Love & Grown-Up Relationships

So I think this is the proper sequence for our "mating" ritual: Attraction, Dating, Courtship, Relationship, Marriage. Within marriage I think there is a period of disillusionment, a whole lot of personal awareness and growth, and then a commitment to the reality of living with another person and the patience and love it requires to keep the entire thing together! Courtship as we talked about last week is the "wonder" period when couples are thoroughly smitten with each other, see not a flaw in the perfect person they have discovered, and almost don't require food or drink during this halcyon phase when being in the presence of the other is enough to sustain life. Fortunately courtship doesn't last until starvation, but turns into relationship as the gradual idealized projections fall away and we begin to see that our perfect other has room for improvement in a few areas. They often discover that we ourselves could use a little tweaking. Imagine that. Sometimes when this slow realization occurs, couples break it off and move on to find the really really perfect person they were destined to be with in perfect love and harmony. They may repeat this cycle many times and some may never realize that courtship is the unicorn and relationship is the real deal. When couples accept that relationship is the grown-up way to be with another person, they can begin to see both self and other as normally flawed and work on minimizing the effect of those pesky things so the two of them can be together in a fundamentally healthy way both mostly giving and receiving enough to keep each other close and relatively contented. If this happens consistently, then marriage, the uber-relationship, may be in their future. And of course we all know that marriage is not for the feint of heart or folks who cannot look into the mirror of self-awareness the spouse will hold up from time to time. Marriage is for grown-ups and luckily it provides on the job training!