The Eight Stages of Intimacy™

By Laura Dawn Lewis

Is your relationship everything you ever hoped for? Does it feel like something is missing or maybe it’s just note quite what you are looking for? Do your romances crash and burn before six months?

The following illustrates the eight different stages of intimacy. With your life partner, achievement of at least seven of the eight leads to relationship success. With friends, coworkers and associates, you’ll match in some, but not all.

To achieve true intimacy, two ideas must be present:

Safety & Connectedness

Safety means that as the relationship grows between two people. Should something frighten, upset or threaten you, your partner becomes the safe haven, the person you seek rather than avoid. Safety is something a person earns through trust and actions.

Connectedness or more commonly chemistry is that feeling that you are in tune with the other person, you have enough common ground to feel comfortable yet enough differences to keep things interesting. True intimacy cannot be achieved without feelings of safety and feelings of connectedness.

Your relationship may be experiencing several of these stages and they may not necessarily fall in order. However, if you are starting out in a relationship with a new partner and you really are interested in the long-term, the stages are an accurate road map to achieving a fulfilling relationship. Too often, couples reach level three and skip all the way to number seven. Then they wonder why it never worked and they felt unfulfilled.

The longer you are together, ideally, the more of these you will attain. Use this information to evaluate your relationship and see if it is where you want to be. If areas are missing, explore those with your partner and see if your partner wants the same as you. You'll be surprised, especially if it seems that you never achieve the relationship want, how the stages illustrate what you can do to get there. If it does feel like something is missing, carefully read stages 4-6, (Intellectual, Spiritual & Emotional Intimacy). These are the three areas most couples have problems in and the three areas most adults skip in order to reach level seven by the third or fifth date.

If you're just starting to date again, and are tired of unfulfilling relationships and short-term romances (less than six months), the eight stages will help you achieve a loving relationship by giving you a step by step guide to dating. Make a commitment to yourself to explore each stage in-depth with a potential mate before proceeding to the next. Most superficial relationships will fall apart during stages four through six, the very stages most people skip in order to experiment in seven. Then they wonder why the relationship didn't last! When you finish this article, you may be enlightened.

This is also an article you will want to print and think about. The questions should help you identify areas you may need to focus on in an effort to cultivate the type of relationship you deserve. It's also a good checklist for review if you and your partner seem estranged, but you're not sure why yet.

Each of the following 8 pages will give you an overview of the Eight Stages of Intimacy, questions to ask yourself if you're in a relationship to gauge if you've achieved this and questions at the end to ask people you are dating to identify compatibility and learn more about each other. At the bottom of each page we provided questions to ask if you are dating or in the first year of a relationship.

Couples Company is very excited to bring this breakthrough in relationship tools. Not only do the stages provide an excellent step by step plan for dating and finding true love, we believe these stages will also help you get to the root of many of the frustrations you may be experiencing in your current relationship.

Presenting The 8 Stages of Intimacy: