The Four Stages of Importance
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Matthew Hussey's second model ranks what actually matters in a relationship into four stages of importance: admiration, connection and chemistry, commitment, and compatibility. Each earlier stage is necessary but not important — admiration is one-sided, chemistry is mutual but has ruined plenty of lives, and even a mutual yes doesn't survive misaligned values. Compatibility is where the weight sits: do you want the same kind of life, and do your definitions of things like loyalty and kindness actually match? The practical use of the model is to stop over-weighting an early stage. People lose their value in dating by martyring themselves for stage two — the connection — and accepting poor treatment because the highs feel extraordinary. Grading each relationship against the four stages keeps your attention on the level of importance appropriate to where you actually are.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Stage one — admiration
Notice that you can admire someone up close or from afar. It's necessary, but it's one-directional: it only tells you this person seems impressive or attractive.
Pro tip Name it out loud as admiration so you don't inflate it into something mutual.
- 2
Stage two — connection and chemistry
Now it becomes mutual: there's something between you, not just you admiring them. Slightly more important, but still not the thing to build decisions on.
Watch out Hussey points out how many people have ruined their lives over chemistry with someone who was a terrible partner and a terrible person to base decisions on.
- 3
Stage three — commitment
Both people actually say yes to each other. Test for a real yes, not a scheduling yes — 'I'd like to see you this Friday at 11:00' is not a yes to a relationship.
Pro tip If you're stuck at stage two, ask whether the other person has ever actually said yes to anything beyond the next meeting.
Watch out Many people treat a stage-two situation as if it carried total importance, and act as though commitment exists when it doesn't.
- 4
Stage four — compatibility
Ask whether you want the same kind of life and whether your values line up in practice — nights in versus constant travel, drinking and drugs versus not, and especially what each of you means by loyalty.
Pro tip Two people can both say they value kindness and hold completely different standards for what kindness means. Compare definitions, not labels.
Watch out Love does not conquer all — without compatibility, a genuine mutual yes still produces two miserable people.
- 5
Weight each stage correctly
Audit where a given relationship actually sits and give it only the importance that stage deserves. Losing your value in dating happens when you stop paying attention to the appropriate level of importance at different stages.
Pro tip If you find yourself defending a situation with 'you don't understand, when we're together it's amazing', you're over-weighting stage two.
In the wild
Hussey's example of a stage-four failure: your idea of loyalty is that I don't have sex with anyone else; my idea of loyalty is that you don't emotionally cheat in the texts you send. Both people have said yes to each other. There's admiration, connection, commitment — and one partner is quietly miserable, not because anyone broke a rule, but because the two of you were never running the same rulebook.
→ The incompatibility surfaces as ongoing misery despite genuine commitment, showing why stage four carries the most weight.
Hussey says he deals with people every day who have admiration and chemistry with someone who has never actually committed. The other person isn't saying yes to a relationship; they're saying 'yeah, I'd like to see you this Friday at 11:00.' Applying the model, a reader in this position grades the situation honestly as stage two, stops treating it as total importance, and either asks for a real yes or withdraws the value they'd been giving for free.
→ The situation gets named accurately, so effort is matched to the stage instead of being spent on a relationship that doesn't exist yet.
Common mistakes
Martyring yourself for stage two
Treating 'I found someone I have a connection with' as the be-all end-all makes you the person who spends a lifetime accepting poor treatment because every time you're together it's amazing. It also destroys perceived challenge, because your value now costs nothing.
Reading a schedule as a commitment
Someone offering time is not the same as someone saying yes. Confusing the two lets people behave as if they're in a committed relationship with a person who has never agreed to one.
Assuming shared words mean shared standards
Both partners saying they value kindness or loyalty proves nothing until you compare what each of you actually means by it. The gap only shows up later, in ways that make both of you miserable.
From the transcript
“And in any relationship you have to go through four for in terms of importance you have to go through four stages.”
“Love does not conquer all.”
“we lose our value in dating when we stop paying attention to the appropriate level of importance at different stages.”
From the episode
The Difference Between Healthy and Toxic Relationships