THE STAGES OF MARRIAGE
Falling in love and getting married is easy. Staying married is not all that difficult, either. Even when the marriage is not a happy one, many couples decide just to endure; they decide that they are trapped with each other, and then they live semi miserably ever after.
Keeping your marriage alive and growing, on the other hand, is a most difficult challenge, and it is also no doubt the most rewarding and healthiest of the alternatives that face you once you vow, "I do." Understanding how your marriage developed and where you are now on your path of growth as a couple can be very helpful in this regard.
Just as individuals continue in their psychological growth throughout life, marriages likewise progress through fairly predictable stages of change. Understanding these stages of marriage and their underlying psychological and emotional issues can greatly calm the turmoil that naturally occurs when illness threatens to stop the growth of your relationship. In the following pages, I describe marriage as having three major stages, each of which involves certain dramas or themes that tend to organize much of the emotional reacting and counter-reacting that make up day-to-day living as a couple. I emphasize that this is only a theoretical conceptualization of marriage; no marriage actually progresses clearly through each of these steps of growth, and there is no way-to predict how long it will take for a given couple to grow from one stage to the next.
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