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The Three Phases of Love

You’ve been together a year. The butterflies are gone. You argue about dishes now. Is this the beginning of the end, or is this just… what comes next?

Love Has Phases (And That’s Normal)

Dr. John Gottman, whose research spans over 50 years and thousands of couples, has identified three distinct phases that healthy relationships progress through.[1]

Understanding these phases changes everything. Most couples panic when Phase 1 ends, not realizing they’ve entered the most important — and most challenging — phase of their relationship.

Phase 1: Limerence (Falling in Love)

This is the phase everyone knows. The one songs are written about.

Characteristics:

  • Intense physical and emotional attraction
  • Release of “bonding chemicals” (oxytocin, dopamine)
  • Tendency to overlook red flags
  • Focus on similarities while minimizing differences
  • Feeling like you’ve found “the one”

Duration: Typically 3 months to 2 years

What’s actually happening: Your brain is flooded with dopamine, creating a neurochemical high that impairs critical judgment. This isn’t a design flaw — it’s evolution’s way of bonding you long enough to reproduce. But it’s temporary by design.[2]

Gottman’s insight: The neurochemical high of this phase can impair judgment. Couples benefit from enjoying this phase while maintaining awareness that it is temporary and not a sufficient foundation for lasting commitment.

The mistake most people make: Believing this feeling IS love, and that its fading means love is dying.

Phase 2: Building Trust (The Make-or-Break Phase)

Once the limerence glow diminishes, the relationship enters its most challenging — and most important — phase.

The core questions of Phase 2:

  • “Will you be there for me?”
  • “Can I count on you?”
  • “Do you really see me?”
  • “Am I safe with you?”

What happens:

  • Frustration, disappointment, and conflict emerge
  • Differences become more visible and harder to ignore
  • The majority of fighting happens in the first two years
  • You see your partner’s actual flaws, not the idealized version

This is where most relationships fail. Not because they’re wrong for each other, but because couples don’t know how to navigate this phase.

The 5:1 Ratio

Gottman’s research found that couples who maintain a ratio of at least 5 positive interactions to every 1 negative interaction during conflict are likely to stay together.[1]

This doesn’t mean avoiding conflict. It means the overall emotional climate stays predominantly positive even when you disagree.

The Four Horsemen

Gottman identified four communication patterns that predict relationship failure:[3]

  1. Criticism — Attacking character, not behavior (“You never…” “You always…”)
  2. Contempt — Mockery, eye-rolling, disgust, superiority
  3. Defensiveness — Denying responsibility, making excuses, counter-attacking
  4. Stonewalling — Shutting down, withdrawing, refusing to engage

Contempt is the worst. It’s the single greatest predictor of divorce — Gottman’s research could predict relationship failure with over 90% accuracy based largely on the presence of contempt.

What Successful Couples Do Instead

Key behaviors for Phase 2 success:

  • Awareness of partner’s struggles and pains
  • Turning toward (not away from) partner’s bids for connection
  • Listening non-defensively, even when it’s hard
  • Practicing empathy before problem-solving
  • Repairing after conflict — not avoiding conflict, but recovering from it

The repair attempt: Gottman found that what distinguishes master couples from disaster couples isn’t how they fight — it’s how they repair. A repair attempt is any statement or action that prevents negativity from escalating: humor, a touch, an apology, even just saying “can we start over?”

Phase 3: Building Commitment and Loyalty

The final phase involves a choice. Couples either:

  • Cherish one another and nurture gratitude, OR
  • Nurture resentment for what seems missing

The gratitude path: Partners actively appreciate what they have. They build a culture of respect and fondness. They create shared meaning and rituals.

The resentment path: Partners focus on what’s lacking. They keep score. Small irritations become proof of larger inadequacies.

The Fairness Metric

Gottman emphasizes that deep, lasting trust is very difficult to establish when power distribution feels unfair to either partner.[1]

Both individuals must feel they can give AND receive what they long for. One-sided relationships don’t survive Phase 3 — or they survive unhappily.

What Phase 3 Looks Like

Couples who successfully navigate to Phase 3 report:

  • Deep trust and security
  • Ability to be fully themselves
  • Shared life vision and meaning
  • Maintained attraction (different from limerence, but real)
  • Effective conflict navigation
  • Genuine friendship

The Transition Problem

Most relationship advice focuses on Phase 1 (how to find love) or Phase 3 (how to maintain it). Almost nothing prepares couples for Phase 2.

Common Phase 2 mistakes:

  1. Interpreting the end of limerence as the end of love — “The spark is gone, we must not be right for each other”

  2. Avoiding conflict instead of learning to navigate it — Conflict isn’t the problem; how you handle it is

  3. Expecting your partner to be the same person you fell for — They were showing you their best self; now you’re seeing their whole self

  4. Trying to return to Phase 1 — It’s not coming back. The goal is Phase 3, not recreating Phase 1

The Hopeful Research

A 2011 study scanned the brains of couples married an average of 21 years who still reported intense romantic love.[4]

The findings were remarkable:

  • Activity in the same dopamine-rich reward areas as new love
  • PLUS activation in brain regions associated with attachment and calm
  • MINUS the obsessive, anxiety-driven components of limerence

Translation: Long-term love combines the reward-motivation of early passion with the security of deep attachment. The intensity can remain while the anxiety fades.

This is what lies on the other side of Phase 2 — if you do the work.

Self-Reflection

  1. Think about your longest relationship. Which phase did it end in, and why?
  2. When you’ve experienced Phase 2 conflict, which of the Four Horsemen showed up most?
  3. What would it look like to “turn toward” your partner during conflict instead of away?

One Thing You Can Do

Name the phase. When you’re struggling in a relationship, ask: “Which phase are we in?” If you’re in Phase 2, recognize that the difficulty isn’t a sign of incompatibility — it’s the work of building trust. The question isn’t “why is this hard?” It’s “how do we handle the hard parts?”

References

  1. Gottman, J.M. The 3 Phases of Love. The Gottman Institute.
  2. Fisher, H.E., Aron, A., & Brown, L.L. (2005). Romantic love: An fMRI study of a neural mechanism for mate choice. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 493(1), 58-62.
  3. Gottman, J.M. & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown.
  4. Acevedo, B.P., Aron, A., Fisher, H.E., & Brown, L.L. (2011). Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(2), 145-159.