Dimensions of healthy courtship

12 Components to Healthy Courtship

• Courtship, when done in a healthy way, provides individuals an opportunity to learn how to handle intimacy appropriately.

• Courtship proceeds in a developmental pattern, meaning, it builds on itself.

So lets look at the 12 elements to healthy courtship:

Noticing: 

• This is the ability to notice attractive traits in others. 
• With an existing partner this means the ability to stay conscious of the desirable traits in that partner. 
• This dimension requires the capacity to filter out traits that, while desirable, are not a good match for you. 
• Put another way, noticing also means to be discriminating.
• Compulsively, some people don’t care what the other person looks like as long as sex is available.

Attraction: 

• This is the ability to feel attraction towards others and imagine acting on those feelings. This dimension assumes a functional arousal “map” in which you select behavior and persons appropriate for you. Attraction involves curiosity as well as desire about the physical, emotional, and intellectual traits of others. 
• In an existing relationship it means the ability to maintain openness to change and the unknown in the other. 
• In quality relationships the partner keep “discovering” the other. Attraction is where passion starts and how relationships endure.

Flirtation:

• Successful flirting uses playfulness, seductiveness, and social cues to send signals of interest and attraction to the desirable person. 
• This ability extends to noticing and accurately reading flirtation from others. 
• The compulsive person does not see flirting because it makes them vulnerable to rejection.
• The compulsive person sees flirtation everywhere because sex is their most important need.
• The critical factor in flirtation is in knowing when it is appropriate to send and receive. Settings, age groups, relationship status (single?), friend.
• Success in long-term relationships requires an ongoing flirtation with your partner.
• Everyone needs to know how to flirt.

Demonstration:

• This is when one demonstrates “prowess” (a physical trait, a skill, or a capability).Sexually, this is the classic “I will show you mine and you show me yours.”
• There is in fact a pleasure or eroticism in having a potential partner show interest in your sexuality. Behaviors here include demonstrating a skill such as in an athletic competition or in dressing to attract the other person or specifically doing sexual things to further the partner’s interest. 
• It is important to know that you are doing that and that you are being appropriate in the context and to the person.

Romance:

• The ability to experience, express, and receive passion. Romance assumes the ability to be aware of all the feelings of attraction, vulnerability, and risk. More importantly, a lover must be able to express them and have sufficient self worth to accept the expressions of care from a lover as true.
• Included in romance is the ability to test the reality of the feelings. Is what is perceived in the other person accurate or a projection of what you want it to be?
• Or are the people selected consistently bad choices for you?

Individuation:

• In the midst of the romance, healthy persons are able to be true to themselves. They feel absolutely free to be who they are. 
• They feel no fear of disapproval or control by the other. They tell the truth and do not feel intimidated. Nor do they have to “give” on important matters. 
• They can ask for needs to be met and they do not have to defer to the other. They trust that people care for them as they are.

Intimacy:

• As the exhilaration of early passion subsides partners enter the “attachment” phase where the relationship deepens in its meaning and integrity. 

• This means a level of profound vulnerability that is ongoing and is more difficult than the exhilaration of discovery during early romance.

• This is the “being known fully and staying anyway” part of relationships.

Touching:

• Physical touch requires trust, care, and judgment. Touching affirms the other but is respectful of timing, situation, and boundaries.

• Touching without permission or sexualizing the touch betrays trust.

• Touch can also be seductive and misleading. Touch can also be extraordinarily healing.

• With adults who were not touched or neglected as children, touch deprivation can be very extreme. People deprived of touch will sacrifice their judgment and their needs simply to be touched. Touching is therefore important and not to be taken lightly.

Foreplay:

• Sometimes referred to as the most important part of sexual contact, it is the expression of sexual passion without genital intercourse. 
• Holding, fondling, kissing, and sexual play builds sexual tension and is erotic and pleasurable. As a stage it includes the verbal expression of passion and meaning. 

In repeated surveys, most people say it is the best part of sex. It is often skipped over in our culture because of time pressure, stress and emphasis on genital sex as all of what sex is.

Intercourse:

• More than the exchange of body fluids, this is the ability to surrender oneself to passion, letting go and trusting yourself and your partner to be vulnerable.

• Intercourse, while extremely pleasurable, is also an index of how you are able to give up control. To give oneself over to passion requires a true abandonment of how things are supposed to turn out, ie, not a performance.

• Many people limit themselves or fail in arousal and/or orgasm simply out of trust and control issues.

Commitment:

• Commitment is about the ability to bond or attach to another.
• Some describe addiction as a failure to bond or not having the capacity to form a deep, meaningful relationship. 
• If someone matters enough, you honor the relationship by your fidelity to it. 
• Many addicts refer to the “black hole” they are searching to fill. This is it – being bonded in meaningful relationships including the non-sexual ones. 
• If you grew up in a family in which you learned not to count on others, you look for what you can count on. Alcohol, sex, drugs, and high risk always do what they promise, unlike people. 
• This “pathological” relationship with a mood altering behavior does not fill the void.

Renewal:

• The capacity must exist to sustain all the above dimensions in an existing relationship. 
• To be married does not mean you stop flirting or express passion. There is a difference between being attached to someone out of habit and being devoted because of the meaning that has evolved in your journey together. 
• Successful couples continue courtship, continue to show the other they are a good deal, continue to make efforts to attract their mate, and continue to express the value they have for each other. 
• If a relationship is not working, partners take responsibility to change it. If the relationship is not tenable, they leave.

Mike Quarress CSAT-S