There are five stages of dealing with loss, I have heard. The Kubler-Ross model says that the stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. While people might feel a few of them or all of them in different orders, mostly they will have to end at acceptance to move on with their lives.
However, what if the loss is actually of a relationship. I believe that an end to a relationship is not unlike death. When two people come together, they combine to become a new entity; an entity that gets dissolved when the relationship breaks. The pain is almost vengeful and wants to hurt you for letting the relationship die.
This makes me wonder if the same five stages are observed after a relationship ends. Perhaps! Probably!
The interesting part is not this but the fact that these five stages are experienced by two people and if they experience it in two different times, chaos ensues. What if for one person, the relationship died sometime before it ceased to exist for the other person?
Do you think that it is this asynchronous relationship death causes the friction at the end of the relationship? While one person is going through denial, other is going through anger. When the first person reaches anger, the second one is already depressed and by the time someone actually reaches bargaining, an acceptance has creeped in the relationship demise. Voila! You are done with the cycle while the second person is still trying to understand the head and tail of everything.
What should be done? Trying to match the frequency is one way, although I doubt it would work as it is the lack of frequency that is causing the end of the relationship in the first place. What to do?
Is it best to go through the steps quickly so that you are hurt less. Or is there nothing else to do except going through the pain.
For once, I do not have an answer. The pain is there and by the time it will go, there won’t even be the wound left. Probably a scar to remind me of the nth time I screwed up.
