Ep.117 / The 5 Stages of Love Are Bullshit | PART TWO

When does healthy self-reflection become endless self-blame? Does fighting for a relationship always mean staying? Can previous relationships train us to expect rejection and judgment from partners who aren’t actually treating us that way? And does a healthy relationship really have a final stage?

Sometimes They ARE the Problem: What Healthy Love Actually Looks Like

There is a particular genre of relationship advice on the internet that seems to believe every problem you experience with another human being is actually an invitation to look inward. Your partner does something that upsets you? Check your triggers. You feel anxious? Examine your attachment style. They repeatedly cross a boundary? Maybe you need to heal the wound that makes the boundary feel so important. And listen, I am a huge believer in self-reflection. Relationships can show us parts of ourselves we desperately need to look at. But somewhere along the way, “take responsibility for yourself” became “assume everything bothering you is secretly your fault,” and those are absolutely not the same thing.

In Part One of this conversation, I broke down the first two stages of a viral Reel claiming there are five stages of long-term love. We talked about “The Magic”—the chemistry, hot sex, butterflies, and certainty that you have found your person—and then the stage where the bickering begins. My biggest issue was not that those experiences never happen. Of course they do. My issue is turning them into a roadmap that implies healthy relationships are supposed to progress through the same sequence. Part Two gets into the final three stages, and this is where I think the framework becomes much more complicated.

The “Villain/Victim Era” Sounds Smart—Until Someone Actually Is Treating You Badly

The third stage supposedly happens when both partners begin believing the other person is the problem. Everyone builds a case. Everybody has receipts. You become the prosecutor in the world's least enjoyable courtroom drama, and your partner becomes the defendant.

There is absolutely truth here. People become defensive in relationships. We often explain our own behavior through context while judging our partner’s behavior as character.

“I snapped because I’m overwhelmed.”

“They snapped because they’re insensitive.”

“I forgot because I’m busy.”

“They forgot because they don’t care about me.”

Human beings are spectacularly talented at making ourselves the sympathetic lead character.

But there is an enormous problem with assuming that thinking your partner is the problem automatically means you are stuck in an immature relationship phase.

Sometimes your partner’s behavior actually is a problem.

Sometimes anxiety comes from old wounds. Sometimes you are anxious because the person you are dating is inconsistent.

Sometimes you need to communicate more clearly. Sometimes you have communicated the same boundary twelve different ways and nothing changes.

Sometimes you are projecting.

Sometimes you are accurately recognizing behavior that hurts you.

Those situations require very different responses.

“Look Inward” Can Become Another Way to Abandon Yourself

Relationship therapy language has given us incredible tools, but internet culture loves taking useful psychological concepts and flattening them into commandments. Attachment style. Triggers. Nervous-system regulation. Childhood wounds. Shadow work.

Suddenly, every uncomfortable feeling becomes evidence that you need to do more healing.

Ask yourself what belongs to you. Absolutely.

But do not assume that because you have emotional history, every reaction you have is therefore invalid.

You can have abandonment wounds and be dating someone inconsistent.

You can have anxiety and recognize that someone lies to you.

You can struggle with conflict and decide you dislike the way somebody speaks to you.

Two things can be true at once.

Self-awareness should help you trust yourself more accurately. It should not teach you to explain away every experience until nothing anybody does is ever allowed to bother you.

Staying Is Not Automatically the More Mature Choice

We love the phrase “fight for your relationship.”

It sounds noble. Romantic. Committed.

And sometimes it is.

There are couples who enter incredibly difficult periods, seek support, communicate differently, rebuild trust, and create relationships much stronger than what existed before.

But staying itself is morally neutral.

A relationship lasting twenty years does not automatically make it healthier than one that ended after five.

Leaving does not necessarily mean someone failed to do the work.

Sometimes leaving is the work.

Sometimes two people love each other but consistently bring out painful patterns in each other. Sometimes both people are decent humans who simply cannot create a healthy relationship together. Sometimes one person keeps apologizing without changing. Sometimes the relationship is asking you to become increasingly smaller just to keep it functioning.

Longevity is not the same thing as quality.

My Marriage Taught Me That Intention Does Not Erase Impact

I do not need to turn my ex-husband into a villain to talk honestly about my experience in that relationship.

That distinction matters to me.

There were times when I would bring up something I was feeling and be met with a lot of questions. Maybe his intention genuinely was to understand. I cannot tell you what was happening inside someone else’s head.

What I can tell you is how it felt to me.

I often experienced those conversations as though I had entered an interrogation. Instead of leaving feeling understood, I would sometimes leave wondering whether I had been wrong to feel what I felt in the first place.

Why did that bother you?

Why would you interpret it that way?

Could it actually be because of something else?

Eventually, you can become so focused on explaining your feelings correctly that you forget the original point: you were trying to tell someone how something affected you.

Understanding somebody’s intention can add context.

It does not magically delete impact.

A Different Relationship Can Give You Different Evidence

Being with Kai has shown me something different.

If something triggers me, if I become anxious, if my brain goes somewhere strange, I know I can bring it to him.

