Gary’s Notes on Relationships

Gary’s Notes of Relationships (took during Gary Garrison’s lecture on playwriting during the Kennedy Center’s Summer Playwright Intensive)

Failed Relationships are based on coming-together (1-5), and falling-apart (A-E)

Coming Together (1-5)

1. Initiate
   Superficial, desire to learn about them, initiate another meeting
2. Investing
   Investing time, energy, thought, emotions
   Giving-out personel information in hope that they will do that, too
   you start to drop-in risky things
   Most dangerous part
   Most fragile part (talk of exes?)
   There is something that happens that makes you want more
   
3. Involving
   Introduction of parents and friends
   Greater risks & more personal information is given
   People beginning to see you as a couple
   You begin making mutual decisions
   You begin to start privately fantasizing about a bigger future
4. Engaging
   You make a determined commitment (what’s the BIG step before engagement?)
   Public articulation of what you know to be true
   Move-in together, cabin together, travel together
   Privately thinking about marraige
   All the deep-seated horrible doubts, the testing of the relationship
5. Bonding
   A public ceremony which cements the decision for life
   Decision that all of the good outweighs the bad

Now, at any point, relationships can fall-apart.

A. The doubts start to creep in
General uneaseness / restlessness
The battle of good VS bad is tilting more towards ‘bad’

B. Isolating
“It’s not our music, it’s my music”
Asserting individuality into the relationship
You begin spending time out of the relationship
You start having a secret: life, fears, desires
Fantasizing about a “split”

C. Erupting
You are not talking & so you have horrible arguments about nothing / everything
Feeling of hopelessness
More time is spent in conflict than in peace

D. Dissasociation
Moving-out
Pulling yourself out of the relationship
You have stopped the relationship

E. Splitting
You take everything and you go out.  You leave.

Now, this holds for: jobs, parties, friends, families, those diagnosed with a disease/disorder

Advertisement

~ by litpunk on March 24, 2011.