THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES.

If there’s any time that two and two don’t equal four, it’s in a marriage. Add one 2.0 to another 2.0 and you don’t get Cheerfulness (4.0). You get fireworks!
A person’s attitude about the opposite sex is dependent on his tone. Love itself is not an emotional tone; but the energy of loving may raise, lower or intensify one’s tone. It can sit anywhere on the scale. We may see a young man deeply in love who starves himself to death (a characteristic of Apathy) or a young girl in love who manifests a dreamy enthusiasm which makes her bloom.
Let’s examine this "grave mental disease" (Plato’s definition of love) on a few levels of the scale.
At Grief/Apathy the person doesn’t outflow much love; he wants to receive it, but he worries so much about losing it that he is never able to have it anyway. His "you don’t really love me" needs constant reassurance.
Far too many marriages are based not on love but on the limp substitute, Propitiation. The .8 or .9 usually marries someone who "needs" him.
The fearful person yearns and marries for security.
The 1.1, although incapable of true affection, will put on a good show when it furthers his own purposes. He will charm, flatter and betray; he’ll undermine his partner’s confidence; he’ll point out faults (just to improve her); he’ll try to educate her into adjusting to her environment ("Stop being vital and alive"); he’ll break his vows; he’ll enjoy clandestine affairs. It’s all part of his game.
The 1.2 doesn’t believe in love, but he may enjoy playing the cool Lady Killer.
The 1.5 overrides and dominates his mate using blame and blunt invalidations. He’ll try to enforce affinity ("say you love me").
Antagonism mostly wants a sparring partner.
So, it’s not love, but who’s doing the loving that counts.
WHAT IS LOVE?
Fred Allen once said, "It’s what makes the world go around with that worried expression."
This too depends on tone. It’s a natural instinct for man to seek companionship and ultimately to select one person of the opposite sex as a partner. The highest-tone love is based on strong friendship—one which will survive as a friendship with or without the introduction of romantic (or physical) love. Such a relationship requires the willingness and ability to communicate easily and a fairly close agreement about the things one considers essential goals and efforts. Together these produce a strong attraction and understanding.
When two people disagree about most things, their understanding and affection for each other are limited. Similarly, if they cannot communicate easily, fondness
OWNERSHIP
After falling in love with an object, the low-tone person wants to own and control it. The beginnings of most downscale romances are in the 1.1 band. He’s plotting how to "make out," and she’s eagerly reading the articles entitled "How to Trap Your Man."
Following the initial stages, however, the low-tone lover tries to reduce his mate to Apathy (where the person thinks he is a physical object and is therefore as ownable and controllable as a vegetable). This is the famous battle of the sexes: two lowscale individuals trying to own, dominate and control each other. Each one, of course, resists such domination and control, using the tools of his particular tone.
SENSATION
In addition to his need for companionship and understanding, man needs sensation. High on the scale a person can experience pleasurable sensation easily in many ways. In the low bands, the person needs more impact to feel sensation of any kind. His love life reflects this obsessive need for more impact in masochism, sadism, promiscuity, perversion, orgies, preoccupation with pornography and the constant search for variety.
IS THERE A HIGH-TONE LOVE?
Yes, Virginia, there really is a high-tone love. Brotherhood, friendship and love are only possible above 2.0 where people aren’t motivated to trap, dominate or own one another. And they do not worry about losing each other. They channel their mutual understanding into growing together, rather than apart. We find constancy—the desire for a monogamistic relationship. The partner is faithful, not because of custom, enforcement or fear, but because he prefers to be.
The high-tone person is able to sublimate the sex drive, so his love is not so dependent on the physical relationship. This doesn’t mean he outgrows lovemaking. On the contrary, the upscale person enjoys sex more than any of the lower tones. However (some people will never believe this), when two people share a high-tone spirit of play, this is a more intense sensation than that of sex.
MIX AND MATCH
If I were to devise a computer program for mating people, the first step would be a test for emotional tone. Once tones were matched, I would look for compatibility in goals and activities. What does the person want to achieve and what does he consider the most important way he can spend his energy? If one partner thinks the ideal occupation is an unending junket around the country on a motorcycle and his partner prefers puttering in the rose garden, theirs is a rather slippery grip on a workable partnership.
