Relationship escalator

What is the relationship escalator?

The relationship escalator is the standard path a love relationship is supposed to follow according to social norms: getting to know each other, going steady, exclusivity, living together, marriage and keeping that up for life. Each step counts as progress upward, and stepping off as failure. The journalist Amy Gahran coined the term to make that self-evidence visible.

What the relationship escalator looks like in practice

You usually notice the escalator only when you don’t move along with it somewhere. Take a couple who are happy after three years, but don’t want to marry and don’t want to live together. To themselves it’s right, but the people around them read it as “not serious” and ask when the next step is coming. That is the escalator at work: not as force, but as assumption. Peter McGraw, professor at the Leeds School of Business in Colorado and author of Solo, describes the path as a fixed sequence: finding someone attractive, dating, becoming intimate, falling in love, stopping other romantic contacts, living together, marrying and staying together for life. Whoever deviates, he writes, loses social recognition and sometimes legal advantages, even when their own relationship feels better.

Where the term comes from

The relationship escalator is not an old concept but a recent name for an old pattern. Amy Gahran interviewed more than 1,500 people with unconventional relationships for her book, and gave the invisible script a name. She describes the escalator as “the bundle of socially acceptable traditions for intimate relationships: monogamy, living together, sharing a sexual and romantic connection, always prioritizing one’s spouse above almost every other adult, and permanence”. The image of an escalator is at the core: you step on, and the escalator carries you up along steps that count as fixed and as the only right order. By giving that package a name, it becomes discussable, and with that a choice instead of an automatism.

Why people step onto the escalator, and why off

The pull of the escalator is real. The path gives a ready-made script, social recognition, and practical advantages: a house together, legal protection, a story everyone understands. For you the fixed sequence takes the guesswork out, because you know what the next step is called. Whoever steps off chooses the reverse: deciding for yourself which parts you do and don’t want. For one person that is no children, for another living apart or no exclusivity. According to Gahran the traditional path suits many people fine, but it is “just not the only game in town”. What the escalator is not: a law. Naming it is no judgment. Whoever wants the path may walk it, and whoever doesn’t want it doesn’t have to prove that their relationship is “real” anyway.

What the relationship escalator is not

“The relationship escalator is something bad you should step off of.” No. Gahran doesn’t say the path is good or bad, only that it is a standard and not a law of nature. For many people it fits perfectly.

“Stepping off means no commitment.” Often the opposite. Whoever lets go of the fixed steps has to agree more explicitly what does and doesn’t hold, because less goes without saying.

“It’s only about polyamory.” Not only. A monogamous couple that decides not to marry or not to live together steps off the escalator just as much, without a second partner in sight.

What I see myself

In my work I come across both sides. Women high on the escalator, married for years, and still missing something that doesn’t fit that script. And women who feel they’ve failed because their relationship never went “up”, while there was nothing wrong except the measuring stick. With my background as a psychotherapist I notice that naming the escalator often gives relief: it turns a vague sense of falling short into a choice you’re allowed to make consciously. I am not a relationship therapist and I don’t decide about your relationship. But the room to want something that falls outside the standard path, without having to justify it, is exactly what I work with.

What you can do with this

• Notice where you take “the next step” as self-evident, and ask yourself whether you want that step yourself or only because it’s on the escalator.
• Discuss the parts separately. Exclusivity, living together, marriage and children don’t have to come as one package; choose per part what fits you.
• Don’t judge yourself if your relationship doesn’t go “up”. Standing still on a step is no failure, only a deviation from a script you didn’t write yourself.
• Check whether your partner means the same by a step before you take it, because the same step can mean commitment for one and simply convenience for the other.

Further reading

• Relationship anarchy is the form that rejects the relationship escalator most sharply, with the manifesto included.
• Ethical non-monogamy gathers the forms in which people fill in the escalator differently.
• Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator (2017), is the book that coined the term, based on more than 1,500 stories.

Where this fits on my site

If you stand high on the escalator and want something for yourself that doesn’t fit there, that is no betrayal of what you have. With me you can fill in a meeting differently than the standard script prescribes, discreetly and without having to explain anything. How that works you can read under my services. Sounding it out first is always fine, and that commits you to nothing.

Sources

• Why Step Off the Relationship Escalator?. Amy Gahran, author of Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator. Gives her definition of the relationship escalator as “the bundle of socially acceptable traditions for intimate relationships: monogamy, living together, sharing a sexual and romantic connection, always prioritizing one’s spouse above almost every other adult, and permanence”, and the observation that the path suits many people but is “just not the only game in town”.
• Amy Gahran, Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life. 2017 (ISBN 9780998647012). The book that coined the term, based on research among more than 1,500 people with unconventional relationships. Gives the origin of the concept and the description of the ways people deviate from the standard path.

Related terms

The relationship escalator is the standard path relationship anarchy refuses as a whole.

• Relationship anarchy. The form that rejects the escalator most sharply and scraps the ranking between relationships.
• Ethical non-monogamy. The umbrella under which people fill in the escalator differently in their own way.
• Monogamy. One of the features of the escalator, which you can also choose apart from it.
• Polyamory. One way to deviate from the exclusivity the escalator prescribes.