Relationships do not stay the same. Across their lifespan relationships tend to move from warmth, openness, and growth towards contraction, rigidity, and coldness. This is not cynicism, but the entropy of all systems (Prigogine, 1984). Over time, without interruption, systems move into more fixed and predictable ways of functioning. In understanding relational systems, the idea of the four seasons offers a useful way of describing the key transitions that unfold between people as this process takes hold.

Spring is where it starts. It is a time marked by life, excitement, growth, and expansion. Two people meet with curiosity and openness, and the difference of the other is something they naturally move towards. It is explored, pursued, and often enjoyed.

At this point, both are most able to step into the interaction and engage with the other as they are, without needing to defend or protect. There is no fixed pattern yet, no accumulated history shaping the moment. There is space, movement, and a developing sense of what this could become. Spring is flexible, relatively unguarded, and strongly driven by the chemistry of connection.

This aligns with what is often described as the honeymoon phase of relationships. Even though each person’s blueprint is already present, the caricature of the other has not yet formed, and there has not yet been an accumulation of injury within the relationship itself.

It is a time where connection feels more effortless and spontaneous, and where interaction flows with less resistance. At the same time, this is also the period where the fantasy of the perfect partner is most active, often unnoticed because it is shared.

This phase does not last, for the simple reason that the relationship does not remain in a state of expansion. It begins to settle into more stable and repeated ways of interacting.

Summer follows, and brings with it a sense of consolidation, stability, and relative abundance. The relationship begins to take a clearer shape. The “we” starts to form in a more defined way. Habits develop through repetition, roles begin to settle, and the interaction becomes more familiar.

There is comfort in this familiarity, and often a sense of thriving within something that now feels established. At the same time, what stabilises also begins to fix. The patterns that emerge through repetition start to shape how the relationship functions. Flexibility narrows, often subtly at first.

The way of speaking, arguing, and repairing becomes increasingly automatic, less consciously chosen and more driven by what has been repeated over time.

Summer therefore marks the transition from newness into stability. There is relief in this movement, as uncertainty and unfamiliarity give way to predictability and a growing sense of safety. But this same process also lays down the relational pattern that will carry the relationship forward.

This pattern is deeply informed by the blueprints each person brings into the relationship. It develops naturally through ongoing interaction. However, as the limits of this pattern begin to show, particularly under strain, the relationship starts to move towards autumn.

Autumn is characterised by increasing friction and differentiation. Individual needs, preferences, and differences push more strongly into the interaction, and the limits of what has developed between the partners become more visible and more felt.

The emotional temperature of the relationship begins to cool. What has formed no longer expands in the same way, and its constraints become harder to ignore. The ease that characterised summer gives way to strain.

Conversations begin to stall. The same arguments repeat with little movement. The same issues remain unresolved despite multiple attempts. Frustration and dissatisfaction begin to accumulate, often in small increments at first.

As this builds into a more established legacy of injury, the movement into winter begins.

Autumn reflects the lived experience of a relationship where individuals increasingly feel constrained within what happens between them. The predictability of their interaction highlights the gap between individual needs and what the relationship can accommodate.

Small ruptures, moments that do not land, or interactions that remain unresolved begin to build on each other. These experiences become more pronounced and less tolerable over time. The pattern between them begins to restrict both experience and expression.

As this intensifies, connection becomes less consistent, more effortful, and more easily disrupted. From here, the relationship moves into winter.

Winter is marked by contraction and coldness. The interaction narrows significantly. There is more closing down, more withdrawal, and a stronger presence of defensiveness. Hope tends to reduce as repeated attempts at change fail to produce different outcomes.

The way each person speaks and acts becomes more corrosive, and injury accumulates with little reprieve. Efforts to connect begin to feel increasingly pointless or even risky. The focus shifts away from the relationship as a shared space and towards the self within it, often in a protective mode.

Protection of the self becomes dominant, alongside the growing consideration of escape. The relationship becomes saturated with pain that cannot be tolerated, and warmth and connection are not only rare, but overshadowed by what has come before.

At this point, the other is no longer experienced as complex or dynamic, but as fixed. They are encountered through a version that has been shaped by accumulated injury and repeated negative interaction.

The relationship is no longer based on responding to the person as they are in the moment, but on reacting to what they have come to represent. The caricature of the partner becomes dominant, and the legacy of injury is no longer background, but active in shaping each interaction.

In winter, escalation becomes more likely, whether through overt conflict, withdrawal, or a combination of both. The ways of being with each other have become predictable and increasingly brittle.

The interaction often feels like survival rather than engagement, and is frequently dominated by survival responses. The intensity of the relationship remains high, but it is an intensity that is difficult to sustain and often intolerable.

Being in the relationship generates distress, and there is very little comfort left in togetherness. The other is experienced less as a place of connection and more as a source of threat.

This movement across the seasons is not random. It reflects the natural progression of repeated interaction over time. As patterns stabilise, they become more predictable, and this predictability narrows the range of available responses.

In doing so, it reduces individuality within the interaction and increases friction between partners. What initially supported connection begins, over time, to erode it.

This is what needs to be interrupted.

I refer to this interruption as the Second Spring, but unlike the first, it does not emerge spontaneously and it is not driven by chemistry.

The Second Spring is deliberate and intentional. It involves a decision to re-enter the interaction, not because it feels natural or easy, but because it is chosen despite the difficulty.

It requires a shift in focus away from what the other is doing, and towards what each person is doing within the interaction itself. This includes how they speak, how they respond, how they withdraw, and how they escalate.

It also requires actively challenging the caricature that has formed. The version of the other that has become fixed through repeated injury needs to be questioned and disrupted. Without this, the interaction continues to be shaped by the past rather than the present.

The Second Spring involves letting go of the myths and fantasies about relationships, about the self, and about the other. It is not sustained by idealisation, but by ownership and accountability.

It requires effort, consistency, and a willingness to do something different in moments where the pull to repeat the old pattern is strong.

This, in many ways, is the aim of couple therapy.

As a therapist, I hold the uncomfortable reality that relationships progressively move towards decline if left unattended. This is what entropy means in this context. A gradual drift towards less complexity, less movement, and less connection, alongside an increase in dissatisfaction, disconnection, and tension.

Much of the work is therefore deliberately aimed at interrupting this drift. Not by trying to return the relationship to what it was at the beginning, but by supporting each individual to become more deliberate and intentional in how they participate in the interaction.

It is a move towards a more mature and realistic position, where connection is not assumed but built. A place where day-to-day, deliberate investment restores warmth, connection, and intimacy.