A tale of love and blogging in the early 2000s

In 2002, right near the onset of the blogging phenomenon, I started one of my own. It was a comedy blog, and part of a "blog ring" with a group of friends I had in New York City (many of whom went on to be successful writers and stand-ups, not that I'm bitter). In 2003, my now-wife found my blog because one of her friends followed me. She thought it was funny, and sent me an email introducing herself and linking to her own blog, which I found very funny as well.

Over the next year or so, we'd exchange jokes through the comment sections on our respective blogs, and we got to know each other through our senses of humor. She had one photo of herself on her blog and it was when she was six years old. I had one photo of myself on my blog, and I was dressed up like Anne of Green Gables, pigtails and all. Neither of us had any idea what the other looked like nor had we ever met in person or spoken to each other; our initiating phase was entirely written, and lasted nearly a year. 

At the time she lived in Boston and I lived in New Hampshire, about an hour away. I frequently went into the city to play shows with my band and occasionally by myself. One day in 2004 she sent me an email saying she'd had a silly dream about me. I happened to be going to the Boston area the next night to play a short set at a bar in Cambridge, and I invited her. We had amazing chemistry in person, even better than online.

After we met, our emails very quickly got more and more personal. It turned out we were both in the Terminating stages of our existing marriages (I was separated, she was about to be) and we very quickly experienced intensifying and bonding over that shared experience, skipping right over experimenting. 

At the same time we were experiencing the ends of our prior relationships and differentiating and establishing our own identities after years of being attached to another person, each of us in an unhealthy way. All of this took place over about a month and a half.

This is kind of what Knapp's staircase felt like.

​Escher, M. C. "Convex and Concave." Lithograph. 1955—contains Schroeder Stairs;
Licence: Fair Use

In summer of 2004 I moved to the city and got a room in an apartment with another friend of mine I knew through blogging, and she got her own room with a group of friends, but we were pretty inseparable. In February of 2005 we moved to New York City to start a new life together. 

Fast forward twenty years, and here we are. 

I was glad the lecture indicated that only the bottom three stages (stagnating, avoiding, terminating) are considered the "coming apart" stage, because differentiating and some degree of circumscribing (and, honestly, some stagnating) are perfectly natural during the relational maintenance of a healthy partnership that's been going on for two decades. 

Of course there are times when I'll know what her response to a question is going to be. Naturally things sometimes lack excitement and newness. But that doesn't lead us to the end, it just happens over the course of our lives together and managing that is part of relational maintenance. And there are always new opportunities for bonding, even if the first four steps can't really be replicated once a relationship gets to a certain point. 

The only reason Knapp's relational model applies at all to my relationship is because of the fact that you can skip stages, and hop from the left staircase to the right staircase and back again. His model may be set up in the traditional order of stages of a relationship, but I feel like it would be much more useful if it went deeper into what happens during the relational maintenance stage, because that's where most healthy relationships spend the vast majority of their time. 

Granted, the stages of managing a long-term relationship look like one of these guys:

 

 ... and therefore it's be a lot more challenging, but applying different models like the equilibrium model of relationship maintenance or a model based on the dynamics of emotional regulation might save some relationships from ending up in the "coming apart" stages.

 

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 Works Cited:

 

Green, Julia, director. Navigating Relationships Online: Exploring Knapp’s Relational Model , https://canvas.oregonstate.edu/courses/2031510/pages/week-3-learning-materials?module_item_id=26410730. Accessed 22 Jan. 2026.

Murray, S. L., et al. “The Equilibrium Model of Relationship Maintenance.” Apa PsycNet, 2015, psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-00656-003?doi=1.

Foss, Karen, and Stephen Littlejohn. “Sage Reference - Encyclopedia of Communication Theory -Relational Maintenance Theories.” Relational Maintenance Theories, sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/communicationtheory/chpt/relational-maintenance-theories. Accessed 22 Jan. 2026.