The Four Stages of Relationship Importance
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Hussey ranks what actually matters in a relationship into four ascending stages of importance: admiration, connection/chemistry, commitment, and compatibility. Admiration is necessary but not important — it's just you rating someone's stats from a distance. Chemistry is more important because it's mutual, but people have ruined their lives over chemistry with a terrible partner. Commitment is a real yes to an actual relationship, not a slot on Friday at eleven. Compatibility — shared definitions of a good life, of loyalty, of kindness — is the highest stage, and its absence makes two committed people miserable. The framework's power is diagnostic: most dating pain comes from assigning total importance to a stage that only carries partial importance, which is exactly when your own value collapses.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name stage one: admiration
Recognise when you're simply admiring someone's stats — how charming, charismatic, successful or impressive they are. None of that exists in relation to you, and none of it predicts whether they'll be loyal, reliable or a good teammate.
Watch out Admiration is necessary but the least important stage; treating it as decisive is how people fall for résumés.
- 2
Check stage two: mutual connection and chemistry
Confirm whether there is something between you rather than something you feel about them. This is more important than admiration because it's mutual — but it is still not the thing to build a life on.
Watch out This is the stage people martyr themselves for: 'you don't understand, when we're together it's amazing' — while not hearing from them for two weeks.
- 3
Demand stage three: an actual yes
Commitment means both people saying yes to a relationship. Someone offering you Friday at eleven o'clock is not saying yes. Establish whether a real yes exists before treating the situation as a relationship.
Pro tip If you can't point to the moment they said yes to the relationship, you're still at stage two.
- 4
Test stage four: compatibility
Ask whether you want to live the same kind of life and whether your values genuinely line up — travel versus home, drinking versus not, and especially your working definitions of loyalty and kindness. Two people can both say they value kindness and mean very different things.
Pro tip Get explicit about definitions: what does loyalty include, emotionally as well as physically?
Watch out Love does not conquer all — incompatibility will surface in ways that make both of you miserable even with total commitment.
- 5
Re-weight your attention to protect your value
Audit which stage you're currently treating as the be-all and end-all, then re-assign importance correctly. When you over-value an early stage, what you're willing to give stops having a price, your perceived challenge drops, and respect goes with it.
Watch out Losing perceived challenge doesn't just cost you respect — it costs you real value in the other person's eyes.
In the wild
Two people have all three lower stages: genuine admiration, real chemistry, and a mutual yes to a relationship. It looks like everything. Then the definitions diverge. One person's idea of loyalty is not sleeping with anyone else; the other's is not emotionally cheating in the texts they send. Nobody is lying and nobody has broken their own rule, yet one of them is quietly miserable. Hussey's point is that admiration, connection and commitment did nothing to prevent it — only stage four, compatibility, could have.
→ A committed couple discovers that mismatched definitions of loyalty produce ongoing misery that love and commitment cannot resolve.
Someone tells Hussey the connection is incredible — the sex, the conversations, how present the person is when they're together. Then: 'I haven't heard from them in two weeks.' But Matt, you don't understand, the connection is incredible. Hussey's diagnosis is that they've miscalculated the value of stage two and are treating a mutual spark as if it carried total importance. The consequence isn't just a bad relationship; it's that the other person learns this person's value is free and requires nothing to be earned.
→ Perceived challenge collapses, respect follows, and the person accepts poor treatment indefinitely.
Common mistakes
Mistaking a slot in their calendar for a yes
Being offered Friday at eleven is not commitment. People treat recurring availability as though the relationship question has been answered, then build years on a yes that was never given.
Assuming love conquers all
Two people saying yes to each other does not make a long-term relationship. Without compatibility, commitment simply locks both people into a life neither of them wants.
Judging by stats, not by relationship fit
How charming, successful or impressive someone is describes them, not their relation to you. None of those metrics tell you whether they'll be loyal, reliable or a good teammate.
From the transcript
“in any relationship you have to go through for for in terms of importance you have to go through four stages one is admiration”
“love conquers all love does not conquer all two people saying yes to each other doesn't make for a long-term relationship”
“we lose our value in dating when we stop paying attention to the appropriate level of importance at different stages”
From the episode
Bonus Episode - The Science of Attraction: Why You’ve Not Met Someone - Matthew Hussey
Matthew Hussey