163. Why Couple Advice Does Not Apply at the Beginning of a Relationship

Why Couple Advice Does Not Apply at the Beginning of a Relationship

You wonder to what extent you need to show understanding and patience towards the other at the beginning of a relationship? You try to work on your thoughts, your emotional independence, your way of communicating and the results in your relationships are still not there? You have well understood that the couple is a healing space, that the couple repairs and that it is normal that wounds from the past awaken on each partner’s side but you have the impression that you quickly fall at the beginning of a relationship into the role of the coach, the nurse, the saviour or the therapist? You hear contradictory advice on relationships and you do not know what to do for example your match will become the right partner in your interaction versus you need to have criteria for selecting your partner. Or finally you have heard about personal versus relational development and you wonder what is the priority for you to learn for things to work in Love? The mistake that is made in all of what is stated above (and it has become a convinction after having accompanied more than 600 people) is for me applying couple advice to relationships that are not yet a real couple. That is what I am going to try to explain in this episode.

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Stop behaving as if you are in a relationship when you are not yet a couple

Why should you not do it? For the simple and good reason that the first criterion for evaluating whether this person is a good partner for you is the reciprocity of commitment. Otherwise it is just good potential and nothing more. Checking the reciprocity of commitment implies that you invest in the relationship and wait to see if the other also invests. By behaving as in an established couple, you do not count the points because you are trying to work as a team rather than each for themselves. The problem is that if you do this at the beginning of the relationship you deprive yourself of the evaluation of the other’s interest. I am not saying that you should not be understanding, generous at the beginning of a relationship but that you have to do it proportionally according to your degree of commitment to each other. If I draw the parallel with a friendship, you have just met a new person who became your friend a month ago, would you find it balanced to respond to all their requests, already plan holidays together weekends together, make the majority of the efforts to see each other or give news? No, it is the same in love.

From what point does relational development take over from personal development?

The two main challenges, encountered by many people who cannot manage to build lasting relationships, are:
  • The ability to evaluate if the person is the right partner for oneself
  • The ability to dare to be oneself in a relationship and make sure the person accepts us as we are.
These two challenges imply having a sufficiently strong Self and having confidence in what you are entitled to receive, being capable of evaluating the other objectively, being capable of being sufficiently “selfist” (you could put it as loving yourself enough, I talk about it in episode 27) to have certain standards in a relationship. These are for me qualities that develop through personal development. This even “goes against” relational development and the notion of working as a team and questioning oneself through the other, which are two of the four essential criteria for building a healthy relationship. I talk about these criteria in episode 133 called green flags. To manage to question oneself in a healthy way within the relationship, you need to have this solid individual base otherwise it will be difficult to manage to separate what falls under you and what falls under the other. If I take the example of a person who tends towards emotional dependence (more in episode 74) they will much more easily question themselves to maintain the bond, so for them it is necessary to build this strong Self first in order to be able to make this distinction. This is what I observe in many people who start the coaching Opening Up to Love with me, that in fact they are already applying these principles of relational development but they do not yet have a Self strong enough to consider themselves as much of a priority or on an equal footing with their partner. That is why in episode 68 empathy and commitment I presented the tool of self-empathy to manage to decide what is right and what one is ready for in a relationship.

You need to overcome certain wounds to manage to build a relationship

Desfois even applying the advice of relational development when you have toxic patterns in a relationship can feed your denial that the relationship is going badly. If you tell yourself in these cases it is normal to have crises and disputes, 69% of couple problems are unsolvable (and I say this too) that we become the right partner… you are using this advice against yourself and maintaining your pattern. For me there is a minimum of security and conditions to have to be able to build a healthy relationship and experience healing through the bond. Here are cases where for me it is worth doing this work upstream even before being in a relationship:
  • If your love patterns mean that you are attracted to people who are unavailable and therefore that you will not manage to meet a person where there is this minimum to build. I talk about it in episode 45.
  • If you have the abuse pattern where you tend to accept disrespect, situations that are so opposite to healthy relationships, doing this work upstream will be more beneficial for you than trying to overcome this pattern in a dysfunctional relationship.
  • If you have the feeling that it is often you who makes the relationship dysfunctional which is in some way the Red Flag. I talk about it in episode 133.
  • If you have patterns that mean that love stays at a distance typically if you have long-term singlehood it is often that there is a pattern behind that means love stays at a distance, it can be the pattern of being unwanted or of not having your place for example. I talk about long-term singlehood in episode 99.
When these patterns are so anchored and that even with your will by changing your behaviours, you see that you cannot manage to get past a certain point, it means that you need to go through the body. I explain all of this in my free webinar how to free yourself from love patterns to be happy in love

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Going further

In the coaching Opening Up to Love you learn the 2 phases because you need the tools of personal development for the phase of building a relationship and more relational tools when the relationship is committed. Each phase has specific skills and you cannot skip steps. You of course have the possibility of adding the work on your love patterns through the body by taking the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: a psycho-corporeal approach to deprogram the automatisms of the nervous system and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Opening Up to Love

Sandy Kaufmann

is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir a l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.

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