May 8, 2024,
Family, Fundamental Human Needs, Life, Love, Relationship, Relationship Tips 
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The third relationship stage is about discovering not only who you can be as a couple, but who you can be as an individual within it.
When you can resist the pull back to the stage of exclusive attachment, you can reestablish your own identity, which must exist independently of your relationship if it is to be a healthy one.
Where, Exactly, Do I Begin and End?
Therefore, this stage is about you moving from an undifferentiated “we” back to an individual “me.”
In this stage, the “we” part of you continues to be reassessed, while the balance continues to tip more and more in favor of each partner’s further exploration of their separateness within the relationship. It really can become once again about “me”—and it needs to (but with a proviso that I will explain more fully in a moment).
This essential and critical stage often presents a real obstacle for each person in the relationship. It may seem as if your love and care for each other has diminished even further, or has even entirely disappeared, as you struggle to grasp onto what little of each of yourselves still exists.
A natural consequence of this stage might be explained this way: the more one person distances him- or herself from the other—as should happen—the more the other attempts to hang on. Then, the first person pulls away even further. If you distance yourselves simultaneously, you may even start to feel more like housemates than lovers, isolated and emotionally disconnected.
The purpose of this stage is to give each of you an opportunity to redefine who you now are as individuals following the entanglement of your life with that of another.
Challenges for Couples in Stage 3
The principal challenge for couples in Stage 3 is to develop an even stronger personal identity and sense of self than each had before meeting—one that is separate from the relationship, while not so separate that the partners lose sight of each other. (This is the proviso I referred to just a moment ago.)
Each member of the couple gets involved again in career, hobbies, and/or interests in community activities independently of the partner.
This stage is also about spending time with other friends and in other activities, reactivating and consolidating the development of one’s self-esteem, friendships, and personal interests.
If your partner attempts to bring you back to a previous relationship stage, it will add to the challenge of maintaining your own identity under stress.
The importance of rediscovering yourself is that a successful couple requires that each member be a successful individual. You must be sure of who you are and have a healthy self-esteem to then be able to encourage the same in your partner. If you achieve this, your relationship then supports two individuals living out their own dreams while living out their couple dreams at the same time.
The greatest risk during this stage of your relationship is that you lose sight of your partner as you rediscover who you can be, yet not acknowledge his or her own need to rediscover who he or she can be. If both rediscovery processes are not managed well, you may find yourself losing your connection with each other entirely. Since you now spend more time pursuing individual interests and less time on shared interests, this is certainly a risk.
So it is important to remember that as you rediscover who you can now be, you also need to find out and celebrate who your partner can be, as well. All this needs to happen at the same time that you both continue to nurture your relationship by finding even more meaningful ways to spend time together. This takes commitment on both sides as you now come to understand that love alone is not enough to keep the relationship going into the long term.
The good news is that if you make it through this stage, you will discover a greater depth to the relationship than you ever thought possible, while you create a new foundation upon which to build your futures as individuals.
To the wonder of you,
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