Stages of Intimacy

In this essay, the authors have noted the common awareness in our culture of the "staging phenomenon" in intimacy relationships ("the end of romance," "the seven-year itch") and concluded that it must be possible to outline a framework which describes the developmental processes of intimacy against the background of the partners' individual developmental issues. In this context, many symptoms or troubles in a relationship can be seen as predictable crisis or impasses in normal relationship development. Even the emergence of bitter "warfare," resolute withdrawal, reduced sexual desire within the intimate relationship, or the sudden awareness of a new sense of one's own sexuality outside the marriage is both predictable and explainable as the growth of intimacy. The developmental framework outlined is reminiscent of Erikson's stages of identity-development and, in fact, acknowledges that it is the interaction of two or more evolving Identity-configurations that generates the predictable unfolding of intimacy itself. Attention is focused on the sequencing of critical tasks and common complaints normative to the first and second stages of intimacy-development, and casework illustrates the use of this construct as an approach to marital therapy.