April Masini › Relationship Advice Forum › Relationship Advice Forum › Is impatience creating dysfunctional relationships?
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April Masini.
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July 28, 2010 at 11:58 pm #2792
William
ParticipantYour phone rings, for the thirds time that night. It’s your best friend again. She still cannot believe her 3 year relationship is over and is positive she is going to end up all alone. These calls have been happening every day for the past 2 weeks, and of course as her best friend it’s your responsibility to help her through these tough times. So you take her under your wing for a night on the town. She meets a guy and you think, “Great!!” Weeks later she is still seeing the guy she met when you took her out and she is head over heels for him. She won’t stop talking about how great he is, how perfect for each other they are and how they both enjoy all the same things. A few more weeks pass and there talking like they are married, how they are looking for a place to live together and thinking of children. You can do nothing bust gasp in shock at how quick things are moving. Dare you ask her if she is moving too fast or has she really thought about it all? You’re suddenly no longer the friend who was there to see her through her dark spell, but the friend who is casting darkness on light she has found. But surely she is moving too fast with this guy, she can’t have fallen for him so soon, it’s not right for them to move in together yet…. is it?
I’m sure many of you have a friend or at least know of someone who this reminds you of. Their relationship with their “soul mate”, the one they have been with forever and a day has come to an end. I say “soul mate” quite loosely as if they were destined to be together, they may well have spent at least a little portion of your four years together undertaking the normal process of what couples do, or least planning their future. This opposed to their apparent routine; only seeing each other certain days of the week, a “date night”, seeing their own friends on Saturdays, staying in watching a movie on Friday night, yeah you can see where I’m going with this. At no point have they been planning on moving in together or having children, and if the topic has arisen it more than likely on movie night Friday after a bottle of wine and a few beers, with both of them walking up the next day hoping the other won’t bring it up again.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying everyone’s relationship is like this, far from it. However, with each of us knowing at least one person we can be put in this category, that’s a lot of people who are literally speed dating. Which leaves us with the question, why? What makes people throw common sense out the window and immerse themselves in these relationships? Is it love at first sight? Is it destiny helping us find the one? Or is it something else?
Could it be humans growing impatience in today’s fast paced modern world? We live in an “I want it now” society, we don’t like to wait for things, we hate to queue, and we are always using shortcuts, anything that can make out lives easier and faster. Look at the Apple I Phone. When that was first released in July 2008, people queued up for hours before the store even opened to be able to say they were one of the first to get their hands on this technological masterpiece. Yes, I can see the hypocrisy in the last sentence, but it seems we are willing to combat once impatience to ease another. Everywhere we look there are measures put in place to speed things up, the microwave to cook food faster, and cars to get us where we want to go quicker, mobile phones, the internet, laptops, kettles, showers, and remote controllers? This is a near endless list; everything we use has some way of making our lives that little bit easier and simpler, and thus speeding up the process.
Add impatience to the dating scene and what do we have, modern speed dating. If we really are becoming impatient in all other aspects of our life, does this include relationships? I think it does. If you have ever played or seen your partner play on a computer game you will understand. He (or she as not to be sexist) is sitting there for hours on end swearing and throwing the control pad around because he simply cannot complete a certain part of the game. Not only can he not complete it, but every time he fails he has to start the whole level again, and again, and again. He has to repeat each little bit and by now he is getting frustrated not only with the part he cannot complete, but having to do the simple tasks at the start of the level, which by now have become mundane and second nature. If only the game developers had put a save point half way through, it would have made life so much easier. I don’t think this is a stretch too far from many people’s mentality towards relationships. They have spent two, three, four years or maybe even longer with that special someone only to find out it wasn’t working out. Do they really want to go through that all over again? Do they want to spend years dating, finding everything there is to know about each other, deciding if they are right for each other or do they want to throw the cautious air out of the window and by pass this important part of the relationship cycle? I can understand to some degree the rationale behind the idea. You have spent years with someone, maybe because you spent 6 months just dating, going to the cinema, eating out and all the other fun activities you do in the “honeymoon period”. It may have lasted longer, but then you ended up as a serious couple, comfortable and bound by the same routine week in week out never moving your relationship forward. To some extent it’s understandable you don’t want to go through all that again and have accomplished nothing, so you skip a few years and go straight in at the deep end so if it does come to an end you can at least show you are mature and are able to move in with someone, or even start a family, maybe?
According to many psychology and dating website there are 5 stages in the “cycle of a relationship.” They all differ slightly in what they call each stage but process is the same none the less.
Stage 1 – Attraction Phase This is as straight forward as it sounds, you meet someone you are attracted to and a relationship begins.
