Vivian Baruch

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Real intimacy is a daily practice. It is a deep engagement with the whole “dance” that couples do together. Basically it’s just like learning to dance, when we must learn and practice new steps so we can move more easily through the three phases of relationship intimacy.

Decades of relationship research has helped us to understand that there are three predictable phases in the dance of relationships: the promise (harmony), disillusionment (disharmony) and deep love (repair). In this post I lay out Terry Real’s approach to developing the intimacy skills we must practice every day to dance well with our partner. They begin with changing our own reactions first. In order to learn more detail about these skills and practices, check out his book “The New Rules of Marriage”.

Forming new habits

The science of relationships shows us that intimacy grows through the practice of new relationship habits. New habits can only be formed by daily repetition and ongoing practice. The scientific study of habits shows that on average it takes 66 days to form a new habit. Additionally, this can vary from person to person and also for different actions. One study showed it could take up to 254 days! The bottom line is that it can take a long time to form a new habit. And without regular practice, we quickly revert to old habitual behaviours which are unskilled.

While forming a new habit takes about 66 days, mastery of new relationship habits and skills takes ongoing deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson, known as the expert on expertise, studied the science of peak performance in many fields for thirty years. He said that deliberate practice involves stepping outside our comfort zone by trying activities just beyond our current abilities, often with the help of a coach. This means that to develop good relationship habits and then to master relationship skills, we have to put in time and deliberate, daily practice of research-based intimacy skills.

Take hope! You can break bad relationship habits and create new, good habits. Relationship science has identified the skills that are needed to develop real intimacy. By regularly practicing these skills, we learn to dance more smoothly through the three phases of relationships.

The following three phases of relationship can happen in the course of one conversation, one day, one week or continuously over time. They regularly repeat until we master the skills involved to prevent them happening and/or intervene more successfully.

The first phase of relationships – the promise, harmony

The first phase of all relationships is the state of falling in love. It can be best understood as “love without knowledge”.  We all know that this phase of love can be blind. The wonderful experience of falling in love gives us a sense of completion. Needs are met that we never even knew we had. Whether we admit it or not, many of us fall in love with the promise and hope that in surrendering to the beloved, all of our unhealed places, all the old wounds we carry from the past will be healed, or permanently avoided. When we look deeply into our lover’s eyes, we see ourselves as whole and lovable. This is a time of “nose to nose” energy, when partners of any age find themselves acting like teenagers, and nothing is as compelling or fascinating as our beloved.

The second phase of relationships – disillusionment, disconnection

Sooner or later, the bubble bursts. A couple moves from “nose to nose” energy to “side by side” energy. We now face outwards to the world, shoulder to shoulder. When this happens successfully, we are unified as a team and working toward a set of goals, like creating a life together, getting ahead, paying the mortgage, and raising children. It is a normal and necessary development to emerge from the cocoon of the falling in love phase to face the tasks of learning to work as a team. When this doesn’t go well, we feel alone and disappointed.

Think of intimacy as comprised of two intersecting lines, like a cross. The vertical line represents the “nose to nose” energy. It is the capacity to be fully present in the moment, the capacity to face one another. Really looking at one another in relationship is intense, it’s sexy, nourishing, stimulating and romantic. The horizontal line represents the “shoulder to shoulder” energy. It is the capacity to sustain connection over time, by being thoughtful, responsible, and continuing to build trust. In living a good life together, and by sharing common values and goals, the small daily acts of care are nourishing in a different way. They are just as essential as the dizzy euphoria of the first phase of relationships. There is a cozy comfortableness that comes from a strongly established horizontal line.

A healthy relationship needs to be able to move back and forth between both aspects of intimacy. Couples often need to get out of the house, break routine, and get away from the kids to remember you are also lovers. And you must learn to work together as a team to accomplish your goals of having a safe, secure and sexual relationship.

