It’s okay to have an important relationship after your primary relationship has ended. You need support, companionship, and feedback from others to help yourself rebuild. These relationships are often short-term, so you need to learn how to bring about “healthy termination.” You need to take credit for creating these relationships as part of your growing process. And you need to become aware of how you can make these relationships as growth-oriented and healing as possible.
Have I had a growing relationship? Not one, but four. Each seemed healthier than the one before. I guess I learned something from each one.
—Susan
I had one with a woman who had a great built-in crap detector. When I was sorting through my stuff, I could bounce off her and she would tell me what parts of me were authentic and what parts of me were crap. I think I found the perfect partner to have a growing relationship with.
—David
Many people climbing the mountain decide to pair off, to help support each other in the difficult climb. They appear to enjoy each other’s company very much for a while, but often they part ways and continue the climb alone.
It helps to have another person’s support for a while, but sooner or later, one or both of them realize they need to make this climb alone. When they part, one or both of them feel very sad for a while. They often have to rework some of the blocks they had already gone through, such as grief and anger. Both appear to make rapid progress while they are together, but when this new relationship ends, their progress slows down considerably.
We call these unions “growing relationships.” Other professionals have variously labeled them “transitional relationships,” “rebound relationships,” “experimental relationships,” and “healing relationships.” Psychiatrist Martin Blinder, for example, in his book Choosing Lovers, describes the various types of this relationship in some detail and asserts that each type is unique, meeting particular needs of the partners. Later in this chapter, we’ll discuss a couple of the more common types.
Growing relationships, because they help folks manage the climb better for a while, can be very healthy for both partners. But it’s not enough just to let them “happen.” It’s important to understand them and how they work, so they can be made longer-lasting and more growth-enhancing, and—just maybe—so they hurt less when they end.
Among the typical characteristics of growing relationships:
Sometimes a person in a primary love relationship has a third-party relationship and deems it a growing relationship. Such a union can take the form of an affair. We’ve worked with clients who have been able to make their third-party relationships into healing experiences, using them to enrich their primary relationships and make them stronger. That usually is possible only if the new pairing is a friendship rather than a romantic affair. Romantic third-party involvements typically have long-term consequences and make it difficult for the people involved to heal the pain of the affair.
The old parental tapes from childhood about sex and marriage come back and say, “When you talk about relationships outside of marriage that may include sex, aren’t you encouraging affairs or promiscuity?” Not necessarily; these relationships don’t have to be romantic or sexual. If your values—religious or moral—are such that you don’t want a relationship that is sexual outside of marriage, you can still learn and heal tremendously by having a nonsexual friendship.
A growing relationship must fit your moral values while it focuses on the lessons that you need to learn.
There are certain groups of people who are more likely to have growing relationships:
Many people will not want to start such a relationship because it could become more than they can handle. They want something safe that won’t become long-term. It’s important to be clear and communicate your intentions, needs, and desires directly and openly with a potential partner. You can decide how to control your future involvement and not let the relationship become more than you want it to be.
Interestingly, 15 to 20 percent of the participants in the Fisher divorce seminars don’t enroll after their marriage has ended. They enroll after their growing relationship following their divorce has ended. The first relationship after a marriage has ended usually doesn’t last very long, but the emotional pain is often greater when this relationship ends than when the marriage or primary love relationship ended.
Growing relationships appear to be one of the myriad social transitions that take place in society. Learning more about these types of relationships will increase the chances of them becoming more healing. Toward that end, let’s take a look at two of the most common types of growing relationships: the passionate and the therapeutic.
Perhaps the most common of the several types of growing relationships that occur after a primary love relationship has ended is the passionate type, with its emphasis on romantic love. Here at last—or so it seems—are all of those qualities that were missing in the late marriage: passion, honesty, good communication, empathy, understanding. No wonder the new partners want it to last forever, hang on to it tightly, and talk about their future together.
But commitments for the long term might not be healing for either party at this stage. Let’s consider some of the potential pitfalls and benefits of the passionate emotional relationship:
While you may never feel this same exuberance again—becoming free of your shell—you do have the potential of experiencing the joy and excitement of intimacy, being emotionally close, and feeling loving and being loved in your future relationships. And these future relationships may be more meaningful than this relationship now, when you are just coming out of your shell.
Keep track of your time. How much of your free time is spent in improving yourself—engaging in hobbies, taking classes, and spending time by yourself or with your friends? And how much time are you spending with the other person doing relationship activities?
Learn all you can, heal all you can, and stop holding the precious butterfly in your hands so tightly that it can’t fly and be free. The energy you spend holding on tightly to the other person and to the relationship keeps you from climbing your own mountain and completing your own healing.
A growing relationship doesn’t have to be with a love partner. In fact, there are tremendous advantages to having a growing relationship with a person who is not a love partner. You can experience the same type of healing with a good friend or a trusted family member. You can still talk about feelings, be vulnerable, share parts of yourself that you have never shared with another. This friendship doesn’t have the same thrills, excitement, and passion as a love relationship, but it is safer, seldom brings the emotional pain of the end of a romantic relationship, and can offer healing that is just as deep. It, too, can serve as a laboratory for growth, allowing you to change past patterns.
