't lament its evolution into something deeper. I think if you are more anxious in your attachment, that advice is really, really important for you. Don't personalise or internalise the end of that honeymoon period as meaning you've done something wrong.
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Because as soon as you're in that mindset of, oh, no, they've lost interest in me, they've lost attraction to me, panic, they're going to leave me, they're going to stop loving me. As soon as you're in that place where you're in fear and anxiety, you're going to start trying to control and grip and reach them and over function and overwork and over give and shapeshift and do all of those things to try and alleviate that fear and anxiety that you're experiencing. And I promise you that will only make it worse. So as much as possible, taking responsibility for that and taking responsibility for learning to self regulate, for doing this work so that you're not in this state of desperation and panic and fear, that tends to be a self fulfilling prophecy on the avoidance side. If you're listening to this, your impulse will probably be to pull away in that power struggle stage because your starting point is valuing harmony in relationships and feeling like anything short of harmony makes you feel like a failure or just makes relationships feel not worth it.
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It tips the balance in favour of this is not worth it for me because I'm pretty comfortable being on my own so as soon as it gets hard, it ceases to feel worth my energy. As tempting as it is to go there, just know that that's not the relationship, that is all relationships. And if you do want to be in relationship for the long term, if you want partnership in your life, you will have to stay in that discomfort sooner or later. You can run, you can withdraw, you can pull away, but you'll be doing this again in six or twelve months or whenever you next go down this road. So you can do the work now or do it later, but you will have to do the work at some point if you want to be in healthy, secure, lasting, nourishing relationship.
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So that's your growth edge as a more avoidant person is turning towards the discomfort of doing the work and being vulnerable and persisting through the mess and the conflict and the triggers and allowing yourself to grow through that rather than turning away from it and retreating to your comfort zone of isolation and aloneness. So I hope that that has been an interesting discussion, that it's been helpful for you, that you've learned something. And no matter where you're at at the moment, whether you're single, whether you're dating, whether you're in a relationship, really normalising these seasons and these changes in our relationship and cultivating more of an acceptance around that and an appreciation for the gifts and the opportunities that each seasonal stage offers us. Again, it lessens that resistance that we can have and that desire to control and allows us to really grow through those things and make the most of where we're at in our relationships. If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a five star rating if you're listening on Spotify or Apple and leaving a review.
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If you are listening on Apple podcasts, it is a super helpful way of continuing to grow the podcast and get the word out. And I'm so appreciative of your support and all of the beautiful reviews. Otherwise, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you later in the week for our Q and A episode. Thanks so much guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment.
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If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephaniergig.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here. I hope to see you again soon.