Choice Theory (6 page)

My guess is that the vast majority of people who engage in sex are not in love with each other, or one may be in love but the other is not. But many were once in love, and most would like to be in love if it were possible. To get sex, which can provide pleasure without love, many people are willing to act as if they are in love when they are not. But many don’t even bother to act. Driven by survival hormones that care nothing about love, they have sex for pleasure with people they don’t even like, much less love. The sex feels good for one or both, and that becomes sufficient reason to have it.

Sex is also very much involved with power, but that need not preclude love or friendship. This could be described as loving, or friendly, power sex. Henry Kissinger said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Women are attracted to powerful men (men they wouldn’t consider if they weren’t powerful) for a host of obvious reasons, and vice-versa. Powerful men and women throughout history have indulged in the pleasures of sex with partners who want to fantasize they are sharing some of the power. In some cases, the fantasy becomes a reality, as it did for Wallis Warfield Simpson when Edward VIII gave up the British crown for her. Sex is also a way to share friendship and have fun. For one or both friendly partners, recreational sex, without the tensions of love and all its expectations, is enjoyable. It may be a pleasant way to learn about a new person.

Literature focuses on the beginning and end of love because that’s when exciting things are happening. The more prosaic middle ground, the creative struggle to keep love going for the life of the relationship, which may be of great interest to those who read books, is missing. It is hard for a writer to make this part of a relationship dramatic. Yet lasting love is of vital interest to almost everyone.

To keep any love, sexual or not, going, we need to go back to
the friendship discussed in the first chapter. Unlike lovers or even many family members, good friends can keep their friendship going for a lifetime because they do not indulge in the fantasies of ownership. To begin with, they do not become good friends if they have little or nothing in common. I discuss compatibility in detail later, but here, to test if your love is likely to last, ask yourself, How much do I have in common with the person I think I’m falling in love with and even beginning a sexual relationship with? Especially ask yourself, If I were not hormonally attracted to this person, would he or she be someone I would enjoy as a friend? If the answer is no, there is little chance for that love to succeed. Hormones get us together; they do not keep us together.

For a loving and sexual relationship to last, most of us also need a life of our own—not a sexual life but a social or recreational life separate from the relationship. Husbands and wives need to have their own interests, hobbies, and friends that each pursues separately. Can you indulge those interests without fear of criticism or complaint? We do so easily and naturally with good friends and among members of a caring family. Most of us need to learn to do so as easily in marriage. To try to stop a partner from enjoying these respites is destructive to the relationship. Depending on your mate for everything is asking more than what most relationships can provide.

When we think of love, we tend to think more of getting it than giving it. Do you love me? is the question we often ask the other when we are dissatisfied. Can love last when one partner gives a lot more than the other partner? Of course, anything can happen; you may find a giving person who asks little of you. But you can’t depend on getting as much love as you want for very long without giving some back. Both love and friendship are two-way streets. Accepting love is also an art. To learn to receive it graciously is of great help to any relationship.

Difficulties also occur in nonsexual love. Members of families, especially children and parents, often want more than the other is willing to give. When they do, and one or both parties use external
control, the family is often torn apart. There is no way to prevent this rupture as long as all parties involved try to control the others. Unfortunately, these are the behaviors that most family members use when they start to disagree. There is nothing I can suggest to solve family or any other difficulties that have to do with giving and getting love except giving up external control and starting to practice choice theory.

If there is a distinctive human need, it is power. As part of their need to survive, some higher-order animals want love; most want freedom; and, at least when they are young, most play and seem to be learning and having fun. But power in the sense that people want it—power for the sake of power—is unique to our species. Animals become aggressive when they are threatened, want sex, want food for themselves, or food for their young, but this behavior is for survival, not for power. When animals have enough food and are not driven by hormones or young to feed, they are not aggressive. We are the only power-driven species. It is this need for power that very early displaces survival and governs the lives most of us choose to live.

Many humans admit that they have enough of everything a person could possibly want but still want the pleasure associated with getting more even though getting more often means others get less. Even long-term friendships are vulnerable when one friend wants and tries to get much more power than the other. It’s hard to stay friends with someone who is consumed with greed and status. For many people, the quest for this feeling is almost insatiable. We want to win; to run things; to have it our way; and to tell others what to do, see them do it, and have them do it the way we
know
is best. In the pursuit of power, many people have no qualms about doing whatever they believe is necessary to get it, even if it means sacrificing a marriage or a relationship with a child or parent or destroying a business competitor.
Even murder is not beyond the pale for people obsessed by power.

In the external control society we live in, the powerful often define reality, even though this definition may be harmful to others. For example, teachers who believe it is right to fail students are common in all schools. Failing children, an abusive practice based on power, is a strong reason for the flat line of human progress graphed in the first chapter. By itself, power is neither good nor bad. It is how it is defined, acquired, and used that makes the difference.

As infants, once we get a taste of power through seeing our parents or others jump to attention to give us what we want, our need for more power starts to take over. By the time we are teenagers, power pushes us far beyond what we would do if our only motivation was to survive and get loving attention. Driven by power, we have created a pecking order in almost everything we do; social position, neighborhoods, dwellings, clothing, grades, winning, wealth, beauty, race, strength, physique, the size of our breasts or biceps, cars, food, furniture, television ratings, and almost anything else you can think of has been turned into a power struggle. Trying to get ahead even to the point of pushing others down is a way of life for some people in our society.

