Thursday, July 16, 2009

three stages of love

Falling in love involves three stages: the initial feelings of lust or romantic love, physical attraction, and finally a deeper emotional attachment. Reaching the final stage of love isn't just about luck or unconditional acceptance. You can reach the final stage of love with these seven tips for a healthy love life. To be enjoyed, the three stages of love or stages of relationships need to be understood.
What Are the Three Stages of Love?

Before you embark on the stages of love, you might want to learn learn Why We Fall in Love.

The three stages of love are the same for everyone: lust or romantic love, physical attraction, and emotional attachment. The stages of love or stages of relationships aren't necessarily separated by markers like anniversaries or events (such as getting married). Rather, the three stages of love blend together in one long stroke of love.

Not everyone reaches or stays in the final stage of love, which is when separation or divorce becomes an option.
The Three Stages of Love

Romantic love or lust is the first stage of love. It's driven by testosterone and estrogen. Mating is the evolutionary purpose of this stage of love; it creates strong physical attraction and sets the stage for emotional attachment. In this stage of relationship, endorphins soak your brain and you're immersed in intense pleasurable sensations. Your lover is perfect, ideal, made for you. In this stage of love you feel exhilarated and even "high" (similar to the feeling you get after you eat really good chocolate or have a great workout). You feel infactuated in this stage of relationship.


Physical attraction and power struggles make up the second stage of love (the lovesick phase). You may lose your appetite, need less sleep, and daydream about your lover on the bus, during meetings, in the shower. In this stage of love, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin are racing through your body and brain. You're also trying to shape your lover into your ideal partner – which is where the power struggles come in. In this stage of relationship, you're becoming more realistic, and you two may fight about things like whether or not to buy organic food or listen to country music. The infatuation is wearing off, a strong emotional attachment begins to set in, and feelings of infactuation fade.

Emotional attachment or unconditional acceptance is the third stage of love. It involves commitment, partnership, and even children (a fear of intimacy prevents many from reaching this stage of love). In this stage of relationship, you're aware of both positive and negative traits in your partner, and you've decided you want to build a life together. Confrontation is most likely to occur in this stage of love (though if you're authentic and honest, it'll also happen in the second stage of love). You and your partner will either work towards a healthy, loving relationship or decide to call it quits.
The Three Stages of Love: Staying in Love

Your partnership isn't just a vehicle that brings happiness and contentment to your life (or bitterness and pain). It's a living, dynamic creature that changes, grows, and needs attention -- and you must nurture it. In all three stages of love, your love reveals who you really are, in all your glory and weakness.

All stages of love can help you accept your strengths and weaknesses. All stages of relationships also reveal your partner's strengths and weaknesses.
7 Tips for All 3 Stages of Love:
Focus on the things you can control: your attitude, your behavior, your words, and your energy. If you want something to change in any stage of a loving relationship, make it your own traits or actions – not your partner's.
Learn healthy ways to express your disappointment, anger, or frustration. Be honest and authentic, and kind and loving in all stages of relationships.
Remember the first stage of love! Recall your feelings of lust, attraction, and desire for your partner. Think about the traits that you were attracted to, and let those old feelings come to life again.
Appreciate your partner's good qualities; be grateful for the life you share. Gratitude can enhance all stages of relationships.
Focus on emotional intimacy in all three stages of love. Be vulnerable to have a healthy love life.
Own your feelings. Your partner can't "make" you feel stupid or worthless. If you feel unfulfilled or sad about your life, look at your own dreams and goals. Are you pursuing the life you were meant to live? Are you following your heart? Develop your personality, mind, and spirit. Figure out what will make you happy in this stage of love, and start creating the life you were meant to live.
Consider counseling in any stage of love. If you've lost that loving feeling, it could be an individual thing that you need to deal with or a couples' issue that you should tackle together. An objective point of view, from a therapist, pastor, or friend you trust, is incredibly helpful in all stages of relationships.

psychology ............. lets know ourself

this post is about my favourite topic PSYCHOLOGY  its my all time favourite 

Psychology is a reasonable and scientifically organized man-made schema to understand human behavior, based on observation over time.

What comes to mind when you picture a psychologist? 

If you're like most people coming to this fascinating field for the first time, the picture is apt to be a very familiar one. 

A quiet room. A leather couch. A neatly bearded, scholarly looking gentleman seated off to the side, only rarely speaking, quietly taking notes and occasionally nodding as the couch's supine occupant tells his or her story. 

In some ways, such a picture would indeed be accurate, a confirmation not only of the importance of Sigmund Freud in the history of psychology but also of the degree Freud dominates the popular perception of this discipline. 

But the picture would be inaccurate, as well. 

Freud was a physician, and the majority of psychologists are not. Both the psychoanalytic theory he pioneered and the therapeutic approach it was based on–psychoanalysis–have seen their dominance wane in recent years. And psychologists today, as indebted as they may be to Freud's landmark explorations of our psychological landscape, are involved in far more than helping people cope with inner demons. 

