How to Handle the Early Stages of a Relationship Well
130. How to Handle the Early Stages of a Relationship Well
You’ve met someone you like and you’d like to give yourself every chance for it to work
Or maybe you’re feeling a lot of emotional insecurity and you’d like to know whether it’s a bad sign or what you can do about it
Or finally you feel like you’re self-sabotaging your relationships and you’d like to avoid repeating that
In this episode I’ll give you the essential keys to handling the early stages of a relationship well, along with what research says on the subject.
When I talk about the early stages of a relationship, I mean the stage after the first three or four dates or the first month together, from getting to know each other until you decide to give it a try, up to the point of moving in together. To learn more about the different stages of a relationship, I invite you to listen to episode 6, where I list the challenges of each phase.
Why This Phase Is Challenging
This is an important phase for laying the foundations of a healthy relationship (listen to episode 133, the Green Flags) and for building a good dynamic in the way you relate to each other.
It’s a phase that can generate a lot of insecurity, because you need to open up enough to the other person to connect, while you’re both still learning about each other without yet knowing how far you’ll each commit.
This phase therefore involves a lot of the unknown and a lack of control, which is often why love patterns tend to resurface the most during this period and can create a lot of emotional insecurity in you, sometimes causing you to self-sabotage the relationship.
It’s a phase where introspection is essential to help you tell apart what comes from your own emotional insecurity, what’s due to your shared dynamic, and what’s due to the other person’s behavior. To help my Opening up to love clients through this sensitive phase, they use the dating journal tool, which covers up to the first year of the relationship, so they can clearly tell these influences apart.
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You're Still in a Stage of Choosing
Your three or four dates, or your first month together, have let you do a first round of filtering, but you’re still far from truly knowing the partner in front of you.
The more time you spend with your partner, getting to know them, meeting their friends, living alongside them, the more it will confirm for you:
– Whether they have the qualities you’re looking for
– The qualities you’re looking for that they don’t have
– Their flaws
So You Can Consciously Decide Whether You Can Accept Them As They Are, Without Trying to Change Them.
To that end, you can ask yourself whether you can accept not getting some of the qualities you’re looking for, or accept their flaws, as you move forward in commitment — that is, if you live together, decide to marry, decide to have shared projects together, or decide to have children together (if that’s something you want).
Making this choice consciously will help you avoid, a few years down the line, regretting your choice or wanting to change your partner. I still too often see clients who stop choosing the other person too early on in building their relationship.
Check for Mutual Commitment
Just because your partner told you once, early in dating, that they were looking for a serious relationship, doesn’t mean that’s still the case or that they’re capable of it (your partner has love patterns too):
– Checking that you’re on the same page in terms of plans and intentions about the relationship is the first step.
– The second step is to see whether the person in front of you is actually capable of committing. The signs that someone is able to commit are fairly simple: they make sure to see you regularly, they introduce you as their partner, they include you in their life, they keep their word, and they’re also open to discussion in order to reach mutual satisfaction.
Supporting Yourself Through Emotional Insecurity
You’re not choosing to feel this insecurity on purpose — it comes from your love patterns.
That said, the other person isn’t responsible for your insecurity.
The first thing I invite you to do is to understand whether your insecurity comes from:
– The facts. In that case, it’s a topic to discuss with your partner.
– Your perception, your fears. In that case, learning to regulate your emotions and finding a helpful inner dialogue to create more inner security for yourself is essential, so your insecurity doesn’t harm the relationship. I talk about regulating your emotions in episode 122, and in episode 138 I go into the specific case of emotional insecurity. In these cases, your partner can also be understanding and help you, but they’re not obligated to. I go into more detail on this in episode 67, inner security versus outer security.
Building a Good Relational Dynamic
In their research, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman and Dr. John Gottman identified the qualities of what they call the Masters of Love — that is, couples who stay together and are happy and fulfilled (you can read their book on this, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work”). Based on this, they created 7 principles for building that kind of relationship:
– Knowing each other deeply: taking an interest in their history, their preferences, their inner world. To do this, you simply need to ask open questions and be curious about discovering the other’s world by listening closely.
– Nurturing fondness and admiration: focusing on and putting into words what your partner has done that’s positive strengthens your connection and fills your emotional bank account (listen to episode 84 on this topic).
– Turning toward each other: when your partner asks for your attention — whether through a request for a hug, by expressing a need, with a smile, or by starting a conversation — and you respond, it shows how much importance you place on your partner.
– Gottman notes that these three qualities are also essential for building friendships.
– Accepting influence means trying to accommodate the other’s wants and needs without sacrificing your own. The goal is mutual satisfaction, along with the feeling that each partner has influence over the relationship and feels considered.
– Solving the solvable problems. I’ll go into this more in episode 131, How to Argue Well. Solvable problems are decisions to make whose impact is limited in time — for example, what to cook tonight, or where to go on vacation. Gottman estimates that around 31% of problems in a couple are solvable problems.
– Having the right approach to perpetual problems (the other 69%!), which are more rooted in differences of personality and lifestyle: managing money, sexuality, time spent together, raising children, housework, intimacy — and so will keep coming back into the conversation. To avoid them turning into a dead end, it’s important to be able to talk about them to understand the underlying goal or dream behind the other’s position, in order to reach a win-win agreement that will work for a while.
– Creating shared meaning by establishing connection rituals, developing a shared purpose, and supporting each other in achieving your dreams and goals. This is what I call team spirit and the desire to grow together.
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Going further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book Opening up to love, available in all bookstores.
And if you need help learning all this, you can join my program Opening up to love, the fruit of my 8 years of practice. You can choose the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: body-based work to deprogram your nervous system’s automatic patterns and reprogram new relational reflexes.
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 à l’amour”, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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