Choice Theory

If you and your partner or prospective partner trust each other enough to share your quality worlds, there is a good chance you love each other. As you assess your own quality worlds (separately or together), look for the following: If your quality world is filled with people you get along well with, you have a high need for love and belonging and are a happy person because you have been able to satisfy this need. If your quality world has just a few people, but you are very close to them, you may have a high desire for love but a lower desire for belonging.

To assess the strength of your need for power, ask yourself if you always want to have your own way, to have the last word, to own people, and to be seen as right in most of what you do or say. If you do, you have a high need for power. If you don't care that much about having your own way, don't want to own anyone, and won't often fight for the last word, you have a low need for power. If you care somewhat, you probably have an average need for power.

The key to assessing the strength of your need for love and belonging is how much you are willing to give, not take, compared to your family members and friends. Be careful with this need; look hard before you leap into a loveless marriage. Don't confuse sex with love. Pay attention to belonging. As I said in chapter z, don't marry someone you would not be friends with if there was no sex between you.

If you have found that you are less willing to take risks than most people, you have a high need for survival. If you have about the same willingness as most people you know, you have an average need, and if you are willing to take more risks than most of your friends, you have a low need.

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.

When you are strongly depressing, what you are most aware of is its miserable feeling, a feeling that takes over your thinking, acting, and even your physiology and tends to slow you down. It takes a lot of energy to block the angering completely, which is why you are so tired. As long as you depress, you have little energy to do anything else. If we were not able to depress quickly and effectively, we could not function in marriage, as a family, or as a society. Depressing prevents huge amounts of marital and family violence. If most of us didn't depress a lot of the time when we were frustrated, our streets and homes would be war zones.