Marriage, Stimulus + Response

Assuming for a(nother) moment that we are deliberately designed by one or more really smart people, we can infer a little bit about their design philosophy.

For one thing, they keep everything functioning through equilibrium of opposing forces -- earth's temperature is managed through summer and winter, day and night -- constant change of opposing forces that balance each other out. Equilibrium of extremes keeps things from changing too much and spiraling out of control.

They were also much more concerned with proportion than with size. Show me 100 frogs, and I'll show you 100 frogs of different size. But they all are designed with the same proportion in mind.

Today i thought of a third design philosophy we can infer from how they designed things -- development through challenge. We develop muscles when we have to lift things. Speed when we have to run. Aggression when we need to assert ourselves.

So let's apply this to marriage. Assume for a moment that women were designed as a stimulus to develop personal strength in men. What would we expect them to become in marriage? Unstable, emotional, bossy, unpredictable, flaky.

Without those stimuli, we'd never need to develop leadership.

Taking that a step further, marriage can be looked on as a personal challenge for men. Rather than expecting it to be a situation that gives us everything we want -- happiness, peace, and stability -- we can look at is as a challenge to develop core leadership qualities in us that are essential to running a Tribe.

Maybe that's why things are the way they are -- why wives commonly act in ways that make us nothing short of miserable. They're not there to make us happy. That's not what they're designed for. They're designed to force us to become what we need to be.