The participants in our rebuilding seminars easily identify with this type of growing relationship based on friendship. They are open and honest with one another, share important aspects of themselves, feel a closeness and intimacy with others, and realize that these relationships are special and often more healthy and healing than what they have known in the past. Learning to develop friendship-based growing relationships can be one of the most valuable learning experiences from divorce recovery groups.
Therapy can also develop into a growing relationship, depending upon the therapist and the style of therapy. But the same type of growth can take place—and with the safety that comes from clear boundaries, paying for the therapy, and keeping it professional. A therapy relationship that helps you to become fully yourself can be one of the most valuable experiences you will have.
Does every growing relationship have to end? Each relationship has a foundation that is unique, both to that relationship and to where you are emotionally when you start the relationship. The foundation for the growing relationship is built for growth and healing; that’s its purpose. A long-term committed relationship has a foundation built for longevity. What’s the difference?
When you are building a growing relationship, you are in process—unstable, continually growing and changing, healing the wounds of the past. You are different today from what you were yesterday. And you will be different tomorrow. During this period of rapid change, your foundation needs to be flexible, adaptable, changeable—allowing you to be different as you change. That isn’t a suitable foundation for a long-term relationship.
The “contract” when you started the growing relationship probably wasn’t written, or even spelled out verbally, but it was there, with wording something like this: “I need this relationship so I can find out who I am.” The foundation for a long-term relationship is more stable and more permanent (although not rigid). Long-term unions require commitment, purpose, and stability.
If a growing relationship is to become a long-term one, it needs to be jacked up and a new foundation put under it. This can be done in various ways. Some couples have had a “healthy termination” of their relationship so that one or both of them could go be the “young colt”—out running around the pasture investing in themselves rather than investing in the relationship. Then they can get back together and build a relationship with a more permanent foundation.
Changing the relationship can also can be done with good communication. Both partners must become aware of the costs and benefits of making their short-term healing relationship a long-term committed relationship. Both must take ownership of their feelings, contributions, and roles in the new relationship. And communication must be open and honest. If you and your partner talk it out thoroughly, with awareness and accountability, and decide that you want to change the growing relationship into a longer, more committed one, it can be done.
But there is an issue that can arise here. If you are truly changing, you might be a different person than you were when you started the relationship. Maybe your attraction and reason for entering into the relationship was to be with a person who was entirely different than your parents, former lovers, former friends. And the need for a contrasting person is met, maybe you will want relationships with people more like your parents, former lovers, and former friends. So when the need for the different person passes, you may want to end the relationship. Many people in growing relationships outgrow the relationship for a variety of reasons.
Don’t move too quickly to try to convert a growing relationship into one of long-term commitment. Both partners must be ready to accept themselves where they are now and to move ahead into a more stable future.
Sometimes people ask why they have to have so many growing relationships. A very good question. There are several possible explanations:
Each relationship contributes to your growth, and it might be helpful for you to identify and be thankful for each relationship, as well as for each person with whom you have been in relationship. The homework at the end of this chapter will guide you to explore what you have learned and how you have healed in each of the growing relationships you’ve had.
Please be gentle with yourself. If your inner critic beats yourself up every time you enter into or end a relationship, you will negate the healing. Give yourself a warm fuzzy for each growing relationship you have created, which will maximize the healing that has taken place.
One of the most exciting ways to have a healing relationship is to make your marriage or primary love relationship into a growing relationship! The same concepts apply; you just bring them to your current union: living in the present, good communication, no future expectations, and taking ownership (both individually, being accountable for your own feelings and attitudes, and jointly, being responsible for shaping this new relationship together).
It won’t be easy, but many primary love relationships can be reenergized and reinforced with a stronger foundation under them. If you’re interested in carving out a new relationship within your marriage, you may find helpful the discussions on rebellion (chapter 12) and healing separations (appendixes B and C). (Bruce’s book with Nina Hart, Loving Choices, describes ways to create a growing relationship within a committed love relationship.)
A growing relationship needs good communication, and the quickest way you can improve your skills is to learn to use I-messages instead of you-messages—a communication technique first introduced by Dr. Thomas Gordon and discussed several times earlier in this book, especially in chapter 9, when we were talking about expressing anger.
As a refresher: You-messages are like poisoned darts that you throw at another person, who either becomes defensive or starts thinking what to say (throw) back at you as a result. I-messages let others know that you are accepting responsibility for (owning) your own feelings and attitudes.
I-messages may be difficult for you if you haven’t always been in touch with what is going on inside of you. Here’s an easy way to start using I-messages: Start each sentence with “I” when you are having important conversations with others. Try using these four kinds of I-messages: “I think ,” “I feel ,” “I want ,” and “I will .” It is helpful to separate your thoughts from your feelings and to use different kinds of communication for each. Think about what you hope to achieve with your message. If you don’t say what you want, you probably won’t get what you want. And you need to finish your communication with a commitment about what action you will take. Taking responsible action to help achieve what you want is really putting your money where your mouth is.
Men frequently have difficulty accessing and talking about feelings. Using “I feel” statements may help them overcome this handicap. On the other hand, women can often tell you what others around them want or need, but they can’t tell you what they themselves want or need.
Another key part of growing relationships is healthy termination. Because most of these relationships will end, they will be more growth enhancing for both parties if you learn how to conduct a healthy termination. It’s an inherent problem in these relationships: you try to make them last longer than is healthy because you’ve started attaching expectations for your future to them.
By trying to stretch a short-term relationship into something longer than its “natural life,” you make it unduly stressful. When you finish stretching it till it breaks, it snaps back at you like a rubber band—and hurts more than it has to.
If you can back it off into friendship before it gets stretched too far, you are more likely to have a healthy termination to the relationship. If you live in the present, you’ll notice when the present becomes less meaningful than it was. The needs that created the relationship have changed, and that’s when it’s time to start terminating.
Talk about your needs being different. Own what is happening with your feelings, explain how your needs have changed, and share your valuable learning from the relationship. Healthy terminations end with a fraction of the pain that results from trying to stretch the relationship into something it is not.
A healthy termination has its roots in openness and honesty about the needs and desires of both partners when you started the relationship. Pete, an army chaplain, stated it well: “I told her I was a wet little kitty and needed someone to take care of me and lick me dry like the mother cat does. And I also told her I didn’t know whether I would want a relationship with her when I finally was dry. We were able to terminate the relationship with a minimum of pain because we had been open and honest from the beginning.”
So here are the actions that pave the way for a healthy termination. We encourage you to work them into your growing relationships:
The concept of a healthy termination applies to all relationships. Each relationship has its natural cycle of growth. Some are short-term annuals, and others are long-term perennials. It’s not easy to recognize just what the life span of a relationship should be. Ownership—acceptance of responsibility for yourselves, your feelings, and what’s going on with each of you individually—is a tremendous help in allowing the relationship to find its own natural cycle.
A great deal of the pain in our lives comes from holding on to something too long when we need to let it go. If you believe your happiness is someone else’s responsibility, you’ll have difficulty letting a relationship have its natural length of life.
There are a number of ways to heal without having a growing relationship. However, it does feel good to have someone’s hand to hold while you are waking up. And someone to talk to while you are learning about yourself. They contribute much to the healing experience.
If you can understand that these relationships are a place you can put into practice all the skills that you have read about and learned while reading this book, you’ll see the benefits of this relationship even more. We hope that the awareness you’ve gained from reading this book—and doing the exercises we’ve suggested—will help you pursue real healing in these kinds of relationships, instead of allowing them to repeat old patterns.
Your children will probably develop growing relationships also. They may suddenly be good friends with other children whose parents are divorcing. They will find they can talk to these friends better than to their “married kids” friends.
You may be surprised to find yourself feeling judgmental toward kids whose parents are divorcing. You may even not want your kids to associate with them. Surprise! You have found some of your own biases and prejudices toward divorce. Remember that your children are going through the divorce process also, and finding friends who are in a similar situation may be helpful. As you have learned, anyone can go through a divorce; it doesn’t help to persist in critical attitudes toward people who are ending relationships.
If you are involved in your own growing relationship, where do your children fit in? It depends upon the type of relationship you are creating. If you have a therapy relationship, it may be helpful to share this with your children. They will be more open to talking with others if they realize you are talking to someone.
If your growing relationship is with a friend or family member, you may choose to involve your children in this relationship by sharing with them how good it feels to have a special person to talk to.
If your growing relationship is of the passionate love affair kind, though, then you need to decide carefully how much to include your children in this relationship. Your children have been observing the arguments between you and your ex, so it might be nice to expose them to a more peaceful and loving relationship. However, it’s very easy for the excitement of the new relationship to cloud your thinking; you may find yourself wanting to include your children in this relationship more than is appropriate at this stage. Having your new partner spend the night while your kids are there, for example, is usually difficult for children to deal with, and is probably not a good idea.
As we’ve discussed in this chapter, the chances of a transitional growing relationship lasting and becoming long-term are not high. Your children will very likely have to deal with the rending of another of your relationships. Keep that in mind as you consider how much you want to involve your children in this relationship.
Take responsibility for creating this growing relationship as part of your adjustment process. Awareness of this may help your children to put the relationship in better perspective. You take control of your life by making more aware, loving choices; your children can—and will—follow your example.
Write responses to the following questions in your journal:
Bruce observed hundreds of couples create a new and loving relationship from the painful ashes of a dead relationship. If that is your goal, a good way to start is for both partners to read and work your way through this book. Do as much of the homework as you can. Encourage and nurture each other because this process takes commitment, self-discipline, and confidence. And there are no guarantees.
Before you go on to the next chapter, take advantage of this brief self- assessment. It will help you to determine if you’re ready to head on up the trail.