9.4.1 Coming Together

Figure 9.1 Stages of Coming Together

Initiating During the initiating stage, you size up a person you’ve just met or noticed. You draw on all available visual information (physical attractiveness, body type, age, ethnicity, gender, clothing, posture) to determine whether you find him or her attractive. Your primary concern at this stage is to portray yourself in a positive light. You also ponder and present a greeting you deem appropriate. This greeting might be in person or online—more than 16 million people in the United States have used online dating sites to meet new partners (Heino, Ellison, & Gibbs, 2010).

Experimenting Once you’ve initiated an encounter with someone else (online or face-to-face), you enter the experimenting stage, during which you exchange demographic information (names, majors, where you grew up). You also engage in small talk—disclosing facts you and the other person consider relatively unimportant but that enable you to introduce yourselves in a safe and controlled fashion. As you share these details, you look for points of commonality on which you can base further interaction. Relationships at this stage are generally pleasant and “light.” This is the “casual dating” phase of romance. For better or worse, most involvements never progress beyond this stage. We go through life experimenting with many people but forming deeper connections with very few.

Intensifying Occasionally, you’ll progress beyond casual dating and find yourself experiencing strong feelings of attraction toward another person. When this happens, your verbal and nonverbal communication becomes increasingly intimate. During this intensifying stage, you and your partner begin to reveal previously withheld information, such as secrets about your past or important life dreams and goals. You may begin using informal forms of address or terms of endearment (“honey” versus “Joe”) and saying “we” more frequently. One particularly strong sign that your relationship is intensifying is the direct expression of commitment. You might do this verbally (“I think I’m falling for you”) or online by marking your profile as “in a relationship” rather than “single.” You may also spend more time in each other’s personal spaces, as well as begin physical expressions of affection, such as hand-holding, cuddling, or sexual activity.

Integrating During the integrating stage, your and your partner’s personalities seem to become one. This integration is reinforced through sexual activity and the exchange of belongings (items of clothing, music, photos, etc.). When you’ve integrated with a romantic partner, you cultivate attitudes, activities, and interests that clearly join you together as a couple—“our favorite movie,” “our song,” and “our favorite restaurant.” Friends, colleagues, and family members begin to treat you as a couple—for example, always inviting the two of you to parties or dinners. Not surprisingly, many people begin to struggle with the dialectical tension of connectedness versus autonomy at this stage. As a student of mine once told his partner when describing this stage, “I’m not me anymore, I’m us.”

Bonding The ultimate stage of coming together is bonding, a public ritual that announces to the world that you and your partner have made a commitment to one another. Bonding is something you’ll share with very few people—perhaps only one—during your lifetime. The most obvious example of bonding is marriage.