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harmony with your partner and it disturbs you. You can only change yourself in a relationship. Put your focus where you have control: on yourself, your
behaviour, and your communication patterns. Changing your partner must never be the goal.

The costs of making a match with someone who shares traits with a parent, start coming into play. You may not have had some of your basic needs met in
childhood, so you try to fix it now. However, your partner is not a willing team-mate. In fact, you chose him or her, in part, because he or she recreated
the same difficulties you had in childhood.

Stage 4: Unconditional Acceptance

A healthy relationship moves beyond power struggles and control issues to unconditional love and acceptance. However, during the transition, partners must
still confront and resolve issues, taking risks to make positive change wherever possible and accepting those conditions that cannot be changed. Differences
are approached positively, not as things to brush over, hide or suppress.

Whenever two people get together, eventually some of the belief systems and personal habits of one will annoy the other, regardless of how much love there
is. In healthy relationships couples learn how to resolve conflict.

At this stage, each person becomes highly aware of various traits in the other. Some you like and others you dislike, but you learn to accept the ones that
cannot be changed. With good communication, you can almost always navigate your way to a more fulfilling relationship.

Stage 5: Attachment

The attachment, or commitment, stage is love for the duration. You've passed love of romance and are entering into real love. This stage of love has to be
strong enough to withstand many problems and distractions. This is the stage of transition. Similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if you have not successfully
moved through the first four stages of love, inevitably, you will find yourself re-visiting them before you can happily proceed to the final stage of mature love.

Stage 6: Mature Love

This is the ultimate reward of committed love relationships. In mature love, the relationship continues to flourish from the processes and corrections put in
place to meet the demands of the power struggle. The partners learn how to balance the requirements of closeness and separateness, how to create a sexual life
that satisfies them both, how to solve problems effectively together, and how to talk and listen to each other so their differing points of view are understood
and honoured. Understanding and acceptance become the most valuable assets. They use these new ways of relating to learn more about each other, especially
where they have each been hurt and need help to heal. Finally, both partners know how to give love to each other, and how to receive the love that has been
offered.
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You can see how crucial the power struggle is in stimulating couples to do the work that needs to be done to reach the stage of mature love. But romance and
attraction also lend some of their important elements to this stage of a relationship. The partners in mature love have learned how to instil their relationship