The shift out of the early, intense, erotic phase to a more settled one is natural and necessary. Yet it can be unsettling and disillusioning for many people. Somewhere in that transition something dreadful happens to many couples. The shadow, the underbelly, the incomplete past each partner thought they had healed or outwitted, reappears in their lives with a vengeance. They have entered the realm of disillusionment and normal relationship conflicts.

The five losing strategies

Sadly, the majority of people enter relationships unequipped to face the continuing challenge of working through disillusionment and disconnection. In the moment when connection, in the face of disconnection is most needed, each partner becomes caught in unskilled, but predictable behaviours, which are hard-wired by evolution. Because we are not taught the skills required for true intimacy, when we’re triggered, we all react in fairly typical ways. All couples therapy models have their unique way of describing these patterns. Below are what Terry Real calls the “five losing strategies” of unskilled patterns:

• needing to be right
• controlling our partner
• uncontrolled/immoderate self-expression
• retaliation/revenge
• resignation/withdrawal

None of these losing strategies work. They create more misery and more disconnection.

Misery stabilizers and bad relationship “dance steps”

When disconnection and disillusionment occur, we often resort to using Terry Real’s “misery stabilizers”. A misery stabilizer is anything we turn to for comfort or stimulation. Instead of turning towards each other and facing our issues, partners turn away from or against each other. We use work, food, shopping, TV, alcohol/drugs, other people, affairs, exercise, over-involvement with children or pets, arguments and excessive use of the internet to manage our misery. We become miserable and get stuck in a cycle of shame, anger and depression instead of doing something about it. Taking action can be anything from reading about what relationship experts recommend, using self-help techniques, talking to a person you respect or seeking out a relationship expert.

We can now have many different types of relationships. Yet, according to Davis Buss, our cultural and sexual conditioning runs deep. For the most part, similar patterns occur in all relationships, whether they are same sex, non-binary, heterosexual relationships or monogamous, non-monogamous and polyamorous relationships.

The intimacy skills of self-soothing and emotion regulation, healthy introspection, communication and openness to listening without having to agree are foreign to many people. As a consequence, when most of us encounter disillusionment, rather than learning these much-needed intimacy skills, we may feel a deep, formless sense of betrayal. As a consequence, predictable patterns occur, like angry fighting, silent withdrawing, resigning ourselves to disappointment, resentfully complying and/or clinging desperately to the hope that our partner will change instead of changing ourselves.

Learning and practicing intimacy skills is the antidote to all of this. These skills provide us with the experience that when we modify our own reactions, we can respond more effectively. This can positively influence our relationship. Practicing these intimacy skills helps us to feel more adult and empowered in our life and relationship. As adults we learn to accept that we can’t change our partner, but we can influence them by changing ourselves. That’s very liberating!

Working a relationship – learning relationship skills

The first step begins with understanding that skills are needed for a healthy relationship. Falling in love is mostly about spontaneity. Staying in love demands skills. And skills must be learned and practiced deliberately. It takes regular, consistent and deliberate practice to become good at any skill.

Lack of relationship education in our culture means that many partners don’t work their relationships very well. Somehow the idea of “working a relationship” is a foreign concept. This idea seems daunting, and without realising that intimacy is a daily practice and using the required skills, the odds of success are slim. research shows that many couples break up too soon, before they’ve made a genuine effort to work on their relationship.

Do you remember when you first learnt to drive a car? Your instructor told you about, showed you and then coached you in using all the required skills, over and over until they became habitual. Now, as a mature driver, these skills have become automated and you’ve become skilled in their use. The same process applies to learning relationship skills.

The third phase of relationships – relationship practice, repair

So, what does it mean to learn and practice relational skills? And what does it mean to develop deep love and the ability to repair? What are the main challenges that we all face in relationships?

In reality, most of us have to cultivate the willingness to successfully repair when our relationship is in disharmony. Repair is a key intimacy practice skill, and most of us need help to learn new skills.

