The Five Stages of Initial Courtship

In the interest of science, intrepid researchers have braved the wilds of contemporary American male-female interaction to document courtship rituals. That’s right, with complete disregard to their own personal well-being they spent countless hours in prime habitat to observe such behavior – bars and cocktail lounges.

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If you’re going to have to do research, this probably isn’t the worst straw to draw.

The findings are interesting. They repeatedly identified 5 stages of interaction that a couple go through as they develop a relationship in such a situation. See if this makes sense to you and fits in with your experience.

You’ll note as we go through the stages that non-verbal body language figures strongly.

The first phase is attention getting. Both men and women tend to establish a territory and then engage in a number of behaviors to attract attention to themselves.

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The next stage is recognition. You may be familiar with it as a flirtatious glance. At this stage, two people acknowledge each other by making brief eye contact. They might repeat brief eye contact, perhaps accompanied by other positive bits of body language.

The next stage is the initiation of conversation. Although words are involved, non-verbal cues remains the most important. Leaning in and smiling: good; looking away and frowning: bad. This stage is probably the riskiest in terms of the ongoing courtship ending vs moving forward.

If things go well, the fourth stage is the intention phase. This phase involves engaging more directly and moving in more closely. The end of this stage is often a light, casual, non-threatening touch. If this is well received, the interaction continues to the fifth phase.

The final stage our valiant researchers recognized is synchrony. In this stage, the couple gradually, almost imperceptibility shift position until they becomes aligned and their bodies are face to face. They may even begin to move in tandem. NLP types may recognize this as “matching-and-mirroring”, only it’s automatic and unconscious.

Where it goes from there remains a question. Apparently our researches due the line at making some observations, or at least reporting on them.

One interesting point is that although men often perceive themselves as initiating contact and flirtation, most often men were responding to subtle cues initiated by the woman. Rather than the man initiating the courtship sequence, the woman most often does, but a transfer of initiation from the woman to the man evolves. This usually happens at the initiation phase. As this happens the man places himself at risk for rejection when he responds, but that’s another story.