Stage Five: Wholehearted Love
| Score | |
| 1.I recognize that my partner and I are separate people and that we have to accept each other for who we are. | ______ |
| 2.I’m almost always open to having difficult conversations about “us.” | ______ |
| 3.When we talk, I actively listen and seek to understand my partner’s point of view, even if I don’t fully agree with it. | ______ |
| 4.Silences between us aren’t filled with tension, nor do they necessarily indicate an issue between us. | ______ |
| 5.I’m comfortable being myself around my partner. | ______ |
| 6.My self-worth isn’t determined by my relationship. | ______ |
| 7.I acknowledge that I may have idealized love in the past, but now I see that love is more than passion, sex, and novelty. Love is also about kindness, companionship, and collaboration. | ______ |
| 8.I realize that our relationship will continue to ebb and flow. Someday we’ll have an argument again, but what matters is how we approach and handle the argument. | ______ |
| 9.We’ve had very tough times together, but I now see that we were able to build a stronger relationship from those experiences. | ______ |
| 10.I want to treat and respond to my partner with the best and most mature part of me. | ______ |
| 11.When we spend time apart, it doesn’t feel like a threat to the relationship. | ______ |
| 12.I’m not anxious when I don’t hear back from my partner right away. Instead, I feel connected and content when I see a returned call, text, or email. | ______ |
| 13.Our love is not a distraction from my work life or social life. | ______ |
| 14.I’m comfortable being with my partner around friends and going to social gatherings together. Sometimes we talk to different groups of people at the same event, which feels perfectly okay. | ______ |
| 15.My partner is always going to have certain behaviors that annoy me, but they don’t prevent me from appreciating the great partner I have in life. I’m now able to cope well with those small annoyances. | ______ |
| 16.When there’s an issue, I seek to understand how I contributed to it, rather than focus entirely on what my partner did wrong. | ______ |
| 17.We have a comfortable daily communication style, and we make each other laugh. | ______ |
| 18.I’ll introduce my partner to new things I like or find interesting, but I’m not offended if my partner isn’t as interested as I am (and vice versa). | ______ |
| 19.We are affectionate, maybe not as much as when we first started dating, but we regularly hold hands, kiss, and cuddle. | ______ |
| 20.We tell each other “I love you,” but we don’t feel obligated to do so. | ______ |
| TOTAL SCORE | ______ |
Results
Add up your total score for each section. Whichever section you have the highest score in represents the stage you are probably in. If you receive similar scores for more than one section, then you may be in between stages.
The next chapter will guide you through what to do now that you know which stage you’re in.
Can Each Person in a Couple Be in a Different Stage?
Remember, couples experience the stages individually; one person might be in The Merge while the other is in Doubt and Denial. Individuals themselves may fluctuate between stages close to one another. For example, people may go back and forth between the first two stages, fluctuating between rapture and denial because they’re reluctant to let go of the promise of perfect love. People who’ve reached the fifth stage can fall back into The Merge, and then go through the difficult power struggle stages before eventually getting back to Wholehearted Love.
Right now it is important for you to keep this discussion positive. If either of you feels resistant or tense while discussing your relationship stage, let it go for now. As you work your way through Love Skills, you will learn some new ways to talk and listen, so you can revisit this later on when you have learned more