The five winning strategies

Terry Real teaches five essential new skills to help us build a successful relationship:

1. How to hold our self and our relationship in warm regard. This means developing healthy self-esteem.
2. How to speak – moderately and respectfully.
3. How to listen and respond – moderately and respectfully.
4. How to negotiate and manage conflict with the goal of developing a healthy relationship.
5. How to stay on course, independent of our partner’s response. It involves practicing being true to our own integrity and authentic selves with the aim of developing deeper intimacy and connection. This is called the process of differentiation.

1. Healthy self-esteem – This means holding our self and our relationship in warm regard despite our human imperfections and limitations. All of us are flawed human beings. It takes adult wisdom and differentiation skills to accept that neither we or our partner is perfect, and that life is imperfect.

Unhealthy self-esteem – Leads to shame or grandiosity. See if you can identify where you go on this grid when you use the losing strategies.

2. Speaking with self-awareness – This means identifying our own experience (by naming our thoughts, emotions, behaviours and desires) and speaking about them in a moderate and respectful way. Speaking respectfully involves avoiding criticising your partner, over sharing (hogging the conversation) or under sharing (withholding yourself).

Unhealthy self-awareness – Leads to being unhealthily introspective or being unwilling to introspect, acting out, dissociation, drivenness, perfectionism or avoidance of connection.

3. Listening and responding with healthy boundaries – This involvesbeing able to protect and contain our self while remaining connected to others. Identify where you go on this grid when you react with the losing strategies. Developing healthy boundaries helps us stay protected while remaining connected.

Unhealthy boundaries – Leads to either porous boundaries (being reactive, fragile, vulnerable) or being walled off with rigid boundaries (being disengaged, defensive, cut off).

4. Negotiating and managing conflict – This involves developing the awareness of our human interdependence. It means developing relational mindfulness by balancing our “me” and “we” needs. Doing so requires identifying our wants and needs, caring for our self and our partner, while also letting others care for us appropriately. Reciprocity is key. It involves knowing that good relationships are essential for a healthy life and learning to distinguish between a healthy relationship and an unhealthy relationship.

Unhealthy dependence – Leads to either unhealthy fighting or unhealthy conflict avoidance/lack of speaking up. Due to a lack of differentiation, this leads to either over-dependence (being overly needy and clingy) or anti-dependent (being unaware of needs and wants, or pretending to be invulnerable).

5. Staying on course using moderation– By developing differentiation, we honour our relationship as a life-long growth journey between equals. We learn to experience and name our thoughts, feelings and needs so we can express ourselves moderately and respectfully. It involves doing the work to become our “best self”, so we can behave according to our authentic values and integrity, while respecting and supporting our partner’s right to the same.

Unhealthy moderation – Leads to immoderate self-expression. This means being immature (too “loose”, over-expressing our self, over-sharing, nagging, yelling), or super mature (too “tight”, not expressing ourselves enough, withholding, stonewalling).

A team approach to intimacy

Practicing each of these five skills means having a relational approach, a team approach to intimacy as a daily practice. We turn towards each other and deal with the issues together, supporting each other in using a range of relationship skills. At the same time, we take responsibility for our own behaviours and reactions. It’s a whole new way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

These five skills help us practice a new vision of love. They transform intimacy from an ideal to a practical way of life, which means a daily practice of behaving differently towards yourself and each other.

Can you identify the behaviours you use to cope when you’re unhappy in your intimate relationship. To get help in developing intimacy as a daily practice, you may need an experienced relationship counsellor and coach. Call 0421 961 687 or email us to schedule an appointment. International callers should call +61 421 961 687.

Watch this interview where I discuss the research behind what makes a good psychotherapist.

You deserve the best trained relationship coaches if you’re planning to invest time and money in your relationship. If you’re not ready to book an appointment, call us on 0421 961 687 to book a FREE 15 minute phone consultation to discuss how we may be able to assist you.