That does not mean he automatically agrees with every thought I have.

Nor should he.

I do not want a relationship where every anxious thought I produce is immediately treated as an accurate weather report from God.

The difference is that the feeling gets room to exist.

I can say, “This happened and this is where my brain went,” without preparing a Supreme Court case explaining why my reaction deserves to be admitted into evidence.

That kind of emotional safety has slowly given me new information.

And when you have been through a difficult relationship before, new information matters.

Not Every Man Is Every Man

One painful relationship can make your brain extremely good at anticipating the next painful relationship.

Someone criticized your preferences before, so you brace for criticism.

Someone questioned your feelings, so you prepare to defend them.

Somebody made vulnerability uncomfortable, so vulnerability begins to feel dangerous.

Then you meet somebody who reacts differently.

And the strange part is that your body may still prepare for the old reaction.

Being in a healthier relationship does not mean everything you learned before disappears overnight. Your nervous system does not receive a notification saying, “Congratulations! Previous relationship programming successfully deleted.”

You have to collect new experiences.

For me, that has included something as simple as being allowed to like what I like.

My clothes.

My music.

My humor.

My hobbies.

My horror movies.

Kai does not particularly love horror movies. I do.

He does not have to suddenly pretend The Exorcist is his favorite comfort film because he loves me.

But sometimes he watches horror movies because I love them.

That seems tiny.

It isn’t.

It reminds me that another person does not need to share every preference I have in order to respect it.

He can love me without slowly trying to turn me into himself.

“Mirror Mirror” Gets One Important Thing Right

The fourth supposed stage says you eventually stop blaming your partner and look at yourself.

This part has value.

Relationships absolutely can expose patterns.

Fear of rejection. People-pleasing. Emotional avoidance. Defensiveness. Difficulty asking for reassurance. Fear of being abandoned. Trouble trusting.

Another person gets close enough that suddenly your emotional hiding places are not particularly hidden anymore.

But healing does not always mean becoming better at making your existing relationship work.

Sometimes healing lets two people repair something beautiful.

Sometimes healing helps you finally understand why you spent so much energy trying to make an unhealthy dynamic survivable.

Sometimes healing is learning to stay.

Sometimes healing is learning that you can leave.

Healthy Love Should Make More Room for You, Not Less

One of the questions I now find much more useful than “What stage is my relationship in?” is this:

Am I becoming more myself here—or less?

Not, “Am I happy every second?”

That is impossible.

Not, “Does my partner ever challenge me?”

Healthy relationships absolutely challenge us.

I mean something deeper.

Can you wear the clothes you like?

Can you express an opinion without strategically softening it first?

Can you have different interests?

Can you say that something hurt?

Can you ask for reassurance?

Can you disagree without your individuality becoming a threat to the relationship?

Over time, do you feel increasingly recognizable to yourself?

Or have you slowly become an expertly edited version of yourself because that version creates fewer problems?

That tells me far more about a relationship than an Instagram stage ever could.

There Is No Final Stage Where Love Becomes Perfect

The fifth stage supposedly gives us the “conscious relationship.”

You have both healed. You stop fighting each other. You begin fighting for the relationship. Love gets deeper. Sex improves. Everything becomes intentional.

Sounds fantastic.

Unfortunately, life continues.

People lose jobs. Parents die. Bodies change. Money gets complicated. Careers evolve. Mental health fluctuates. Families create stress. Sex drives change. People discover things about themselves at forty that they could not have known at twenty-five.

You do not complete relationships.

Healthy couples do not reach a permanent stage where they have finally mastered being human.

They continue adapting.

Replace Stages With Questions

I am not going to replace the original five stages with my own superior framework, because then I would be doing exactly the thing I am complaining about.

I would rather ask questions.

Can I safely tell the truth here?

Can my partner?

Can we disagree without turning one another into enemies?

When somebody hurts the other person, can we repair?

Do apologies eventually become changed behavior?

Can we remain two individuals while building something together?

Does this relationship give both of us enough space to grow?

Am I healing inside this relationship, or am I constantly healing from it?

And perhaps most importantly:

Am I becoming more myself—or less?

There is no Instagram Reel capable of answering those questions for you.

What Healthy Love Actually Looks Like

There is no one version.

My relationship is not the template.

My marriage is not the universal cautionary tale.

Your experiences may look completely different from mine.

That is exactly why I dislike relationship checklists in the first place.

Healthy love can be passionate.

It can also be calm.

Healthy relationships can involve conflict.

Conflict should not require one person to disappear.

Staying can be courageous.

Leaving can also be courageous.

You can absolutely discover that you are contributing to a problem.

And sometimes, despite what Instagram therapy language has taught us to say, somebody else really is behaving badly.

Maybe conscious love is not a stage you eventually reach.

Maybe it is simply remaining conscious enough to pay attention to what the relationship keeps showing you.

Sometimes two people see that information and grow together.

Sometimes they see it and realize they need to grow apart.

Neither answer can be reduced to a five-stage checklist.

And maybe that is the point.