If you wished to have a really great relationship, what would be required to create it?

Gary Douglas, best-selling author and founder of Access Consciousness™, has some deceptively simple ingredients that just might enable you to bake a relationship cake that’s not like many that have been seen on earth before.

Douglas has worked with thousands of couples worldwide and has observed the truth of psychologists’ observation that most people would rather have a bad relationship than no relationship. A survivor of two marriages himself, he is interested in allowing his clients to become aware of the choices they have available.

Douglas’s latest book is Divorceless Relationships, the target of which is facilitating people to create relationships in which both people become more themselves, rather than one or both having to divorce themselves in order to maintain the relationship.

He is also co-author with his business partner, Dr. Dain Heer, of Sex Is Not A Four Letter Word But Relationships Often Times Is.

Are you ready to try a new recipe? Here are Douglas’s magical ingredients to intimacy, together with a short explanation of how find them.

The five components of an intimate relationship are:

1. Allowance
2. Honor
3. Gratitude
4. Trust
5. Vulnerability.

Allowance means everything your partner does it just an interesting point of view. It’s not subject to your evaluation or judgment or criticism or revision, and it’s not a reflection on you. It is also not significant or important—it’s just their way of looking at the world in this particular moment.

Honor means to treat with regard. You don’t “diss” your partner, you don’t criticize or insult or judge him or her. You treat them with a value equal to yourself at all times.

Gratitude includes being grateful to your partner for showing up in your life, whatever that looks like and whatever they’re doing. If you’re judging them or thinking they should be different—that’s judgment, not gratitude. True gratitude has no room in it for judgment.

Trust is to know that the other person is going to do and be what they’re going to do and be, until and unless they decide to change. Trust requires looking at who the person really is—not who you wish they would be.

Trust is not blind faith. Blind faith is “I know everything will turn out all right” because you want it to. That is not trust! Trust is the alcoholic will drink until she decides to quit, the philanderer will philander until he decides not to.

Vulnerability has been described as being like the open wound. It can be excruciating when the air blows over it. Without vulnerability, however, you have to have barriers and defenses up which keep your partner from knowing you. This can create a loneliness greater than not having a relationship at all. Without being vulnerable, you cannot receive the gifts and love and support your partner could be offering.

You will notice there are also a couple of usually taken-for-granted ingredients missing from this recipe—love and copulation. There is a reason about why they are specifically NOT included in this unusual cake.

Douglas uses gratitude instead of love, and recommends those interested in a tasty relationship cake use it as well. One reason for this is that there are so many definitions of love. The chances that two people using the word mean anywhere near the same thing are infinitesimally small.

A second reason Douglas discourages the use of the word and concept of love is that he has found it always includes judgment. “But what about unconditional love?” the spiritual types always ask.

How long does what is proclaimed to be unconditional love really last? Usually only until the other person says or does something you don’t like, or doesn’t do something you demand. At that point your “love” tends to become very conditional indeed.

The second commonly purchased ingredient that is not included in Douglas’s recipe is what he calls copulation—putting the body parts together. Putting the body parts together is not intimacy in Douglas’s opinion. It’s just putting the body parts together.

Douglas’s points of view on copulation itself are equally unconventional—but that’s a story for another day. If you would like to check them out, then Sex Is Not A Four Letter Word But Relationships Often Times Is may have what you’re looking for.

There’s one more little piece of information you require to mix these ingredients into a really yummy relationship cake—you have to have all of these ingredients of intimacy for yourself first.

Are you ready to start cooking?

Douglas also recently facilitated a class on Divorceless Relationships .

You can also enjoy A Taste of “Getting the Sex You Deserve & the Relationship You Desire” facilitated by Gary Douglas and Dr Dain Heer on Access Consciousness Youtube Channel.