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Stages of love

Love grows and changes. The emotional stuff that brings couples together in the first place is
different from the love that emerges five or fifteen years down the road. Loving relationships go
through many stages. All are important and none can be by-passed if love is to flourish.

Mature love doesn't come into existence unless the relationship has evolved through earlier
stages of attrac-tion, romance, power struggle, acceptance and attachment.

Stage 1: Attraction Our choice of mates is guided by unconscious factors that are the same
for us all. Our unconscious leads us to a person who offers us the greatest opportunity to heal our
childhood wounds.

The person we are most attracted to will very likely share some significant traits or characteristics
with the parent who gave us the most trouble in childhood. If we follow the attraction through to
a committed relationship, we will have the same conflict with our mate that we had with our
parent. Obviously, we don't inten-tionally set ourselves up to have a repeat performance of our
child-hood unhappiness.

Unconsciously, though, we do choose the patterns that are most familiar to us from our youth.
We are now adults and have greater personal strength and a better chance of standing up for
our-selves than we had before. The learning and growing we must do to live in harmony with our
partner is exactly the learning and growing that's required for repairing the damage of the past.
That's what we mean when we say that the purpose of loving relationships is to heal child-hood
wounds.