The Four Stages of Marriage
I remember meeting my husband as if it were yesterday. Even though that was over 25 years ago, I can still feel my heart pound when I think about the moment he introduced himself to me at work. Three weeks after our first date, we were already so in love that we decided we were eventually going to get married. Being with him was incredibly exciting and at the same time so comfortable, and I had never experienced anything like it before.
I knew that marriage could be hard work. I wasn’t naïve about that; after all, I’d already been a couples therapist for a few years by then. I just believed that in a good marriage, the hard work would not be all that difficult, because I would get to do it with this person I got along so well with. We would encounter challenges, of course, but we would engage them hand in hand, a united team facing whatever life was throwing our way.
Ha! Fast forward a few years: we had 3 kids, 2 jobs, bills, and everything else that comes with building a life with another person. We were in the thick of the “hard work,” and it certainly didn’t feel like we were a united team for much of it. It felt more like he was my opposition, the person in the way of figuring out these challenges; I’m sure I felt the same to him!
I realized that the paradigm I had in my head of the two of us navigating life together was not holding up against reality 7 years into our marriage.
Marriage goes through stages
I began to find it much more helpful to view our relationship as an organic thing that would grow and evolve as we went along. It’s not that our relationship was static and something we could rely on to navigate life; it’s that the relationship itself needed to grow and to engage certain developmental tasks, for which life would offer plenty of opportunities. The stage model for marriage describes this process:
1. The honeymoon stage
Falling in love with a person you then decide to marry is intoxicating. It is not just how compatible you might feel with this person. It is also that your brain is experiencing a flood of hormones that feels amazing. High arousal neurochemicals serve to create the “rose-colored glasses” of early relationship, peaking around 12 months. This blissful state typically lasts from a few weeks to a couple of years, but in every case, the norepinephrine and dopamine levels eventually subside as you settle into daily life with each other.
As a marriage counselor in Chicago, I see over and over again how couples want to go back to that early phase of their relationship, believing that the way you felt back then is how it is supposed to feel no matter how much time has passed. Treating those happy memories of your early time together as the place you need to get back to is to miss the point of what that phase of your relationship was all about.
It isn’t about recapturing old magic.
It is about strengthening your determination to hang in there through the hard years ahead. It is about deepening your commitment to your relationship, to your partner, because at the deepest level you remember how much you love them. It is especially about nourishing the narrative you have about your love story, because you will need it when things get tough.
Task of stage 1: Strengthen your commitment
2. The power struggle stage
Sandra and Jose have been married 6 years and are now working full-time jobs while raising their 2 year-old daughter. One Tuesday evening, Sandra walks in from a long day at work after picking up their daughter from daycare and sees Jose sitting on the couch, scrolling through his phone. She looks at the sink piled with the breakfast dishes and is irritated immediately because she had asked him to clean the kitchen before she got home to cook their evening meal. She snaps at him, “Were you ever going to do the dishes or do you just expect me to do everything?!”
Jose has come in from his own long day at work, loaded down with the groceries he stopped on his way home to get. He sits down to take a minute before tackling the dishes when he hears his wife come in the door. The next thing he hears is her saying, “Were you ever going to do the dishes or do you just expect me to do everything?!” and immediately he feels annoyed and defensive. He snaps at her, “Just relax, it doesn’t all have to get done the way you want it to.”
It’s an ordinary moment, one that is happening in millions of homes every evening. We could talk about how they are communicating (and I will! In a future blog) because there are clearly better ways to have that conversation. I’d rather talk here about what is happening at a deeper level, and it is actually quite simple: the problem is that at that moment, they want different things.
Sandra wants a clean kitchen; Jose wants a moment of rest.
Neither one is wrong to want what they want. And a few years ago, while they were in their honeymoon stage, they would never have had an argument about it. Theoretically, they would probably still agree that enjoying your life AND keeping your kitchen clean are both important. The struggle now is that Jose wants to relax before he cleans the kitchen, and Sandra wants a clean kitchen before she feels like she can relax.
