Do you want to engineer a happy marriage? He drives, she rides shotgun.

Reflecting on the empathy strategies undergirding all relationships discussed in Shyly’s delight, here is an extract from the book illuminating the best strategy I know of for building a happy marriage.

Take note: There is nothing wrong with Cautious or Incandescent people. You are what you are, and what you are is very useful and valuable – deployed appropriately. A Driven who is not in charge of something important to him will be disruptive – and eventually destructive. Sociables without direction will get a lot of schmoozing done, but not much else. Meanwhile, if you want something counted, organized or micro-managed, the Cautious person who will always become a tyrant in power will be a critical asset under Driven management. And nothing ever got sold a second time without the blinding enthusiasm of the Incandescents.

Each of those strategies is immensely valuable in a properly-organized business: Run by a Driven with Cautious research and development and accounting, executed by Sociables, with Incandescents handling the sales and marketing. That works, where a business run any other way will fail, either to bankruptcy or as a prison camp grinding its way ever-so-slowly to that same inevitable bankruptcy.

It’s easy to task-specialize in a business – and easy to fix staffing errors when you discover them. It’s not so easy in a family – nor should it be.

I want to talk about three different dualities, all of which make a difference in a marriage:

First you are male and female, and this is a natural condition, not a social construct. In a normal romantic relationship, the man will be dominant as a matter of biological necessity and of precedence of action and because a woman will yield to a man’s on-going dominance, but a man will not yield to a woman’s. She’s naturally more dominant than him? They will marry different people. He doesn’t have to be Conan the Barbarian, but they both have to see him as being more dominant than she is or they will not work as a couple.

This obliges each of them to don sex-specific DISC roles within the marriage, regardless of their pre-dispositions. He can be nothing but Cautious at work, but as the dominant partner in his marriage, he must be Driven at home. And even if she’s all the way Driven at work, she will be the more Sociable partner in the distribution of duties. Don’t be confused by details: He may look like the social butterfly to you, but it’s how their home life is structured – mostly where you can’t see it – that matters.

All of which leads us to the other two discriminations: We’re making a distinction between your DISC profile at work and your strategy for thriving at home. They will be different, with the man taking primary responsibility for the cultivation of the marriage, the home and the family, with the woman taking charge of the nurturance of that social machine.

And since either or both can be working outside of a safe and familiar DISC comfort zone, both need to be attuned to the meaning of inbound and outbound expressions. Inbound is the signal I received. Outbound is the signal I sent – the display I offered in greeting or response. An encounter, an interaction, a transaction, an on-going social or commercial relationship – all of these exist as the ping-ponging of inbound and outbound signals. You said what you said in words, but you also communicated your DISC pre-disposition – and so did everyone else.

Like this: Even if I am trying very hard to be Sociable, if you keep me waiting, my Driven impatience will start to show. Getting annoyed annoys the people around me to no good end, but it’s bad for me first and worst. If I can remind myself that my only job is to pursue my own values – and then actually get on with it – everybody wins, starting with me.

If I want to avoid the repulsion loop that results from my indulgence of my ineradicable dyspossibility, I have to take my impatience in hand, patiently explaining to it that everything will work out in due course – and probably not before – even if I choose to ruin it all with a futile, petulant display. There are always delays – to me it seems sometimes that the universe is composed entirely of needless, inexplicable delays – so before I get cranky about that, I make an effort to do something else instead.

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Shyly’s delight: Work, play and love like a Labrador.

Want a happy marriage? It’s easy. Whatever he is at work, at home the husband should manage his behavior as a Driven Sociable: A definite agenda with a focus on affection and enjoyment. And whatever she does outside the home, within it she should be a Sociable Driven: Affection and enjoyment in pursuit of valid and valuable goals.

He nurtures the relationship by his cultivation of it and she cultivates it with her nurturance. In the minivan of their family, he takes the driver’s seat and she rides shotgun. His job is to get them where they’re going, hers is to get them there alive and content. Each helps the other, but this division of responsibilities is not just hugely beneficial, it’s the only way a family can work happily.

There’s one other factor in here that no one ever thinks about: Time. Quality time? Quantity time? How about time enough to get the job done? There is no such thing as a quick hug. An embrace takes time to register to your body, but it takes time to take form in your mind, too. Everything of love – for everything you love – is expressed with commitment, attitude and effort over time. Not just the time it takes to hug, but the time it takes to hug each other that way every day – in every way you can think of – for fifty years and more.

That works and nothing else does. Doubt me? Go look at happy families – the couples you know with happy kids and grandkids. Happy families work out this way because this is the way human beings work. This is the way our constituent physical, mental and emotional components are made to work together. This is the way happy couples successfully stay together, and this is the way they raise bright, happy, productive children.

How did they get all that – the real version of ‘having it all’? By loving like Labradors, that’s how.