Stage 2 – Honeymoon Phase This is the key phase in a relationship. Its correct term is “Idealized Positive Transference”. Put simply, you take the image of your ideal partner and transfer this onto the other person. This is where you see your partner for who you want them to be in your ideal world, not who they actually are. Usually the two are quite different. Subconsciously you are transferring images of what you lacked in your childhood onto your new partner. If you needed a lot of compassion as a child and you didn’t get it, you transfer the image of someone very compassionate onto your partner. If you needed patience as a child, or understanding, whatever it was this is what you are seeing in the other person.
Stage 3 – Reality Phase This happens in two stages. It begins when you first say to yourself, “There is something about my partner I’m not sure about”. It could be anything from the way they laughs to the way they eats. The second stage is when you ask yourself, “Can I make it with this person? Are we really cut out to be together?”
Stage 4 – Commitment Phase Now you have decided that this is the person for me, this is when you move into the commitment phase. Here is where you start to subconsciously negotiate parts of your relationship usually to do with space issues, such as how often are we are going to see each other and what each partner is expected to do within the relationship. This is normally the first point you here the phrase, “I need some space.” You start treating each other more like family and airing any issues and seeing how well your real personalities mesh together. Remember you weren’t seeing the “real” person during the honeymoon phase.
Stage 5 – Marriage Phase The final stage, where you sign a piece of paper and move in together. This is when both people really see each other in the relationship and things play out more so than when you were starting out or living together.
Ok, so we have impatience in today’s society, combine that with dating, and we have fast moving relationships, but how is this leading to dysfunctional relationships? If we look at the Relationship Cycle, we see that the honeymoon phase is the key phase, which everyone is aware that we all go through in a new relationship. The phase where a new couple is all over each other like a hot rash, rarely spending a day apart, and many of you may have recently learnt, the phase where we falsely idolize our partner and put them on a pedestal. We are seeing our new partner as the person we would like them to be, not who they really are. This is why the relationship is at one of its strongest points during this time; you ignore all the minor traits you dislike. In short, you are dating the person you ideally would like to date.
If this is the case, we are seeing our new partner in a way where they are perfect for us, and we are far too impatient to wait for the relationship to progress along its natural course, then this cannot be an ideal time to make such important decisions? Of course every relationship is different and for some the honeymoon phase may last three months, for others it may last a year, but this is what the whole article has been leading too. The fact that numerous people are choosing to move their relationship forward faster than what most people could call healthy cannot be an ingredient in a stable and lasting relationship? It could just be my cynical and eccentric view that it takes time to get to know someone, to understand them and be sure they merit pursuing and by bringing about advances in relationships that should not be entered into lightly, they are setting themselves up to fail? Is it safe to say that after three or four months with someone you know enough about them to move in together and create a financial link to them? What about having a child? After six or seven months with someone are you certain you relationship will last or at least has a high chance of lasting the test time, enough to create a physical link to the person? To some people the answer is clearly yes, to others a simple no. Everyone will have their own angle on this, but if people are making life changing decisions while not seeing the full picture, or seeing the “real person” their dating as we have discovered, what is the result of this?
We could be left with a world full of numerous happy and long lasting unions, full of excitement and love, or if we look at the facts we are left with a totally different picture. Each year in the UK the divorce rate has been increasing with the average marriage in 2007 lasted 11.5 years whereas in 1980 you could expect marriages to last an average of 37 years. The number of single parents is on the rise, currently with 25% of children living in a single parent household. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blinded to think there are no other factors in life contributing to these statistics, but what is to say our natural impatience isn’t one of them? Motivating people to make haste through the relationship cycle putting themselves in positions that are premature to their natural course? Making decisions when not of sound mind, but when intoxicated with infatuation and delusion of their partner during the honeymoon phase. Surely this is like agreeing to something while drunk, or under the influence of drugs? You wouldn’t go and take, or more to the point be allowed to take out a loan while drunk. “Let’s move in together and start a family.” These words may sound magical to many couples and lead to something fulfilling and special, but for the ones who are rushing this could be the start of a lifetime of regret and disappointment. It may work out fairly simple and painless if they are only living together, but what happens when a child and marriage is included in the equation? A messy divorce and an innocent child stuck in a nasty custody battle and yet another statistic generated.
Impatience may not be the lone factor generating the state of affairs in modern relationships, but it can definitely add to the struggle and disruption already there. Are people ever going to stop treating relationships like a race? Will people suddenly stop for a second and think, “No, it’s too soon to have a child.”? Probably not as love does tend to work in mysterious ways, but it can’t hurt to pause for a second, take an outside look at the situation, and ask yourself, “Am I ready for this?”
William Whitehurst
July 29, 2010 at 12:07 pm #14815jonathan
Participantnice article! i really enjoyed it… 😀 January 23, 2016 at 8:45 pm #16308April Masini
KeymasterHappy New Year! Let me know how things are going for you. 😉 -
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