A good marriage makes everyone better: Thriving seeds ever-more-abundant thriving. You breed by breeding, but you breed your ideas with your good example, too.Photo by: Hamza Butt
So it doesn’t get lost, here’s the big news:
I can quantify love and marriage.
I can troubleshoot and optimize any social relationship – but so can anyone else who works my way.
What matters most in the pursuit of human thriving is that you and your best-beloved can work together to get better at being best-beloveds to each other: You can get better as a couple at being encoupled, better at best-beloving.
Better egoism through practical ontology. How cool is that?
So we looked at every potential DISC cross yesterday, even though many of those are unlikely as marriages. The active pursue the passive, the dominant lead the submissive – pins poke cushions – so most marriages, both better and worse, will be D or C men pursuing S or I women.
O, sweet mystery of life: At last I’ve found you! Green is the color of thriving, and those green marriages are full of love – and full of loved ones. Looked at that way, you can see the goldenrod as a sort of weediness – and the red as barren turf.
Urf.
Still, if I’m right about the relative amiability of DISC profiles, a distribution like this is going to fall out: Kind people make the people around them more kind, cruel people more cruel. This is obvious, of course. It is worth reporting only to make it that much harder to have affected to have pretended to have denied it.
As we saw last week, the ideal marriage, in the abstract, is Dsci/Sdic: Perfect lovers, perfect mates, perfect parents, perfect partners forever. They fit together in the way that all other organisms somehow manage to fit together without maps. Accordingly, they have the most and the best-raised children. When you hear people say, “You can’t fake good kids” – they’re talking about this couple.
But that’s a hard target to hit, and all of the D/S marriages are pretty good:
Much more green than goldenrod. That’s worth celebrating.
The general neighborhood of the ideal dysmarriage of Inferox (Cisd) to Fascinatox (Icds) is a different scene: A last-chance stand of weeds perishing in the drought:
That’s less than ideally accurate, though. Why? At the D and S corners of the DISC quadrant, submissive husbands and dominant wives are rare. They’re far more common in the C and I corners – not alone because mutual-reciprocity matters a lot less – so that world can be both larger and yet still somehow even more barren:
I don’t care about outliers, generally, since it’s the 99% rule that matters, not the 1% exception. But it pays us to look at marriages that should be outliers, but sadly are not in our current state of Ci Blindness.
So here are the Stick-It-Outs, C marries S. For all of these outlier marriages, “marries” implies dominance, so you can swap the sexes at will. Ayn Rand’s awful marriage (Ci marries Sd) is here. What makes these marriages durable, when they are? The Cautious break up by combat and the Sociable by reconciliation: Physical or emotional battery is love – both ways. As awful as this is, it can be very stable.
And here are the Cheating-Hearts, D marries I. She loves his money. He loves her tits. Both are fungible – and deflatable. One or both of the partners to these marriages could find it easy to stray – in fact or just in incessant fantasy. I always hope for the best, but that’s the stuff you’ve got to watch.
As we discussed yesterday, S marries S is Lesbian Bed Death. By contrast, D marries D suggests either continuous home improvement or simultaneous mutual homicide. Want more peace in the marriage – assuming it could ever exist? Either way y’all are trending – more work or more dominant-friction – get a bigger house.
But of crazy marriages big and small, who’s is the craziest of all? How about I marries I?
Does this really happen? Celebrity marriages – real attempted-romances and the kind affected for publicity or as camouflage. Does this happen in real life? I’m from Missouri…
On the other hand, C marries C is temporarily common. Social prominance in a Ci culture consists of demanding Ci displays. The “elite” marry the “elite” – and they’re almost all Ci’s.
Yikes! Reptilian, unilateral and aggressive displays emerging habitually from both sides of the marriage. And almost all of these couples are Ci marries Ci – people who only bring out the worst in each other when they are together and who are happiest when they are farthest apart – in physical space or emotional distance.
What do we call them?
Power Couples.
What kind of fools are we?
Fools no more, I should hope. I’m showing you who gets marriage better – and how to get marriage better.
What makes the weeds weedy? What makes the barren ground so barren? Aggressive displays.
What makes the green ever-greener? Affectionate displays.
Marriage dies by the snarl – by the snub, the scoff, the scowl, the dismissal, the rejection. A kitten came to you, daring to play, and you scatted it away with a snap of your lizard tail. That’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the great pretend-mystery for everyone lost in the weeds and the drought is this: “Why won’t that kitten come back for more abuse?”
Big duh, huh?
Here’s better news: If love dies from aggression, it thrives in the sunlight of reliable affection. Why does the word ‘reliable’ matter? How many times do you have to snap your tail before that kitten never comes near you again?
But when reliable affection meets, mates, marries and merges with reliable affection, the light of those two suns can be blinding. For the two of them, always – it can seem as if they can’t see anyone else. But for everyone around them, too. People can feel the warmth of that love – and they can see what they’re missing.
A good marriage makes everyone better: Thriving seeds ever-more-abundant thriving. You breed by breeding, but you breed your ideas with your good example, too.
And how cool is that?
