1. The honeymoon phase

So let?s define what the honeymoon phase is from an energy perspective.

You take 2 people and you put their most authentic energy in there. There?s no insecurities, no doubts, no fears. There are just good intentions and a lot of hopes and dreams. That?s what feeds this beautiful part of the honeymoon phase. The energy you see there is the pure one almost as if we are newborns again.

But the truth is that we are no longer newborns and very few people are actually healed enough to have that authentic part of them unhindered by bad experiences which will create a new version of the truth in the next phase.

As you transition to a new phase of the relationship, the energy involved in this becomes more ?real? and thus more anchored in the present moment. We no longer live in the future with our partners, we live in the present tense. That might bring uncomfortable emotions, realities and unavoidable discrepancies for building up that future you envisioned together in the honeymoon phase.

So dealing with that might be something that you can do, or even know how to do if you are mature enough from an emotional standpoint and if you match some compatibility criteria with your partner.

But what happens after you?ve moved from this phase which we will call ?the present reality check??

If you move further, the next logical phase would be to get more depth and to get more knowledge about your partner?s past.

We will call this the ?skeletons in the closet phase?.

So now we have 3 stages of the relationship that we can talk about:

  1. The honeymoon phase
  2. The present reality check
  3. The skeletons in the closet phase

Before going in-depth with all these, I?d like you to also consider that this only applies if you?ve gone past the ?lust phase? of the relationship which is something that can?t really be tracked where it starts and where it ends because ideally you always feel the lust towards your partner and you are physically attracted to them to create that connection that feels like fireworks. It is though, after this phase, when we start building the love relationship that lasts. So in order to really tell the difference between what qualifies as honeymoon phase for a relationship, we need to make sure that our partner is there with us not just for sex and lust but also for other reasons. Those other reasons might be their need for an emotional connection with someone, but might also be that they need to be with someone to not feel lonely. All these are not real love but roadblocks on your way to real love. Check out these articles on finding the one:

How Do You Know You?re Not Settling for Less in Relationships?

Do you have a convenience-based relationship that?s cozy but something is missing sometimes?

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Is he the ONE or is he another illusion?

Stop making up excuses for him not being the one if you haven?t got your intentions straight first!

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How do you know he really is what he says he is?

You can spot the patterns of inconsistent behavior in a new relationship a lot faster with these simple tricks!

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What people tell you in this phase about themselves is who they really are except not always using the concrete words about it. Also, depending on how emotionally available they are, the story might be different. But assuming they really want a relationship with you and you have their intention to be with you checked before you begin to analyze what energy comes from this phase for the 2 of you, the result might be that you are able to capture about 80% of who they are from their stories about life up until the point they met you.

Some of the ways people tell us who they are might look very subtle and we might not be really sure how to interpret that if we don?t have much experience or confidence in ourselves. We might take things too personally and think this is not a match from the get-go. But what happens most often is that we are able to give the benefit of the doubt and neglect or be blindsided by some details. Many people who started dating narcissists have fallen under this trap.

However, if you manage to get a good grasp of who they are but things don?t go so well in the coming stages of the relationship, one thing that I would want to outline with this article is that:

You should never question if what you had with them in the honeymoon stage was real, because it was!

What happens though is that often we can?t change much in the present or about how we perceive our past which is subject to the next relationship stages that go bust and thus makes us doubt everything, to begin with. But this can be very harmful to our self-confidence in the long run.

People who start doubting if this was real often fall into the trap of internalizing the message of the defectiveness or the hurt they?ve suffered and then block themselves up for new love until they can deal with the failure of the relationship.

The idea that if it failed it means it wasn?t real, to begin with, stirs up a lot of self-doubts and that doesn?t help open up again in the future to cancel the bias we just formed. The cognitive distortions that contribute to us self sabotaging are of various degrees and can be best understood in new relationships ( either romantically or professionally or even with friends).

The part that is most tricky from going from this phase to the next one is to know how to preserve some of the daydreamings that happen in this phase with your partner throughout the relationship and drag it to the next phases.

Daydreaming allows you to escape a bit from reality and be in a happy perfect place, even if that?s not real, just to gain your hope back. As Alain de Botton said about our society today,

?We?ve given up religion but together with that we also lost hope?

By losing hope, our mindset is that we are the only ones to blame for our own discomfort and misfortune. We, in fact, don?t believe in ?fortune? or ?sermons? which are the grounds of establishing rituals that we plan so things can happen for us. We are no longer in control of our energy and how that will change in time if we don?t invest actively in understanding it. We move on from one emotion to another without properly giving it the space to love and fear them. Our emotions are connected to the organization of our life so we leave room for them to occur and hold space to see them from a distance as well without judgment.

