Relationships have a natural path through stages.  In the Pleasure Course we focus on those stages in detail, but for now let’s just use their titles: the new and exciting stage, the best friends and lovers stage and the eternal date stage.

People run into difficulty because they may be more comfortable at one stage and not another, or they may have skills in one stage and not another.  We have found this difficulty to be the case for most people.  You may have a tendency to try to rush ahead, say to the eternal date (a committed relationship), or a tendency to stay behind, say eternally dating (and never getting serious). The most common scenario that we have found over the last 17 years of teaching people to have successful romantic relationships is that of a woman wanting to rush ahead in the relationship, prematurely pushing toward commitment, and a man wanting to keep it in the dating stage, often way beyond when moving forward would create more depth and quality of romance.  This was the scenario that Alicia and I had to move through.

This is only the most common scenario. The roles can be reversed, the middle stage of relationship can come into play, and so on.  The possible permutations are infinite.  The point is that our individual relationship blueprints (our personal psychologies) can distort a natural progression through the stages at the appropriate time for maximum pleasure and romance.

How do you know when to take a relationship to the next level?  You have to get out of your head and simply be present to the relationship.  There will be a feeling, a sense that you can tap into, as to whether the relationship is due to upgrade.  If you aren’t inhibiting it, it will happen naturally.  If you are rushing it, and you get out of your head and simply be present to the relationship, there will be a natural tendency to slow down.

This is one of the beauties of life.  Things flow naturally if we get out the way.  That is a tall order, I must admit.  It really is a spiritual process that we have covered and will cover in other topics.  But, for now, know that you have to be present to the relationship not your relationship blueprint.  Have your attention on the relationship, not on yourself!

Life also provides hints! Your friends (who have good relationships) are pushing you in one direction or the other.  Or, you’ve been dating this person for a really long time, say years… probably time to cut bait or move forward.  Or, you just started dating a few weeks ago and you are trying to push it forward… probably good to slow down. 

You get the idea!

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Tags: blueprint, Committment, dating advice, relationship problems

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 6:37 pm and is filed under How to relationship, Relationship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.