They have firmly arrived in stage 2 of their marital relationship, where couples encounter all the ways they are different from one another, without the ameliorating effect of dopamine to cast a rosy haze. There is more that is different between us than is the same, no matter how compatible we were at the beginning. Indeed, John Gottman’s research has found that more than 70% of the issues couples start to argue about in stage 2 are a permanent fixture of their relationship and will never be solved.
The work of this second stage in your relationship is not to win arguments and convince your partner of your own point of view. This is where so many couples get bogged down and why the divorce rate spikes around this time.
The work is instead to figure out how to argue productively about any topic you face. When you stop trying to win the particular argument and start collaborating on how you manage any argument, you are on their way to moving beyond the power struggle. When you shift from blaming each other to understanding each other, you are able to find ways to navigate the different needs you have.
Instead of spending an evening frustrated with and disconnected from one another, Sandra and Jose can create a better way to manage the evening stress. They might agree on a different schedule for dishes, or a particular way to express their stress, or a way of responding that works for them both.
Each couple needs to come up with its own unique recipe for sorting out differences. When you have figured out how to do this productively, you have the security of knowing you can speak up about whatever matters to you without destabilizing your relationship. You have the confidence that your love can persist even as you each grow and change.
Task of stage 2: Learn how to manage your differences effectively
3. The two ships passing at night stage
Most couples who had a happy honeymoon period get to stage 3, whether or not you have effectively resolved the power struggle phase. Life picks up speed, responsibilities multiply, time gets short, stress gets more intense, and pretty soon the two of you are barely connecting anymore when it isn’t about logistics.
Divorce rates tend to stabilize during this phase, as couples settle into the project of raising kids, building careers, connecting to family, friends and community, or trying to keep up with health and wellness. Your days get very full and it becomes easy to postpone the particular time you used to spend with each other. Maybe you haven’t been on a vacation alone together in years, or you have sex less often, or your date nights always include other people. You may feel like you know everything there is to know about each other so what is left to talk about?
You may have arguments that are so unpleasant that you begin to avoid talking about anything important. Or you may instead just bicker at a low level about who’s right and who’s wrong, and then feel unmotivated to carve out any extra time for each other because you don’t see how it will be enjoyable.
Couples can exist this way for years and remain fairly stable. Until, of course, their common project (of career-building, child-raising, community-involvement etc) ends and you are left with a very distant connection. The divorce rate spikes again after about 20 years of marriage, as especially women start deciding that the distance between them has become too painful to live with and too hopeless to fix. In my own counseling practice, I have seen how common it is for couples to try couples therapy at this point in their marriage.
Let’s face it, couples who figure out that they need to prioritize the time they spend together are going to be happier than those who don’t. Couples who regularly choose to spend time with each other, rather than waiting for the perfect moment when everything lines up, end up in a closer relationship than those who don’t. Put spending enjoyable time together at the top of your priority list, because if it isn’t at the top, it falls quickly off the bottom and the disconnect between you will only get worse.
Task of stage 3: Nurture your connection
4. The thriving stage
This stage of your relationship is only possible by effectively resolving each stage that comes before. It is what most of us imagine when we are in that first phase of our marriage, but it only becomes possible once you find a way to navigate your differences productively AND enjoy each other’s company no matter how much you each may have changed along the way.
Because you will change! You won’t be the person you were when you first met, and neither will your spouse. Your values might remain but their nuance might be increased by your own life experience. Your bodies will have aged, your goals might be different, and yet if you have found a way to come together even when you aren’t always on the same page, you will get to enjoy the best honeymoon of all.
Author Bio
Melinda Yachnin, LCPC, is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in La Grange and Chicago IL. She specializes in couples counseling for people in long-term relationships and has been counseling couples for almost 30 years in the Chicago area. She uses Gottman Method, Imago Therapy, EFT and RLT in her work with couples so that couples can access the practical skills in everyday life and the deeper currents that can transform their relationships. She has been married for 25 years and raised three children with her husband, a perspective that has enhanced her commitment to helping couples navigate the many stages of a life together.
