Choice Theory (15 page)

Unlike power, this difference can usually be addressed in the solving circle. In the circle, the partner with the high need for freedom has to tell what concessions he or she is willing to make. Simply by agreeing to accept some restrictions to freedom to please the partner with the low need for freedom, the partner with the high need can ensure that the negotiation will have a happy ending. Just the willingness of the high-freedom partner to call home if he or she is going to be late will make a big difference. If in their frustration they reject each other, they have no chance.

If both partners have a high need for freedom, the marriage may or may not work. It will work if each can accept the freedom the other wants. To do so, both partners must get into the solving circle and tell each other what freedom they are willing to give up. A blank check for freedom can’t work in any marriage unless there is a lot of love and belonging to make up for the times the partners are not together, and even then it is very difficult. Marriage is not a situation in which there can be anywhere near total freedom. This is a difficult test of the solving circle, but mutual high-freedom needs will constantly challenge any marriage.

Today, as many couples live together before marriage, this incompatibility may surface before they take the legal step, and that is the time to use the circle—maybe here it should be called the
premarital solving circle.
If a couple finds out after they marry that they both have a high need for freedom, they will divorce or just leave without getting a divorce. Unlike a mutual high need for power, a couple can’t unite for increased freedom. Shared freedorn
for two high-freedom people is an oxymoron. For these reasons, the solving circle makes no sense for high-freedom people. They don’t want to be in a circle with anyone; to them any circle may seem like a prison.

Sharing a high need for fun is excellent for every relationship, especially a marriage. If fun is the genetic reward for learning, then partners who learn together have the best chance to stay together. Fun is almost never limited by age, sex, or the lack of money. With a minimal effort, you can laugh and learn anytime, anywhere. But fun is not critical to a relationship. Partners can learn to enjoy themselves independently and not hurt the marriage, and they often do. If both partners have a low need for fun, neither will ever know what he or she is missing, and things may work out fine. I don’t think the need for fun, strong, weak, or equal, makes or breaks a marriage if all else is compatible.

Therefore, the best marriages share an average need for survival, a high need for love and belonging, low needs for power and freedom, and a high need for fun. Any deviation from this not-too-frequent pattern will need to be negotiated. The greater the difference, the more negotiation. What this information gives you, whether you are already married or looking, is a clear picture of where there may be trouble. Armed with this information, couples who want a better marriage will use the circle to negotiate. Unsatisfying marriage is, by far, the most frequent cause of human misery. As a friend of mine said years ago when we discussed the value of negotiation in marriage, “Consider the alternative.”

If you agree with what I have just explained, you are wondering, How do I assess the strength of my needs and the needs of my partner? I have given a lot of thought to this question, and I don’t believe it can be done by any simplistic paper-and-pencil self-test like a questionnaire. The questions have to be asked by each individual on the basis of what the person knows about himself or herself and what he or she can assess in the other. Basically, it is an assessment of quality worlds, yours and your mate’s.

By the time you are ready to marry or remarry, you have already had some relationships. Since you were a teenager, you
have been looking for Ms. or Mr. Right. It is impossible to have a relationship and not evaluate it against some ideal relationship that has been forming in your quality world for years. But if you are an external control person, the heart of that ideal relationship is what the other can do for you. Having this other-centered relationship as the ideal leaves you unprepared to find what you really need—a relationship that is based on what each partner can do for the other. O. Henry’s short story, “The Gift of the Magi,” depicts both the sadness and the joy of choice theory love.

To help you create this
right
person in your quality world, you have observed your family and friends, read books, and seen movies and television shows. And during your teenage years, especially if you are a woman, you talked endlessly with your friends about why this boy and that girl were or were not right for each other. On the basis of all this information, you should be able to see where you stand in comparison with others in many of the things you thought or talked about.

Because your basic needs underlie almost all you do and think about, much of your talk has centered on these needs. You may not have come right out and used these words, but you have talked a lot about love, power, and freedom. You have done so because you have seen, and even experienced, that when there are differences in these needs, things are difficult. If you are a woman, you have talked about the fact that all some guys want is sex when you want love, how some of them want to own you (power), and how the guys always want to go off with other guys (freedom). You have done a lot of thinking about relationships in these terms. Driven by a more intense need for power than women, most men rarely talk to each other this way.

If you have found that you are less willing to take risks than most people, you have a high need for survival. If you have about the same willingness as most people you know, you have an average need, and if you are willing to take more risks than most of your friends, you have a low need. The same goes for love and belonging. The key to assessing the strength of your need for love and belonging is how much you are willing to give, not take, compared
to your family members and friends. Be careful with this need; look hard before you leap into a loveless marriage. Don’t confuse sex with love. Pay attention to belonging. As I said in chapter z, don’t marry someone you would not be friends with if there was no sex between you.

To assess the strength of your need for power, ask yourself if you always want to have your own way, to have the last word, to own people, and to be seen as right in most of what you do or say. If you do, you have a high need for power. If you don’t care that much about having your own way, don’t want to own anyone, and won’t often fight for the last word, you have a low need for power. If you care somewhat, you probably have an average need for power.

