What's a Stepping Stone Relationship?

In doing this work for a really long time, and in the lives of so many of the people i've worked with, i've developed a lot of kinds of pattern recognition. And it took me a while to understand them and see their meaning in the whole dating, search for love process. So what's a stepping stone or bridge relation ship? It's something that can cause a lot of pain and a lot of disappointment, but is ultimately, i think, really a harbinger of good. As we learn to love ourselves in deeper ways, and leave that agonizing, slippery, hellish slope of trying to fix and change ourselves in order to find love, we change our field changes