When romantic love turns into a power struggle

Dear Jo

I’m feeling so upset. It feels like my partner has tricked me. He used to be so loving and caring when we first met, but since our engagement a couple of months ago, he’s changed completely. We’re constantly fighting about the smallest things, and he doesn’t want to spend time with me anymore. It feels like we’ve made a big mistake, and I’m really scared. I want to break off the engagement, but I still love him so much. What should I do?

Fiona

Dear Fiona

I can just imagine that this feels like a really scary place in your relationship, and that you’re feeling very hurt. However, there is a way in which to understand what might be happening. All relationships go through different stages, and it sounds like you’ve moved from Romantic Love into the Power Struggle.

When we fall in love, our body releases a whole lot of “love drugs”, which makes us feel all kinds of wonderful feelings – a natural high. We feel that we’ve found the right person to live happily ever after with. Together we feel whole.

We might see a few things in this person that are not perfect, but we ignore them, thinking they might go away or change. After all, if they really love us, they’ll do anything to make us happy. They say love is blind, and that’s true: if we really saw the whole picture, we might run a mile instead of sticking around.

Sadly, we don’t stay on that natural high forever. Romantic love is just the gateway to the next stage, a very difficult stage, but one that has a hidden gift, if only we became conscious of it.

The power struggle is often triggered when a couple moves to the next level of commitment – for instance, when you got engaged. At this point we often start to review our relationships. It’s such a big step, we want to make sure we’ve made the right choice. So we start to put the relationship under a magnifying glass.

Suddenly the things we ignored become major issues in the relationship, and the cause of many arguments. As someone once said, “When I met Mr Right, I didn’t know his first name was Always!” In fact, the power struggle is directly related to the fact that both partners feel they’re right.

When we experience the loss of romantic love, we go through phases similar to those we face with other losses: shock, denial, intense anger and sadness. We try everything in our power to get our partner to give us what we want: we blame, judge, criticise, withdraw or coerce them in any way possible.

Unfortunately, the more we do this, the more they panic, and the less they’re able to meet our needs. It sounds like you’re seeking more closeness while your partner is trying to get more distance – a typical feature of the power struggle. And unfortunately, it’s at this point that couples often decide to end the relationship or to start living parallel lives.

In this very painful place, you need to know there’s another alternative. This partner, whom we now think has turned out to be totally incompatible, is in fact the perfect partner – if only we can become conscious of all of these things. At that point, we can make another decision and embark on a different relationship journey: that of the conscious relationship.

In the conscious relationship, the Power Struggle’s gift is to give both of you the opportunity to heal and grow through the relationship. We get to understand that the frustrations hold the key to the transformation that can make your relationship better than ever – even better than during the Romantic Love stage!

Johanri Engelbrecht
Clinical Psychologist Registered Imago Relationship Therapist and Workshop Presenter
082 448 0271

Imago Relationship Therapy is based on the book Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix

Read more about Johanri Engelbrecht and Imago Relationship Therapy