If you can’t stand the idea of following rules, conforming, or even staying in one place or with one group of people very long, you have a high need for freedom. If you are a little this way, you have an average need. If it doesn’t bother you to conform, you have a low need for freedom. And the same goes for fun. If you enjoy learning and laugh a lot when you do, you have a high need for fun; if you enjoy teaching a class that tends to laugh at what you do and with each other, you have an even higher need. A little less enjoyment of learning and laughing make you a person with an average need for fun. But if you really don’t want to make much effort to learn and you depend on others for enjoyment, you have a low need for fun. If you hardly ever laugh when others are laughing and are not much interested in finding out more than you know now, you have a very low need for fun.

Another way to assess your needs is to take a look at your quality world. If you and your partner or prospective partner trust each other enough to share your quality worlds, there is a good chance you love each other. As you assess your own quality worlds (separately or together), look for the following: If your quality world is filled with people you get along well with, you have a high need for love and belonging and are a happy person because you have been able to satisfy this need. If your quality world has just a few people, but you are very close to them, you
may have a high desire for love but a lower desire for belonging.

If you have a lot of people in your quality world but are not close to any of them, you may have a high desire for belonging but a lesser desire for love. And if you have only a few people in your quality world and are not close to any of them, you have a low need for both love and belonging. This does not mean that you have no need, but it may mean that you have a lower need than does your mate. If your desire is more in the area of belonging and less in the area of personal closeness, this could be a problem.

As I have already explained, use this information to negotiate and use the solving circle as a vehicle for negotiation. As long as you can stay in the circle and accept that you can control only your own behavior, you can negotiate almost anything. If you are able to see the rationale of choice theory, you understand that there is no sense blaming the other partner because that is the way he or she is. It’s like blaming the other partner for not being tall enough or being allergic to seafood. Working together to become aware of your need strengths can give you information you can both use. If you are willing to use it for the sake of the relationship, you will get closer to each other just by starting this assessment. Most people are not
that
incompatible. The solution is as much in what you are willing to try to do as it is in actually doing that much. A small compromise sends the message,
I care more about our relationship than I do about what I want personally.
This is a powerful message.

I have described some simple and obvious parameters of need strengths. In any individual instance, you may vary from what I have described and be high or low for another reason. I can’t go through all the possible variations. That is a task for you. Take your time, discuss it with people who know you, try to be open-minded, and you should be able to do it well. Remember your feelings and how good you feel when your needs are satisfied. The better you feel, the stronger the need. It doesn’t take much to satisfy a weak need. Base your assessment on total behaviors that felt good, and your profile will be reasonably accurate.

If you are beginning a relationship and it seems as if it could
get serious, you may think of making a compatibility assessment before the other person’s picture is so strongly in your quality world that you have little chance to see him or her as he or she actually is. Even if the person is already too much in your quality world for accuracy, doing so is still better than doing nothing. Try to assess him or her in the same way you have assessed yourself. If you see a problem, talk about it while you are very attracted to each other. Your assessments may be biased by your love, but your love will make you more willing to compromise at this stage than at any other time and well before you have used so many controlling behaviors on each other that negotiation is impossible.

Try to make sure that you do not let good sex or the desire for good sex become too much a factor in making this initial assessment. If, however, sex is not good or the desire for sex is not strong, you can be assured that this situation is unlikely to change for the better. Sex in the beginning of a relationship, before you have learned things you don’t like about each other, while you are firmly in the circle, is about as good as it is going to get. In a good relationship, it may lessen in frequency but will stay satisfying. If sex starts out good and gets bad, it is not sex but the relationship that has gone downhill.

If your relationship is not going as well as you would like, but you think that assessing the strength of the needs is too difficult, inaccurate, or not worth the effort, you are throwing away an important opportunity to know yourself. After you are married and the dissatisfaction with your partner begins, there are not many opportunities to help the marriage that both partners are willing to try. This is a golden opportunity—use it. If you depend on the widespread lover’s delusion, With my love he or she will change, you have little chance to help yourself. This delusion is external control to the maximum. If things are not good in the beginning, they are very likely to change—but not for the better.

Here is what I promised earlier, the two personalities that are totally incompatible for marriage with anyone. Marrying a person with either personality will result in nothing but misery. There are no silver linings in these two clouds. If you are not yet married but
suspect that the person you are involved with has either type of personality, run as soon and as fast as you can. Start packing your bags as soon as you read this section. Don’t wait to finish this book.

If you are married when you discover that your partner has one of these personalities, realize that no matter how bad the relationship is now, it is guaranteed to get worse. Begin now to think of what you can do to extricate yourself. With this kind of a person, man or woman, whatever you are feeling now, you are well off compared to how you are going to feel later. But I don’t have to tell you that your relationship is bad; you already know it. What I explain here is
why
it’s bad.

The
sociopath
seems to care only about power and personal freedom and has no real consideration for the needs of anyone else. Most sociopaths are men because genetically men have a lower need for love and belonging and a higher need for power than do women.

The survival need of a sociopath is below average, but he has enough of a need to survive that he can concentrate on what he is doing for short periods. What is characteristic about him is that his need for love and belonging is almost nonexistent, while his need for freedom is high. He is always on the move trying to satisfy his need for power and doing so at the expense of anyone he can cheat, swindle, or steal from. His need for fun may vary, but if he has a high need for it, he will enjoy learning all the ways he can exploit you and everyone else he meets. He also enjoys putting you down, no matter how competent you are. The only person he sees as competent is himself. In the beginning, sociopaths may be exciting because they are so active and full of charm that they get things going. But because of their low need for survival, most have little follow-through. Life may be miserable around them, but it isn’t dull.