Relationship : The power struggle

z RelationShip: The power struggle

    Your body and head have become accustomed to the effects of phenylethylamine and endorphins. You are still happy, happy, but the intensity of your happiness has diminished and you gradually come back to earth.

Surprised, you realize that your prince charming sometimes behaves like a toad, that your charming princess takes out her claws and her fangs more and more regularly. You make contact with the real person with whom you are in love.
    You are entering the second phase of your couple relationship: the struggle for power. The anxiety and insecurity of seduction and passion forced you to show your best; the security of your happiness and the certainty that the other loves you allow you to let yourself go and show yourself in your true light. You no longer pretend you are yourself and you start to say and even to demand what you expect from your relationship. You said it before, but the other man admired you and he/she didn't really hear what you said. If it is true that love is blind, it also makes you deaf.

    It is then that you realize that the other does not fully share your views on leisure, money, the choice of house, the distribution of household tasks, the number and education of children, friends, the frequency of sexual intercourse, the type and place of your vacation, the choice of films… in fact, the way of loving and investing in the couple.

    You realize that he emphasizes his career when you would like him to take more care of the family. You realize that she wants to make love but in her own way. You are meticulous, it leaves everything lying around. You love tight arguments, it brings emotion everywhere. You like large family gatherings, he prefers to go hunting or fishing with his friends. You like reading your newspaper in the morning, she always has something to blame you for. You like TV shows; he prefers sports broadcasts. He plans to retreat to the south; you would prefer to be near your grandchildren. And so on.

    This power struggle is inevitable and even necessary. It is this struggle that allows us to know who we are dealing with and which allows us to assert our needs and expectations in the face of the couple. This struggle brings the two partners to situate themselves with each other. Unfortunately, the majority of couples get bogged down in this struggle and get into dead ends:

• "It was you who started! " " No it's you! "
• "If you listened to me too when I talk to you. "
• "You and your damn family! You are all the same. "
• "If you stopped criticizing for change. "
• "If you didn't always put it off until tomorrow."
• "If you picked yourself up, too."
• "If you made a man (a woman) of yourself. "
• "What did I do to the good Lord to find myself with you?"
• "It looks like you're doing it on purpose".
• " I told you so. "
• “You (speaking of the children) always let them do as they please. "
• "You just have to take care of it a little more (children). "
• "You always want to be right.
• "Anyway, you will never understand anything."
• "Okay, here we go again! "
• "That's it, go! "

    These words are familiar to you. Don't worry, you're normal. Our two intimate and passionate lovers become, during this phase, two intimate enemies. Both love each other and want to continue loving each other, but there is more and more friction. These frictions are due to the differences existing between men and women, to the differences existing between this particular man and this particular woman; They are also due to our frustrated expectations in the face of married life and the paradox of passion, i.e. the coexistence of the need for passionate fusion and the need for autonomy.
    At this point, the future of the couple is at stake. More than half of couples will divorce and many will repeat the same dynamic with a new partner. Thirty percent 30% of couples will resign themselves, develop an unbalanced couple relationship, wage a war interspersed with periods of lulls (burst of phenylethylamine production) and seek compensation in work, family, or elsewhere. Barely 20% of couples will succeed in transforming this inevitable struggle for power into power-sharing, the third stage in the life of a couple.