The expansive and varied roles of contemporary psychologists create another common image—of a crowd of white-coated researchers gathered around a maze, carefully recording a white rat's performance. It's another inadequate picture because experimental psychologists today usually work with people, not animals. 

Moreover, the areas of interest those psychologists are pursuing now encompass every part of the process we use to develop and function as people: 
How we perceive, remember, and learn 
How we select our friends and partners and retain their affection and love
The things that motivate us as we make our choices in life 
Even how we relate to the vehicles, machinery, computer systems, or workspaces we encounter as we make our livings. 

A Basic Introduction to a Complex Subject 

The Psychology of Human Behavior is an outstanding introduction to the field of psychology, beginning with its historical context and looking ahead to some of the directions it is likely to take in the future. Though the course is not intended to be an in-depth exploration of this constantly evolving discipline, its 36 lectures work smoothly as an easy-to-follow primer and offer the ideal starting point for satisfying curiosity about how the mind works, the perspectives from which that question can be approached, and directions for further learning. 

Curiosity about the human mind is something Professor David W. Martin believes is present in just about everyone–even if we don't always realize it. 

"If you go to a party and see what people are talking about, they are talking about other people and other people's behavior." 

"'Why did she leave him?' 'Why don't they bring up their kids in a better way?'" 

"They are talking about human behavior, [something] we're all interested in–and what we are going to be talking about in this course." 

In keeping with the introductory nature of the lectures, Professor Martin maintains the discussion at a straightforward level, using technical terms when necessary and always defining them clearly. He presents this broad array of topics in a way that makes it apparent why his teaching skills have been so consistently honored. 

He uses his own specialty–engineering psychology–as an example of the many new research areas that now fit comfortably beneath psychology's umbrella. As an engineering psychologist, Professor Martin studies how people function as components in a larger system of human-and-machine—for instance, why they see (or ignore) data presented on a computer screen... how they process information to make decisions in a specific environment formed by person and device... or even the best way to indicate which burners on a stove are controlled by which knobs. 

This kind of career path has only lately become possible. As his lectures show, Professor Martin, like psychologists working in the field's many subspecialties, are the beneficiaries of decades of increased understanding of how the psyche and brain function, how information is processed, and how to go about gaining that understanding through sophisticated, state-of-the-art research methods. 

A Time When "Introspection" Was Scientific Procedure 

Odd as it seems today, the major method of data collection during experimental psychology's early days, around the turn of the 20th century, was through what was called introspection: Researchers were trained in concentrating on and identifying the methods their own minds used to process a stimulus presented to them, so they could then report the results! 

Today neurologists and neuroscientists can see the electrical and chemical effects within the body's most complex organ as mental, physical, and emotional processes are stimulated. 

Ultimately psychology is about human behavior: what we do and why we do it. And as Professor Martin moves across the landscape of psychology today, he introduces topics as varied as major types of mental disorders; the different kinds of physical, behavioral, and "talking" therapies available to treat them; and the ways simple learning is accomplished. He includes example after example of how complex that simple idea—what we do and why we do it—can be. 
In looking at the field of social psychology, and the ways people can be persuaded, he describes experiments in which people waiting in a long line to make copies are confronted by a person asking to be allowed to jump in at the front. Most people (94 percent) agreed if the reason given was "being in a rush"; 60 percent agreed if no reason at all was given. But even when the reason given was "because I have to make some copies" (obviously!), 93 percent still said yes! As Professor Martin explains, the key element is the use of the word "because," which functions as a heuristic, a psychological shortcut for people too busy to take in the data but who have learned through experience that the word "because" is usually a signal that a good reason is coming. 
In exploring memory, we learn about the work of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who has demonstrated how easily memories can be implanted, sometimes just by asking whether someone remembers having experienced a nonexistent event. Subjects will initially deny—accurately—having had the experience, but about a third of them, when tested later, will remember the experience with as much certainty as if it had taken place! 
Of the relatively new field of evolutionary psychology, we learn that in police reports, men explaining why—"for no reason at all"—they seek to kill one another in meaningless fights over insults is in fact for one of the oldest reasons on the planet. Even if the fight takes places in a bar, with no one around but male strangers for whom an insult to one's reputation would hardly matter, the violence likely stems from the evolutionary need for male status in a very small community of 60 to 100 people, at most, with a limited supply of females. 

Under such circumstances, notes Professor Martin, an insult that reduces one's status–thus one's ability to attract a mate–would have been very consequential. 

"Our genes are set up to have behavioral predispositions to considering these fighting words, and engaging in aggression, when somebody denigrates our status. That's apparently what's happening in these situations." 

Similarly, evolution appears to have had a profound impact on the development of altruism, the ways we choose our sexual partners, why we make war, and even why we overeat. Though most of our understanding of human psychology has been gained in little more than a century, the puzzle psychologists are working to assemble and understand has been in process for a long, long time. 

Psychology of Human Behavior can only begin to describe that puzzle, of course, but it is a fascinating description–both a solid summary and an ideal starting point for those eager to find the keys to the puzzle's solution.