Choice Theory (14 page)

Once you have this information, you can focus on where you are different and stop criticizing and blaming each other in areas of the marriage where you are actually compatible. If I want more freedom than you are willing to let me have, we can negotiate that difference and not exaggerate it into blaming me for not being loving enough. The love part may be fine. It is foolish to link it to the disagreement over freedom. As long as the differences in the need strengths are not too extreme, they may not do serious harm to a marriage. It is how you deal with those differences that counts. You always have a chance for success with choice theory. But if you use controlling and coercing, the differences will remain, the effort to change the other will magnify them, and you will find yourself arguing over unimportant issues that you wouldn’t even think about if you used choice theory.

During our long marriage, my first wife and I had one conflicting need strength that gave us some difficulty. But when we both learned choice theory and started using it in our marriage, we were able to work out where we differed. For me, freedom is a very strong need; for her, it was no more than average. When we discovered this incompatibility and negotiated it, we got along much better. After my wife died, I married an instructor in my organization who also teaches choice theory; however, before Carleen and I were married, we checked the strength of our needs and found we were highly compatible. We also agreed to use choice theory with each other from the start. So far we have had a very happy relationship, and it seems to get better as the years go by.

Since we are dealing with a normal distribution, the odds are against people marrying whose need strengths are so incompatible that the marriage is in immediate danger. But the odds against a perfectly compatible marriage are also small. What a couple, or at least one partner, can learn from the need strengths is to pinpoint any difficulty as soon as it is recognized and then use choice theory to do something about it.

To illustrate what I am talking about, look at how a difference in the need to survive can cause problems in an otherwise good marriage. Even a moderate variation in the strength of this clear-cut need can cause trouble. A common problem is that one partner’s lifestyle is more conservative than the other’s, usually because of a difference in the strength of the need to survive. For example, one is a saver, the other a spender. That combination does not augur well for the marriage unless the couple recognizes this difference early and sets up a plan to negotiate when trouble arises.

Assume the usual case, that there is enough money but no surplus. When the less conservative one wants to spend, the other says it’s not necessary. If each is dedicated to fighting over this disagreement, they will have an argument every time and will soon escalate the argument into the personal,
You don’t love me anymore,
which they will then use to blame the other for every difference, large and small, they have. As long as they argue, there can be no resolution. If their need for power is about the same, neither will give in, and in time both will harden their positions. Without knowing what they are doing, they are trying the impossible: to change the other’s genes. All they can negotiate is a compromise. Choice theory is the way to compromise; fighting, arguing, and trying to control are the paths to increased conflict.

A good way to use choice theory to solve marital problems is to start by agreeing to picture your marriage (or other relationship)
inside a large circle I call the solving circle. It helps to draw an imaginary circle on the floor. Then both you and your spouse take chairs and enter the circle. There are three entities in the solving circle: the wife, the husband, and the marriage itself. Recognize that you both have strong positions based on the differences in the strength of your needs, but these positions are not so strong that you are unwilling to enter the solving circle. What you are agreeing to when you enter the circle is that the marriage takes precedence over what each of you wants as individuals. Both of you also know choice theory. You know that if you try to force the other, it is likely that the weaker person will be pushed out or will decide to step out of the circle. Unless both of you are in the circle, you cannot negotiate; all you can do is argue.

The reason you have moved into the circle is that during the time one or both partners are outside the circle, a marriage problem cannot be solved. The marriage has suffered a wound and is bleeding. The wound is not fatal, but it will continue to bleed as long as one or both of you are outside the circle. This is how most marriages end, slowly bleeding to death, one or the other unwilling to step back into the circle. A more severe wound, often fatal, would be if they were so dissatisfied that both stepped out; that wound would indicate that the marriage is hemorrhaging and will soon be dead.

A couple who knows choice theory will not try to make the other do what he or she does not want to do. When they step into the solving circle, they agree not to wound their marriage. No matter how serious the disagreement, they must stay in the circle and negotiate this difference. They would start by one saying and the other agreeing,
We have a disagreement over money. It may be based on the fact that one of us has a much stronger survival need than the other. But that difference does not mean we can’t negotiate. We both know that arguing and blaming will do no good. We need to stay in the circle, talk, and find out how much each of us is willing to give to avoid wounding or killing the marriage.

In the circle, each tells the other what he or she will agree to do
that will help the marriage. Within those limits, they must reach a compromise. At times, one may give in completely, but, realistically, a compromise is usually necessary. One may say,
I
will agree to your spending this much. It is more than I want to see spent, but it is my attempt to reach a compromise.
The other may say,
I will cut my spending more than I want to, but this is as low as I will go.
If both agree on what is acceptable, the negotiation has succeeded; the marriage has taken precedence over individual wants.

If no compromise can be reached in this first attempt, one or both must be willing to say,
What I want right now is more important to me than this marriage. I am going to step out of the circle now, but I am willing to try again tomorrow.
This is a test. If they give themselves a night or even several nights to think this over, the next time they get into the circle, both should be ready to say,
It is more important that we stay in this circle than that we spend or save any amount of money.
As long as they both know they are willing to do it, disagreements will surface but then fade away. The awareness that this circle is there to use and that both will agree to use it does the job. This simple vehicle can give any marriage a chance. If one or both stays outside the circle, external control takes over and soon dismantles the marriage.