Of course, many people gain power working for the common good. We struggle to achieve things that give us a strong sense of power and may also help others in many ways. When one person raises his batting average or lowers her golf score, someone else’s does not diminish. When a doctor saves a human life or develops a new treatment, he or she feels powerful and everyone benefits. The ranks of the teaching profession are filled with happy teachers who feel powerful when they see students succeed. I have written this book to try to help people, and if I succeed, I will feel very good and very powerful.

Fortunately, in an affluent, reasonably democratic society such as ours, almost everyone has some access to power, and many people are satisfied with the amount they have. We don’t all aspire
to as much power as do politicians or those rich people who have made their own money. But, at a minimum, we want someone to listen to what we have to say. If no one listens to us, we feel the pain of the powerless, the kind of pain you feel in à foreign country when you are trying to get information and no one speaks your language. In a choice theory world, many more people would enjoy the benefits of listening to each other without trying to get the last word.

In personal relations, coercion doesn’t work any better for the powerful than it does for anyone else. Because the powerful tend to use it so much, it may actually work to their disadvantage in their marriages and with their families. Powerful men used to stay with their wives, but it was unusual for them to be faithful. Today many more of them divorce, rather than pretend that their marriages are successful. Because today the law protects wives who divorce much more than it did in the past, many more unhappy wives now divorce their powerful husbands. The powerful need choice theory for happiness as much as or more than other people. Because of their power, if they embraced this theory, the whole society could benefit.

In a choice theory society, where the emphasis is on getting along with one another, forcing others would be practiced less often. There would be little reason to judge each other, and more effort would be made to negotiate differences. The powerful would find that there is more power in getting along with people than in trying to dominate them. A characteristic of this society would be learning to deal with the need for power. Such a society is not beyond our grasp if we can change our psychology.

Just as the power of others concerns us primarily when they use it to threaten what we want to do with our lives, freedom concerns us mainly when we perceive that it is threatened. I believe that the need for freedom is evolution’s attempt to provide the correct balance
between your need to try to force me to live my life the way you want and my need to be free of that force. This balance is best expressed by the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. External control, the child of power, is the enemy of freedom. Its bloody rule, use the power you have to kill the people who don’t agree with you, is the leading cause of suffering around the world.

But more than suffering is at stake. Whenever we lose freedom, we reduce or lose what may be a defining human characteristic: our ability to be constructively creative. As I explain in great detail in chapter 7, our creativity is not necessarily good. When we don’t feel free to express ourselves, or if we do and no one will listen to us, our creativity may cause us pain or even make us sick. The more we are free and able to satisfy our needs in a way that does not stop another person from satisfying his or hers—the golden rule again—the more we are able to use our creativity not only for our own benefit but for the benefit of everyone. Creative people who feel free to create are rarely selfish; they get a lot of pleasure from sharing their gift.

What made the United States one of the most creative, modern countries is that our Constitution protects our freedom, especially free speech. The Founding Fathers, many of whom were rich and powerful, were well aware of the dangers of an oppressive society when they wrote the Constitution. Most of them had fled England to find freedom and were generous enough to want to share it with many who were much less powerful. To be rich and powerful is not necessarily to be selfish.

But after so many years of the freedom we have, many people are still deeply suspicious of free speech, of allowing people to say things that they
know
are not
right.
Having enjoyed the benefits and suffered the problems of the Bill of Rights for so long, these people see only the problems and would vote against this protection today if they had a chance.
If you will do what I say, I will protect you against the forces of evil
is the working maxim of every tyrant who has ever lived.

Fun is the genetic reward for learning. We are descended from people who learned more or better than others. This learning gave these people a survival advantage, and the need for fun became built into our genes. With the possible exception of whales and porpoises, we are the only creatures who play all our lives. And because we do, we learn all our lives. The day we stop playing is the day we stop learning. Fun is best defined by laughter. People who fall in love are learning a lot about each other, and they find themselves laughing almost continually.

One of the first times infants laugh out loud is when someone plays peek-a-boo with them. I believe they laugh because that game teaches them a useful lesson:
I am I, and you are you.
Up to that time, they thought that I am I, and you are me, too—that they
owned
everyone who took care of them. Not being able to recognize that you are different from others and don’t own them is not a problem when we are a few months old. But it is destructive to relationships if it continues into adulthood. It is important to find out early that we are different from others and that the only persons we own are ourselves.

It takes a lot of effort to get along well with each other, and the best way to begin to do so is to have some fun learning together. Laughing and learning are the foundation of all successful long-term relationships. When a marriage begins to go sour, fun is the first casualty. That’s too bad because fun is the easiest need to satisfy. There are so many things you can do to have fun, and rarely does anyone stand in your way.

The answer to the all-important question posed in the first chapter,
How can I figure out how to be free to live my life the way I want to live it and still get along well with the people I need?
is
that it is much more possible to find ways to do so with choice theory than with external control psychology. But if you want total freedom, you can’t have it. None of us is free from what is written in his or her genes. As much as we may try to find love and belonging, we can’t disregard the other needs, especially power and freedom.