Let me bring about the types of relationships:
SURVIVAL RELATIONSHIPS– These exist when partners feel like they can’t make it on their own. The choice of a partner tends to be undiscriminating, made out of emotional starvation, and something like, almost anyone available will do. This involves relating at its most basic: “Without you I am nothing; with you I am something.” The survival involved may be physical as well as emotional, including the basics of finding shelter, eating, working, and paying bills. The partners tend to be ‘relationship junkies’. They are desperate for relationships.
VALIDATION RELATIONSHIPS– A person may seek another’s validation of his or her physical attractiveness, intellect, social status, sexuality, wealth, or some other attribute. Sex and money are especially common validators. In response to a sexually unsatisfying relationship, a person may choose a new partner with whom sexuality is central. Many teen-agers and young adults who are looking for a sense of identity form relationships based on physical or sexual validation.
These relationships are always a little insecure: “Does she like me, or not?” there is enormous tension and constant testing: “Do you really love me?” One small act can be everything, a source of tears and anguish, despite everything else the partner has done all week.
SCRIPTED RELATIONSHIPS- This common pattern often begins when the partners both are just out of high school or college. They seem to be ‘the perfect pair’, fitting almost all the external criteria of what an appropriate mate should be like. In these relationships differences often take the form of power struggles. Endless arguments develop about everything, like, how to maintain the illusion of perfection to family and friends as well as how to handle their own feelings and inclinations.
ACCEPTANCE RELATIONSHIPS– In an acceptance relationship we trust, support and enjoy each other. And within broad limits, we are ourselves. Hence, we tend to accept everything, including every flaw in the partner.
When the expectations are not overwhelming, when the differences between the interests and inclinations are not too dissonant, and when the combative instincts are not too strong, a scripted relationship can evolve into an acceptance relationship.
HEALING RELATIONSHIPS- These liaisons follow periods of loss, struggle, deprivation, stress, or mourning. Participants typically feel wounded and fearful. They need tender loving care badly, and at the same time need to undertake some reassessment of themselves and their ways of relating. Physical distance is common in healing relationships. Couples in these relationships tend to talk about the past a lot, about the struggle or loss that preceded their own relationship.
EXPERIMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS- These are ‘trying it out’ relationships. The intention is to find out how to relate to someone like this person, and what such a relationship is like. That can open a door to finding new ways of behaving with others, and perhaps to discovering little known sides of oneself and allowing them to grow.
TRANSITIONAL RELATIONSHIPS- In these, the relationship is a cross between the old and the new. This lets us handle the old issues and conflicts in new ways without the gut-grinding of the old relationship. At the same time, trying new ways of being and relating. It’s a good place to practice for a long-term relationship that’s healthier than the one that preceded it.
For instance, a woman whose first husband lied to her constantly, forcing her to rely on her intuitive sense of what was really going on, became involved with a man who was basically honest but whose love of drama led to exaggeration. In the past such exaggeration would have pissed her, but she allowed herself to discover that in the areas that counted, he was honest.
AVOIDANCE RELATIONSHIPS- This pattern may involve people who protect themselves against any deep intimacy with others or any full contact with their own deeper feelings. Or it may involve people just coming out of a relationship who are afraid of still more of the painful feelings of loss, mourning and failure that often accompany splitting up.
PASTIME RELATIONSHIPS- A pastime relationship is essentially recreational & for fun, and is identified as such. Although some hopes may attach themselves, expectations seldom do. Its passionate and delightful until it lasts.
arushiaw 