Two people within the same tone range will be well-matched, which doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily live happily ever after if they are below 2 0 You can’t sweeten lemon juice with vinegar and get good lemonade
I knew one marriage where the husband started out at 2.5 and the wife at 1 .5. He was easy-going, pleasant and content with a routine that was uninspired and uninspiring. She was feisty and domineering. Most of the time he simply ignored her, going his own way; but occasionally he dropped to 2.0 long enough to deal with her. After several mellowing years of marriage, they equalized out with a mildly antagonistic marriage which consists of constant, shallow banter. They resolve most of their differences by stubbornly going separate ways, which seems to satisfy them both. This is a relatively compatible relationship which I call "individuated togetherness."
Another marriage between a Grief and a Sympathy appears to serve a mutual need. She conjures up countless soupy problems which never completely resolve, and he gives her constant fussy attention. Thus they maintain their own kind of low-tone affection for one another. This marriage serves another admirable purpose: it takes them both off the market so they can’t inflict themselves on higher-tone people.
The only danger to this type of compatibility occurs when one person moves upscale (maybe he gets promoted or his bald spot grows back in). This ruins the whole game.
When diverse tones mate up, the person in the lower tone demands more affection and gives less. He wants more communication and contributes less. He asserts his beliefs on less foundation and he expects to receive more agreement than he gives. The high-tone person seeks to understand; but the low one wants to be understood (even though he complains that "nobody understands me").
The upscale individual with his tremendous capacity for loving finds it wasted on the down-tone partner, who can only accept a limited amount of love. This is much like trying to pour a gallon of water into a thimble. You end up with only a thimbleful—and a big puddle.
The warped emotional dependence of a low-tone person sometimes traps the upscale individual who thinks: "She needs me." But, as Ron Hubbard says, "When any individual has to depend upon his emotional partner being low on the tone scale, he’s like a man dying of thirst who drinks salt water. It is wet, but it will not keep him alive." (Science of Survival)
I observed a marriage between a Conservatism man and a Propitiation wife. They owned a business which she dedicated herself to giving away. She refunded to people who actually purchased the product from someone else (a complete loss since the product was not resalable). She hired people who lied to her customers, sold the wrong products and stole from her. Her husband was kind at first; but he soon became alarmed by his wife’s one-woman welfare program, and he dropped to Anger where he put tight controls on her spending. This didn’t stop her, however. She developed more covert ways of spending money without his knowledge. The last time I saw them, she had written several checks without recording them, so when the rent check for their business bounced, her husband, inarticulate with rage, was ripping her checkbook to shreds.
OTHER EMOTIONS
There are a number of human responses that are generally described as emotions. Some of them fall into one band or another as synonyms or shadings of emotions; but some move across the tones. Hate is strongly expressed in Anger; but a person may hate up and down the entire emotional band. In fact, he may have been taught to hate many things (or that he must love everything). So we could find a person in the paradoxical state of "hating love" (especially when his darling runs off with another man). A person who is quite free emotionally can actually enjoy a "good cry." Another might hate having a good cry.
Sometimes courage and cowardice are described as emotions. Actually they alternate like cake and custard on a napoleon pastry. We find true courage at the top, then caution, indifference, and "Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?" (at 2.0 and 1.5). Across the Fear band we get pure, ungarnished cowardice. Toward the bottom (near Sympathy and Propitiation) the whole issue gets cluttered with noble deeds. Grief of course, is a limp coward. Making Amends may be prone to acts of heroic martyrdom (people who burn themselves alive to prove some fanatic point), and in the sub-basement, the fellow doesn’t even know there’s a threat.
Hope (often called an emotion) is high on the tone scale; but down near Fear it becomes an escape mechanism and a little lower it turns into gullibility. We find foolish optimism at .8 and .9. Below this, hope is perverted into daydreams and delusions. And one daydreams only because he has not been able to achieve real action.
Well, you get the idea. There are many so-called emotions, and they all fit into the scale somewhere.
JEALOUSY
Jealousy is not an emotion, but the motivation for an emotion, so it can erupt at many different levels of the scale. A person feels jealous when there is a real, imagined or threatened loss of affection, and this usually drops him down tone. He may become angry, fearful, covert, griefy, propitiative or apathetic about it.
