Levels of Communication: From Formality to Intimacy

We meet, we communicate… Some relationships develop and become long-lasting and stable. Others fall apart. There are relationships that, over time, turn into empty formalities, even though they are maintained. And there are those we would love to preserve or even take to another level—but for some reason, it just doesn’t work out.

In some relationships, we might make a lot of mistakes and do foolish things—yet they endure, and we’re still happy to see each other. In others, there’s never been any drama, but they fade away. There are friends you haven’t seen for a year or two or three, but when you meet, it feels like you just finished your last conversation yesterday. And there are people with whom every conversation feels like an eternity has passed since you last spoke.

We can talk about different levels on which communication unfolds. The renowned psychotherapist D. Bugental, when discussing the establishment of trust, drew a simple diagram of these levels.

The Levels of Communication

At the very center, he placed intimacy—the type of communication that almost all of us consciously or unconsciously strive for. Sometimes we catch a fleeting moment of intimacy, quickly lost in the hustle of daily life. Some people never truly experience genuine closeness. Bugental explained that to reach a sense of intimacy with another person, we must first pass through four other levels, or circles, of communication.

1. Formal Communication

This is the type of communication we use when meeting someone new, trying to impress them with our social status (for example, “Head of the Department of Departmental Relations”). Two people meet and interact through masks, as social personas. According to Bugental, the key feature of formal communication is the desire to fully control oneself, to avoid saying too much or ending up in an awkward situation. Many are familiar with the awkwardness in newly formed groups. For example, four strangers meet in a train compartment and barely exchange ten words during the entire trip. They are still communicating, but it’s nonverbal and formal.

• “Hello. My name is Anna.”
• “I’m Victor. What do you do?”
• “I’m the deputy sales director at a company.”
• “Oh! I’m a loader.”

2. Maintaining Contact

This is also fairly reserved communication, used with people we see regularly but only discuss specific matters with. It feels awkward to pass by an acquaintance without saying, “Hi, how are you?” Here, we’re less concerned with our image than at the formal level, but the relationships are still impersonal. Ritual phrases (“Hot day today!”, “How’s it going?”, “All good”), ritual jokes… At this level, we interact with people we don’t want to cut off, but with whom we have no close relationship, nor do we seek one. “Likes” or reactions on social media are examples of this.

• “Hey, Andrey! How are you?”
• “Good! How’s the family?”
• “Great, sent the kids to camp.”
• “Ah, lucky you! Well, see you around.”

This “see you around” doesn’t actually mean you plan to meet. It simply acknowledges the other person’s significance, even if only symbolically. The maintaining contact level doesn’t aim for more than that.

3. Standard Communication

“Standard” means usual or expected. Standard communication is a balance between caring about your image and being involved in expressing your feelings and understanding the other person. This is the level at which we communicate with most friends, acquaintances, and relatives. We know what to expect from them, we share inside jokes and common topics. If someone suddenly behaves out of character, we get worried: “You seem different today”—meaning, not as expected.

However, there’s a “trap” in standard communication: it doesn’t involve real depth, just like the first two levels. Personal problems are discussed as routinely as anything else. Advice and comfort are given, often in clichéd phrases: “It’s all good,” “Pull yourself together,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “This too shall pass,” “Life has its ups and downs,” and so on. Sometimes these words are enough, but when you’re truly struggling, they can be irritating—just like anything standard and formulaic in non-standard situations. The same goes for romantic relationships: too much standardization can be harmful.

Standard communication is paradoxical. On one hand, it helps us feel connected and avoid loneliness. On the other, too much of it can lead to “loneliness in a crowd,” when someone says, “I know a lot of people, but I have no real friends.” This phrase expresses a longing for intimate, close communication. But intimacy is hard to achieve, because to move to that level, you must go through another circle—the “critical” or “crisis” level of communication.

4. Crisis Level Communication

A crisis is any situation of major change, whether for better or worse. Critical communication is when, after the conversation, both my perception of the other person and myself are changed. Afterward, I can’t see the person the same way. That’s the risk—because it’s unclear whether things will get better or worse.

The clearest example is confessing love when you’re unsure of the other’s feelings. It’s a crossing of a line: you can’t go back to how things were. A young man and woman are friends, but he starts to feel more than friendship. For a while, he pretends “nothing’s going on,” that “we’re just friends”—staying at the standard level. “What if I confess and it’s not mutual?” Of course, you can keep pretending, but that’s just an illusion to preserve the relationship. Communication may even drop to just maintaining contact.

Any honest conversation about real feelings, when masks come off and you talk about things you’ve avoided, is a form of crisis communication. Two people may play the roles of friends, spouses, or lovers, while feeling something entirely different. Unspoken feelings, significant figures in the relationship, will create tension until they’re revealed. The difficulty is that no one can guarantee the outcome. Clarity is what we seek, but it can be a destructive clarity.

Most examples of crisis communication are found in relationships between men and women: talking about infidelity, deciding on divorce, proposing marriage, announcing a pregnancy, and so on. But there are other examples: a conversation with your boss that leads to being fired; a crisis of faith and changing long-held beliefs; disappointment in someone, or conversely, gaining trust in them. Not every argument or quarrel is a crisis. If fights are routine in a family and don’t change how people see each other, that’s just standard communication. Compare a typical household argument with breaking dishes and makeup sex to a father discovering his son is a drug addict, and his wife has been hiding it and even helping the son out of “pity.” That’s a true crisis: lost trust in son and wife, a crisis of faith in oneself as a father, the collapse of the illusion of family well-being (“normal family”).

But only by overcoming the crisis level can we establish truly intimate relationships. In a crisis, we’re not concerned with our image; we express our real feelings and emotions, often very different from the image we and our loved ones have of us. Intimacy is possible only with genuine emotions, and crisis opens the way to them.

Don’t think of crisis communication as always catastrophic or destructive. But the awkwardness, shame, fear, anxiety, and embarrassment you feel when talking about things that really matter to you also indicate a crisis level. You present yourself without a mask, without armor.

5. Intimate Level Communication

Intimacy is not the same as sexuality; it means the ability to be maximally open, honest, and emotional. Sex can be formal (prostitution), a way to maintain contact (“marital duty”), a standard form (routine sex), or crisis (sexual violence; first sex with someone emotionally significant). Sex becomes intimate only when intimacy exists outside the bedroom as well. Confusing sexual experiences with intimacy often leads to people discovering, after the passion fades, that they are strangers. As one man put it, “After casual sex, I often feel awkward and try to leave or get rid of the woman who, just an hour ago, seemed so desirable and close.”

Intimacy sometimes means being able to sit together in silence. There’s no need to search for topics or feel alienated if you’re quiet. Just feeling the presence of a close person is enough.

Intimacy can only be mutual. It always involves vulnerability, because by opening up, you give up your usual social masks and roles. You can’t have intimate communication if one person is ready to open up and the other isn’t. The other person will close off, afraid of such honesty. And it’s hard to blame them for that.

It’s impossible to maintain intimacy all the time—it’s too emotionally demanding. But once you’ve experienced intimacy with someone, you can return to the standard level and later revisit intimacy without a crisis, because your mutual perception has already changed. The memory of intimacy can mean that, even after years apart, you can greet each other like old friends who never really parted.