If we are able to ?keep and preserve? our honeymoon phase throughout the other stages, that?s because :

We become intentional about taking the discipline of the rituals that made us fall in love and we perpetuate them in a planned way further down the line of our relationship.

Rituals are to be observed just like a religious ceremony and be operated from a conscious way to benefit from the subconscious gifts they trigger in us. We can?t completely change our past but with the way someone makes us feel when we ?fall in love?, we may heal a part of the wounds that were done to us in our past. As such, the honeymoon phase is about the detachment of the past and living in a hypothetical future where you allow your best energy to give you hope and happiness.

2. The present reality check phase

By now you?ve built some momentum in getting to know what are your dreams and wishes and most deep desires that keep your heart burning. But do you know how to live in the moment together?

It might be that living in the moment is less about exciting things and more about keeping things floating.

In yoga, the energies that describe a correspondence with these 3 stages of the relationship are:

  1. The honeymoon phase comes with the energy which is your primal one and builds the future ( in yoga this would be Rajas signifying the activity and passion) and not is able to settle for something less active that gives space for the beingness to happen.
  2. The second type of energy described in yoga is the Sattva which signifies harmony and is about finding the things that are compatible together. We don?t need to do anything that much to see how compatible we are.
  3. The third type of energy is Tamas which means that we bring the turmoil, the darkness and the chaos in the play.

The actions, in the beginning, can be a lot less intense and yet there is a harmony that makes this phase pleasant and satisfying.

If couples enjoy staying present with one another it means that they are able to bring awareness into their actions and to practice a level of self-compassion first before expecting anything from their partner. People who are not ok with themselves will feel this part is ?boring? or seems like it doesn?t bring anything anymore and will try to either push some drama or turmoil or end the relationship.

3. The skeletons in the closet phase

This last and most important phase is the one that brings the relationship to the maturity level because it brings more than passion and compatibility and it brings healing too. This is a more emotional phase of the relationship because we use the energy of Tamas with the turmoil and chaos of our past into our present. If we?ve managed to bring awareness over our triggers, patterns, and way of operating and the couple dynamic, then we are bringing a new layer of complexity when we start digging into our pasts.

We will inevitably find more about the initial family dynamics of our partner. We will find out what they are made of and we will see their darkest secrets and fears. At this point, if we are not healed ourselves, the intensity of the emotional connection will feel like too much and most will cave in and withdraw if the energy of our partner would be too much to handle. The funny thing about the darkness is that it doesn?t need to be heavy if we carry it from a healed perspective. The lightness of being in the moment wouldn?t change at all even if our past is heavy on trauma considering that the sensitivity we have attached to that trauma is not as high anymore.

But the problem with this phase of the relationship is that we no longer know how to keep the other 2 energies alive and we might get too sucked into this dark energy which drains us. The reason why most relationships fail here is that they are so starving for healing that they will automatically dump all their unprocessed trauma on the partner hoping that now that they found each other, the context will provide enough stability to heal those wounds together.

I?ve written an article about emotional healing happening in relationships more than on our own and I stand by this idea still. However, in order to create a testbed for how you start revealing your wounds to your partner, you might first want to build a friendship. That level of intimacy doesn?t automatically come with the advancing of your relationship in ?time?.

Time is the wrong metric for measuring the level of intimacy you?ve built!

While most men are having a great deal of trouble at opening up and becoming vulnerable, that doesn?t help relationships move forward in this stage and be able to navigate correctly the other 2 energies of passion and harmony. The darkness can take everything away if the partners don?t manage their own intensity and release it bit by bit.

Most of the couples will struggle in this phase because they are afraid to open up, they are not aware of how much opening up needs to happen in order to maintain a healthy connection and they will probably lose control over how they handle their emotions and will do something stupid either by cheating or by removing themselves from the trigger because healing becomes too painful and it?s simply easier to walk away and blame the other one for different reasons. Gaslighting partners can be very avoidant towards healing processes especially because they have the most to work on. The more reactive they are, the more they really need to work on themselves.

Finally, couples who make it through all these stages will find more comfort, balance, and rewarding love by staying than by running away. The honeymoon phase is not just a phase but a really addictive drug that can be preserved and used throughout our entire relationship as the foundation to grow and dream together as a couple. I leave you with 2 other suggestions for reading from my previous articles:

  • If you haven?t been able to find what you need to heal and how to start asking your partner to help with that, maybe the first step is therapy and finding out what type of therapy you need according to your wounds. Find some help here:

What?s your emotional wound and what type of therapy suits you?

There?s a lot of research done in the area of relationships and love, but there?s very little connection between that?

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  • Lastly, if you know love is a drug, then use it as such. Learn here how to consume this addictive love without letting it kill you.

Romantic love is the ultimate drug

Just like any other drug, romantic love is the direct response of an altered state of consciousness. And we should see?

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