Jealousy actually stems from the desire for information. The jealous person is wondering: "Does he still love me?" "Was he out with another woman?" "Does she wish she had married the other guy?" "What are they laughing about together?" The big question is:
"Does he want to replace me with someone else?"
The reason jealousy finds no foothold in a high-tone relationship is because communication is free and open. Lower on the scale, where the person thinks of his mate as an ownable object, there is a much greater threat of losing the object.
Also of low tone is the person who deliberately provokes jealousy from his partner; it’s another covert method of attempting to own and control.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOYS AND GIRLS
The main difference between boys and girls is the same one you thought it was back in kindergarten.
There are no differences in tone between men and women except those that are introduced by the culture. Boys are admonished for crying. Such training tends to produce the stereotyped rough, swaggering male; but such a false tone will collapse under stress.
When the bottom falls out of a man’s world and he cannot cry, he is forced into Apathy (which is probably the exact reason there is a higher incidence of suicide and alcoholism among men). On the other hand, girls are not supposed to be tomboys; they must act "ladylike." For this reason, many women stay stuck below Anger as gossipy 1.ls, clinging vines or soft-hearted Sympathy types.
High on the scale, the stereotypes fall away. A woman can be enterprising and capable without sacrificing her graciousness. The high-tone man can be both aggressive and compassionate—and he doesn’t lose his masculinity. Topscale people are neither confused about their gender, nor must they assert it.
THE REBOUND
You should make no major decision (to marry, to separate, or to serve your first baked Alaska when hubby’s boss comes to dinner) while temporarily down-tone. This is where you find the familiar phrase:
"Marrying on the rebound." I knew a girl in college who broke up with her boy friend and dropped to Grief. Before she moved up any further than Sympathy, she met a young man in Apathy/Grief. They seemed to have so much in common and, of course, he needed her. They married. The last I saw of them, he was jealous, possessive, demanding; constantly whining his need for her, he held this once-bright girl locked in the bottom band of the scale.
The trouble with rebound is that we don’t bound back high enough before we make decisions.
THE DEGENERATING RELATIONSHIP
We sometimes see a marriage start out high-tone and degenerate. This occurs when either person drops down-scale for any reason and doesn’t return. The emotional balance is destroyed.
One of the most frequent causes of this phenomenon is the broken agreement. When an individual breaks the codes in his relationship with another, he ceases to survive so well, because those codes were originally devised for the survival of the marriage. The minute he breaks the agreement, some of his freedom is gone. He must hide his actions from the other person. This takes us back to communication. As long as we are able to say anything to a person, we like that person and the relationship thrives.
A partner who commits any non-survival act against a marriage drops downtone. He may be gambling with the rent money. She may be gossiping about him at her bridge club. Infidelity automatically drops a person downscale. The individual who is keeping a secret becomes less talkative, irritable, picky and critical of his partner. Eventually such a marriage erupts with both partners unhappy, blaming and bewildered. They settle into a low-tone relationship or they separate.
If either partner remains in Grief about the subject of love, he may go off and write soap operas or country western music. MARRIAGE.
Before you decide you want to hang your wet socks on the same shower rod with someone for the rest of your life, you should establish some mutual purpose in marriage—one that includes the advancement of your own personal goals (the goals needn’t be the same, but they mustn’t clash). Too often a person sacrifices his own goals for marriage. She gives up a promising career to become a housewife. The man abandons the invention he wants to develop and takes a nine-to-five job for security. As millions of disillusioned spouses can tell you, that marvelous loved one can never fully compensate for the broken dream. For the sake of tolerable cohabitation, marriage may require that you give up some of your mangier personal habits; but when it asks you to abandon your aspirations, the. price is too high. Marriage is not an end in itself. It should help further your individual purposes.
To determine whether or not you are close enough in tone and other important elements with a particular person, take stock of the assets and liabilities in your relationship. As one of my sharp college friends puts it:
"What’s the pain/pleasure ratio?" Is he (or she) giving you too many moments of worry and torment, compared to the periods of fun, warmth, inspiration and sparkling agreement? If the ratio is only 50/50, that’s too delicate; it could easily tip the wrong way. A good relationship should be about eighty-five (pleasure) to fifteen (pain), which will give you just about enough trouble to keep life interesting.