Let’s start off with that famous honeymoon phase. The honeymoon phase -- I’ll call it the Honeymoon phase: phase one of a relationship. It’s mostly run by automatics and you don’t know it’s run by automatics. You see something in your immune system and something in the chemical system and something in the omental set leads you to find a person and hook up with them. And by hook up, I mean connect. You don’t know why it is but, you know, given another time this person may not have been appealing. Given another day, given another condition. Like, let’s say you just, you know, you’re feeling old and you meet somebody young, and boom, you feel in love. Or you’re feeling young and you feel like you’ve just been dumped by somebody, so you find somebody older and you fall in love. Or, you know, it’s set and setting.
In "The 8 Stages of Love", Armand DiMele, founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy and host of “The Positive Mind” radio show, discusses romantic relationships and how they grow and evolve over time. Following is an excerpt from this program.
Set and setting is the dynamic of practically everything in life. Where are you at what point in your life when you fall in love, and if the right thing comes along it’s going to be perfect. You do not spend your life waiting for the right person. There’s no one right person. There are loads of right people. It’s timing. Timing is essential. Where are you physically? Where are you emotionally? Where are you spiritually? Did your dog just die and then you fell in love with this guy you met? Did your father just pass on? Did you just move to a new city and you’re excited? Were you just taking on a new adventure? Are you somebody who every time you do something good for yourself, you get waylaid by a relationship distraction? Do you fall in love out of distraction?
So those first things that happen, they feel like a conscious choice. You could be sitting at a bar, looking down the bar, and the very same guy who you looked at for six months suddenly looks cute. Why? Because something inside you has changed. There are hormones. There are expectations. There are things going on inside you. You know we have bonding hormones. We have menstrual cycles. We have testosteronic cycles. A man loses his job, he goes to a bar, he meets somebody who is very sympathetic, and he falls in love. But think of his chemistry. Think of the way he was feeling. Think of that looming depression that was coming around.
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