From survival, let’s move on to disparities in the strength of the need for love and belonging. It is important to understand that the strength of this need is measured by how much we are willing to give, not by how much we are willing to receive. Most of us would like more love than is usually available. There may be significant differences in the strength of this need, and a difference here can be more serious than a difference in the strength of the need to survive (such as over money). But no matter how much we want, we have to learn that we can’t get any more than our partner is able to give. We can’t give any more love than the amount that is written in our genes, but in the vast majority of marriages that’s enough.

If I am to get all that my wife is capable of giving, my best
chance is to try to give her as much as I can. Here, even a little holding back can cause great difficulty. In conflicted marriages, holding back love is a common punishing behavior. A controlling husband sees his wife paying attention to a man at a party and asks her, “Why don’t you treat me that way?” She thinks, If you would stop trying to make me over, maybe I would. The other man got the attention because in that social situation, it never occurred to either the man or the woman to be controlling. The husband may not know how much love his wife is capable of giving, but what he wants is well within her ability. He is right to assume she’s holding back. What’s wrong is that an accusation is unlikely to persuade her to give him more and probably will result in her giving even less. As they are, both are not even close to being in the circle.

Beware of confusing love and sex. A strong sex drive is not indicative of a strong need for love and belonging; hormonal sex is related to the species’ need to survive. Early in any marriage, a strong sex drive may have little to do with love and belonging. The test for love and belonging is not early sex but a continuous interest in sex and ongoing attempts to please the other as much as or more than to satisfy oneself. When sex starts to wane early in a marriage, it is not because the couple lacks hormones. It is because one or both partners begin to feel that there isn’t enough love attached to the sex. This is rarely genetic; there is usually enough love, but the love has been turned off by too much control.

There can be some genetic variation. If the partner with the strong need for love, often the woman, gives a lot, she may be dissatisfied with what she gets in return. Perhaps the partner with the weaker need is not able to give as much as she wants, or he may be choosing not to give as much as he could. In practice, it doesn’t matter. Either way, there is good reason to negotiate, and the solving circle is the best way to do so. Keep in mind that the circle will work only if the couple is committed to choice theory, to understanding the needs, their strength, the quality world, and total behavior.

Step into the circle and tell each other not what you want but what you are willing to give. Remember, we can only control our own behavior, so you should talk solely about what you are willing to do, not what you want the other to do. If a partner is not willing to stay in the circle with the amount of love and friendship the other is willing to give, there is not much hope for the marriage. Because the negotiation in the circle is, in itself, an offering of love, what is offered is usually enough. As soon as the discussion centers on giving instead of taking, the love problem has an excellent chance of being resolved.

Where survival and love are concerned, the closer your need strengths are to your partner’s, the better the chance for the marriage. This doesn’t necessarily hold for power, the most difficult need to satisfy in or out of marriage. There are so many frustrated people who have no chance to satisfy this need in the coercive workplaces that are the norm in our society that they try to get from their marriages what they can’t get anywhere else. If both partners have a strong need for power, this attempt may doom their marriage. Battered wives are often the victims of powerless husbands who are trying get from their wives at home what they can’t get elsewhere.

A good workplace, in which you have some power and work for people who don’t try to push you around, is very good for your marriage. The only time I saw my mother really happy was when she served for almost six months on the county grand jury. If she had been born fifty years later, she might have been able to use both her brains and her tremendous energy in a job. With her huge need for power, she might never have been able to be happily married, but she might have been a happy single woman. How happy the people who worked under her would have been is a point for conjecture, but she would soon be in charge. My guess is that if they behaved in a way that showed they accepted that she owned them, she would have treated them well. I’ve seen a lot of employees do so; it’s not difficult if you don’t have a strong need for power.

Partners who both have a low need for power are almost always
compatible. Low power leads to a high desire to negotiate, and low-power couples are usually in the solving circle most of the time. Even if one partner has a much higher need for power than the other, their marriage may be OK because the one with the low need for power won’t mind the other calling the shots as long as he or she is loving. I’ve seen this combination of high-power loving men and low-power loving women work reasonably well, sort of like the last half of my parents’ marriage.

But if both partners have a strong need for power, a common occurrence because power attracts power, the urge to push the other out of the circle is almost impossible to resist.
This marriage isn’t big enough for both of us
is the battle hymn of these unhappy, often doomed, relationships. The only way for two high-power people to deal with each other if they can’t satisfy their need for power outside the marriage is to find a way to work together so that their combined effort gets them both more of what they need. This is what my late wife and I did in our marriage, and it worked well. My present wife has a much lower need for power than did my late wife, and we work well together. We both enjoy power, but it is not as crucial for this marriage as it was for my first marriage. I have seen many successful husband-and-wife teams join together to build what neither could build alone.

Unlike the needs for survival and love, the need for power can rarely be negotiated in the solving circle. High-power people push each other out of the circle before they realize it. By its very nature, power is difficult to negotiate because to negotiate always means that both agree to give up some power. Negotiation cannot take place if neither is willing to give up some power. Since the negotiation is
how much power to give up,
it is essential to try to find out how strong each partner’s need for power is before marriage. After marriage it may be too late. I explain this power problem further when I describe the two kinds of people who have need-strength profiles that I believe are incompatible with marriage.

People with a high need for freedom struggle with all long-term
close relationships, but they struggle the most in marriage. The very nature of being free is that no one owns them. When someone tries to own them, they don’t fight, as people with a high need for power tend to do, they move on. In a world in which almost half the people who marry divorce, a lot are moving on all the time. Marriage has the best chance when both partners have a low need for power and a low need for freedom. If one partner has a high need for freedom and the other has a low need, there is no problem until the partner with the low need tries to limit the other’s freedom.