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.
 

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 and understanding are how. When you hear a person say, "We can't talk to each other, but we're really in love," you know somebody's kidding somebody. This isn't love (or even a decent friendship) but some sort of aberrated attachment.

Below 2.0 on the scale, the individual tends to consider only the physical universe or physical objects real. Therefore, the low-tone person is less likely to choose a mate because of any shared understanding and is more likely to fall in love with an object. This is evident when a person's only comments about the sweetheart are like these: "Wow! Is she stacked!" "He's groovy; he looks just like Tom Jones."

Later they say: "I just can't understand what he's talking about half the time, but I'm crazy about him." "She's got a dizzy mind, but in the dark who cares?" So they get married and make a down payment on their wall-to-wall miseries. In a few years, these same people will lean across a bar table and moan, "My wife (or husband) doesn't understand me."
 

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.
 

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.
 

Two people within the same tone range will be wellmatched, which doesn't mean they'll necessarily live happily ever after if they are below 2.0. You can't svveeten lemon juice with vinegar and get good lemonade.

I knew one marriage where the husband started out at 2.5 and the wife at 1.1. He was easy-going, pieasant 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 Iong 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's 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.
 

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 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.
 

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 1.1s, 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 trouble with rebound is that we don't bound back high enough before we make decisions.
 

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...
 

Have you noticed that sometimes your charming, sweet-tempered gal turns into an unmanageable vixen whose only purpose is to drive you up the wall? There's a medical explanation: it's premenstrual tension, caused by physical changes in her body. In most women, the symptoms occur four or five days before the onset of menses. She goes berserk ( griefy, jealous, accusing, nagging, irritable or whatever) and strikes out at the nearest target which, unfortunately, is usually you. Don't take it seriously and don't confuse this madness with the tone scale.

What to do? Current medical research indicates that in the near future it may be possible for women to take hormones and dietary minerals which will reduce or prevent these symptoms. Meanwhile, you can try indicating the source of her unhappiness. If there's a thread of reason left, she may be able to get herself under control. You can tuck her in with a good book and go play solitaire in the basement with as few words as possible (anything you say will be used against you when you come up for trial again next month). If all else fails, run for cover.

When two people don't understand this emotional paradox, they can get into some ludicrous situations (if not the divorce court) as did some friends of mine:

It was New Year's Eve. A violent snow storm raged outside as Marie and George were spending a quiet evening alone in their second-floor flat. All was well until the monthly uglies overcame Marie. She started nagging, "Here it is the end of December and you never did put the storm windows up. It's snowing like mad and we've still got screens on the windows, for gosh sakes! I can't imagine what the neighbors think."

She kept picking at him until her bewildered (and normally good-natured) husband stomped out into the storm. In a desperate attempt to please her, he grabbed a ladder from the garage, climbed up the slippery rungs and grimly began to replace each screen with a storm window. His frantic wife, meanwhile, pranced from window to window, raising it up and screaming, "What do you think you're doing? for gosh sakes, it's New Year's Eve . . . George, you're out there in the middle of a blizzard . . . You're insane! George! What will the neighbors think?"
 

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.