Strangers

Albert told me to watch this video (Strangers, again: 16m 20s):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSdELZxEnHY

For those who don't want to/can't watch it, he talks about how he was with a girl, and everything was amazing, but after a while it died off. He said there are 7 stages in a relationship.

Stage 1: Meeting (2:33)
When you first meet each other (in this case, bumped into each other while running). The great thing about this part is that you never know when getting to stage 1 with someone will lead to moving to stage 2.

Stage 2: The Chase (3:37)
He says it's usually considered the best part. It's when you can't stop thinking about the other person. You secretly keep checking their Facebook/G+/Twitter, you are excited to see that they're online, you stay up later than you really should talking to them, and somehow you manage to spend hours talking with each other. Yet when you are with them, you feel nervous and excited.

Stage 3: The Honeymoon (4:24)
When everything is perfect. You're happy to do anything, but you want to do it together.

Stage 4: Comfortable (5:01)
When you're comfortable being yourself around each other. When you can start to say no to that movie that, in all honesty, you don't want to watch. When you stop thinking of new and exciting things to do together, and are just happy doing whatever you want to do, and sometimes what you want to do and what your partner wants to do overlaps, so you do it together.

As he said in the video, this isn't always bad, but can lead to being taken for granted. Which leads to...

Stage 5: Tolerance (6:27)
You argue with each other, or you make passive-aggressive statements to try to avoid arguments, but that just turns into a delayed argument.

Stage 6: Downhill (8:27)
Being together isn't fun anymore, but you stay together because you're together, and you don't quite want to give up on it just yet.

Stage 7: Breaking Up (9:19)
The end.

He says the next stage is going back to how you were at the start.... strangers.


I think that most long term relationships will fluctuate between steps 4 and 5. That might sound like a bad thing, but I think it's good. For steps 2 and 3, (usually) a lot of effort is going into the relationship. Sure, it's fun at the time, but imagine having to do that for the rest of your life. Think of that episode of the Simpsons where Apu showers his wife with presents in the lead up to Valentine's Day. I don't think anyone could do that every day.

I remember a conversation I had with Lucy a while ago. Sex and the City movie spoilers ahead: We were watching the first SatC movie, and we got to the point where Miranda was arguging with Steve about how he slept with someone while they were separated. He said that he wasn't happy with the fact that they never had sex anymore. I think the movie was portraying Steve as the bad guy, but Lucy said that part of the fault was Miranda's. Why couldn't she just suck it up and have sex with him just to make him happy? The lack of sex was obviously a problem for him, so if she really wanted to save the relationship, why didn't she do it instead of getting angry at him and making him want to leave her even more?

I think that's what stops stage 5 from becoming stage 6 - whether one person in the relationship is prepared to take one for the team, and I guess that's why it's called "Tolerance". And what pushes a relationship into stage 6 is when one person feels like they have been the bigger person too many times, and they just can't bring themselves to do it anymore. Even if the other person suddenly realises what a jerk they've been and decides to put in some effort, it's too late. They might suck it up this one time, but that's not enough compared to the number of times the other person has had to do it.

(As a side note, I think that proposing or having a kid can help move the slider back towards stage 4, but there are really only so many times you can do that, and if you really have to resort to that, maybe you should be thinking about whether there is really something wrong in your relationship.)

Getting late, so to be continued tomorrow.... if I remember what I was going to say.