Happy Sexy Love How to bulletproof relationships with happy, sexy love
Here’s how to find out.
Researcher Amy Gahran popularized the term for the
mindless momentum that pushes many couples toward
marriage.
An illustration of a couple standing on an
escalator with banners stretched across it for
life milestones. The banners read: first date,
boyfriend and girlfriend, I love you, engaged,
just married, welcome home, it’s a girl.
wb-relationshipescalator (Chelsea Conrad/The
Washington Post)
By Nick Roberts
September 27, 2024 at 8:46 a.m. EDT
Laura Boyle was engaged at 22 after being with her
boyfriend for three years. At 23, they had an
archetypal “big, white wedding” with 130
people, a four-layer wedding cake and tons of
money spent on the florist. They were
congratulated broadly by their friends and family.
Boyle remembers her grandma was excited for her.
Just a year later, when she was 24, they were
divorced.
Boyle, who lives in New Haven, Conn., now sees
fundamental disconnects between what she and her
husband were seeking, including whether they
imagined children in their future.
“It can be very easy to get swept up in the
cultural messaging of ‘you will find the one,
and it will feel perfect,’” said Boyle, who is
now 36. “We force ourselves forward through all
the steps without really pausing to consider what
it is we and that person actually want out of this
relationship.”
Relationship researcher and journalist Amy Gahran
popularized a term for the mindless momentum that
pushes many couples toward marriage: The
relationship escalator.
What is the relationship escalator?
The relationship escalator follows a common path:
Two people meet, there’s physical attraction and
after a few dates sex. They stop dating other
people, and start saying “I love you.” The
couple spends almost all their nonwork time
together, decide to move in together and start
planning their future. Engagement and marriage
follow, then merging finances, perhaps buying a
house and having kids.
“It’s a well-known trajectory,” said Gahran,
author of the book, “Stepping Off the
Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life.”
“It’s the escalator, not the staircase,
because it has so much external support and
veneration and status and privilege, it kind of
feels like it’s moving on by it’s own
momentum.”
Gahran first encountered the term years ago among
the polyamorous community in Oakland, Calif. She
immediately saw how the trajectory had defined
relationships earlier in her life.
In her early 40s she had been married in a
traditional relationship that lasted for more than
a decade. “I thought the escalator was my only
option, even though it never really worked, even
though it never really made me happy,” she said.
After she and her spouse amicably separated,
Gahran began exploring and practicing consensual
non-monogamy. In 2012, she began blogging about
her experience and wrote a post entitled “Riding
the relationship escalator (or not)” that caused
the term to explode into the public discourse.
“I never got so much traffic for a blog post in
my life,” Gahran said.
Finding a different staircase
Gahran and other researchers are quick to say that
traditional relationships can be successful and
the best fit for many people. But considering
whether you’ve been riding the relationship
escalator in your own life can prompt people —
both monogamous and not — to have important
conversations.
“You have to talk about what is it that you’re
looking for, what kind of future do you envision
with one or more partners, and you will get so
many different answers,” said Rebecca Rose
Vassy, a sexuality and relationship coach at the
Pincus Center for Inclusive Treatment and
Education in Alexandria, Va.
Vassy notes that people who don’t follow the
escalator face stigma for diverging from the
traditional model. The immediate response is like,
“Why don’t you want these perfectly normal
things that everybody should want?” Vassy said.
For people in consensual non-monogamous
relationships, it’s the job of the individual to
determine what they want and need from their
relationships, and to agree with their partners on
the commitments they will and won’t share.
“One of the core things that we believe is that
nobody can be everything to you and nobody is
responsible for your happiness,” Vassy said.
A relationship ‘smorgasbord’
Vassy says an alternate model to the relationship
escalator is the relationship “smorgasbord.”
The concept has been bouncing around the
consensual non-monogamous community for years.
Here’s how it works.
Consider what commitment means to you: To
understand what your smorgasbord looks like, start
by writing down the things in your life that
represent commitment. Examples include owning a
pet together, taking shared vacations, giving
someone a key to your home, listing each other as
an emergency contact. Moving in together, having
kids, merging finances all have a place in the
smorgasbord.
Discuss the relationship you envision: The goal of
the smorgasbord approach is to sit down with
someone you’re dating, and talk about the
relationship you envision, what you’re available
for and what won’t work. The practice will help
you consider the wants and needs of the
participants involved rather than being beholden
to a predetermined series of steps.
Design your ideal relationship: Asking these
difficult questions helps to intentionally define
the parameters of a relationship — whether
it’s monogamous or polyamorous or something else
— based on the needs of the individuals
involved.
Other ways to step off the relationship escalator
Gahran and other experts say that being aware of
the relationship escalator doesn’t mean you
can’t stay on it. But the goal should be to
design your relationship around what you want —
rather than what’s culturally expected.
Duration doesn’t define relationship success: On
the relationship escalator, successful
relationships last until someone dies. But
longevity doesn’t necessarily mean that partners
are emotionally satisfied. “The success of a
relationship is not in its length,” Vassy said.
“It is whether you were able to respect each
other or your feelings and learn and grow together
for a little while, and feel like, in some way,
both of you were better off for having been
together.”
Marriage doesn’t have to be the goal: Vassy
leads workshops in a variety of specializations
including polyamory, queerness, gender identity,
kink and neurodivergence. In her work, she often
sees the question of marriage as a pressure point
for people in monogamous relationships.
“They’re like, ‘I’ve been seeing this guy
for six months, and he hasn’t even brought up
marriage. Should I break up with them?” Vassy
said.
She says this reaction would feel bizarre in the
non-monogamous community where relationships tend
to be less focused on marriage. “Why does this
question of marriage have to determine whether or
not you’re together?” she said. Better
questions to ask might be: Are you having a good
relationship? Do you make each other happy? Is
there mutual respect that makes the relationship
honest and fulfilling?
Relationships don’t have to be hard: In 2020,
Boyle, the woman who was divorced a year after her
wedding, started the blog Ready for Polyamory as a
resource for people interested in non-monogamy.
She says the same cultural messaging that pushes
couples up the relationship escalator also drives
people to believe that relationships are
necessarily “hard work.”
“I get people coming forward to share stories of
things where they were in relationships that felt
extremely difficult for many years before they
were able to leave,” Boyle said.
“Relationships are work, but relationships
should not feel hard all of the time.”
****************************************************
How will you co-design your ideal relationship with
happy, sexy love that lasts?
Hadley Finch
And claim my gift audiobook with love secrets from top experts
at https://www.happysexyloveinromanticrelationships.com
