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Navigating the 5 Stages of Love &
Surviving the Turbulent Waters of Stage 3
Disillusionment
Valentine’s Day is celebrated as a day of
love. For those who are in a loving, committed,
relationship it is a time of special gifts, cards,
and chocolates. For others, it is a time when we
dream about real lasting love and hope it will be
ours someday. Like many I grew up in a family with
a mother and father who had serious wounds in their
own families and the lessons I learned distorted my
love map.
For more than fifty years I have been helping
men and women learn from my mistakes as well as my
successes as a marriage and family counselor. If
you have visited me at www.MenAlive.com you have seen my
welcome videos, “Confessions of a
Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.” You also
know that I finally learned the secrets of real
lasting love and have been joyfully married to my
wife, Carlin, for 43 years now.
I share what we learned in my book, The
Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative States
of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to
Come. This is the time of year where I get a
lot of calls for private counseling. Women and men
in a relationship where they have been struggling
decide that this year things are going to get
better, or I’m getting out. Single men and
women decide, I’m going to find that special
someone that I can spend my live loving and being
loved.
I’ve developed a self-guided
on-line course for those who don’t need,
or can’t afford, private counseling but know
that they want more from their love lives than they
are getting and want to give more than they are
currently giving.
We all want real, lasting love, whether we are
in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or beyond. Yet too many
relationships fall apart, just when the couple
could be enjoying their marriage the most. Most
people don’t know why. They become
disillusioned, frustrated, and lost. They have
fallen out of love and mistakenly believe that they
have chosen the wrong partner. After going through
the grieving process, they start looking again; but
often, their efforts end up in disappointment.
Those who have been in a relationship that has
gone bad still want love but don’t want to
repeat the same mistakes.
I’ve counseled thousands of individuals and
couples over the years. I’ve gathered together
everything I would have liked to have learned when
I was struggling in my past relationships and what
I wished I had learned before I jumped into a
second marriage. I put it all into a course,
“Navigating the 5 Stages of Love.”
You
can learn more here. In this season of love and
romance, many would like some real guidance to
unlock the mysteries of love.
The 5 Secrets For Finding Real Lasting
Love
Have you ever wondered why finding the
right partner and having a love life that is
passionate, nurturing, loving, and joyful has
been so difficult?
Do you ever feel like you repeatedly pick the
wrong person to fall in love with?
Have you ever felt like you are looking for
love in all the wrong places?
Are you in a relationship that started off
great, but seems to have lost something
vital?
If you answered “yes” to any of these
questions, you are not alone. I’ve been there
myself. Here are five secrets I’ve discovered
that helped me find real lasting love.
~ Love Secret #1: There are 5 Stages of Love
Not Just Two.
Many of us have come to believe that finding the
right person (Stage 1) is the most important stage
(Hence all the programs and dating sites that
promise to help you find your soul mate). Once
you’ve found that special someone, Stage 2
begins and you build a life together. We are told
we are then entitled to live happily ever after.
But that is not the case for most of us. Here are
the 5 Stages:
Stage 1: Falling In Love
Stage 2: Becoming a Couple
Stage 3: Disillusionment
Stage 4: Creating Real, Lasting Love
Stage 5: Using the Power of Two to Change the
World
~ Love Secret #2: Stage 3, Disillusionment,
is Not the Beginning of the End But the Entre to
Real Lasting Love.
If we believe there are only two stages for
having the relationship we’ve always wanted
when things start to go south we ignore the signs
or try to fix what is wrong. When things don’t
get fixed we often blame ourselves or our partner
and real we must get out of the relationship
because it seems that no matter what we do, things
don’t get better.
There is an old saying that can help us at this
point, “When you’re going through hell,
don’t stop.” Most people either stay
stuck in their pain or bail out. What is called for
here is to keep going. One of the most important
things I teach people when they come to me for
counseling is how to understand the value of Stage
3.
~ Love Secret #3: Stage 3 Teaches Us to Be
Real.
Falling in love is by necessity deceptive. We so
want to find that right person, we all project our
unmet needs and desires on them. We don’t see
the real person, we see what we want and hope to
see. We don’t fully share our real selves. We
share the parts of ourselves we think will be most
attractive to a potential partner.
In Stage 3 we learn to recognize our projections
and take the risk to slowly reveal who we really
are and accept the gift of who our partner really
is. We also recognize that there are unhealed
wounds from our past relationships, most
importantly from our first relationships—the
ones we had growing up in our first family with our
parents. We must get real with our past in order to
have the future we all want.
The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung said,
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become
who you truly are.”
This is never an easy task. Stage 3 can help us
release the illusions that keep us from our true
selves.
~ Love Secret #4: We All Have Faulty Love
Maps That Must Be Corrected.
Most of us grew up in families where we got a
distorted map of what real lasting love was all
about. There were beliefs about ourselves and
others that were implanted in our brains and became
mostly unconscious. We were implanted with
internalized messages that told us things like:
I am not safe.
I am worthless.
I am powerless.
I am not lovable.
I cannot trust anyone.
I am bad.
I am on my own.
As a result we become like confused homing
pigeons always flying ever faster towards addictive
and disastrous relationships and away from good
people and potentially wonderful relationships. It
is like having a compass that always seems to take
us South when we want to go North. Does that sound
familiar?
~ Love Secret #5: Real Lasting Love Requires
Three Simple Ingredients.
Most of us have no idea how to nourish a healthy
relationship. It’s as though we are given a
beautiful and rare flower, but me mistakenly give
it too much water or not enough. I thought all I
need to do when I got married was to be a good
provider and refrain from being mean and nasty (Oh,
and remember to shower regularly). But it took me a
long time to learn the simple, yet necessary
ingredients for real lasting love to flourish.
Psychologist, Dr. Sue Johnson, offers guidance
in her book, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for
a Lifetime of Love. She helps us remember these
three ingredients with one simple word:
ARE.
- A is for Accessibility: Can we reach each
other? This means staying open to your partner
even when you are tired, hurt, or insecure.
Answering “yes” to questions like: Can
I get my partner’s attention easily? Is my
partner easy to connect with emotionally?
- R is for Responsiveness: Can we rely on each
other to respond to our emotional needs?
Answering “yes” to questions like: If
I need connection and comfort, will you be there
for me? Does my partner respond positively to my
signals that I need them to come close?
- E is for Engagement: Do we trust our partner
to value us and stay close even when we are out
of sync with each other? Answering
“yes” to questions like, Do I feel
very comfortable being close to and trusting my
partner? If we are apart, can I trust that we
are still connected and cared for?
Most of us didn’t learn how to give and
receive real lasting love. We forget that like
food, we need these three types of nourishment
often, many times a day. A big splurge on
anniversaries and special occasions never makes up
for what we miss if we don’t get these regular
gifts of love every day.
I hope this was helpful to you. If you’d
like to receive the gift of having my on-line
course “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love,”
I think you will find it’s a gift that keeps
on giving long after you get it.
If you want to learn more about counseling or to
subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, come visit
me at www.MenAlive.com.
©2023 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
+ Suicide
* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of seven
books including Male
Menopause, now
translated into 17 foreign languages and his
latest book, The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression. For over
38 years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback.
E-Mail.
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
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