Six clues to character

A while ago -- gosh, it has been over a month -- one of the blogs run by Psychology Today posted this article about the elements that go to make up our character. I thought it was fascinating: not that all character can be defined by six dimensions, but that these specific traits should be so determinative, that they should be things you look at early to figure out what someone will be like in the long term.

Here's the list: intelligence, drive, friendship, intimacy, happiness, and goodness.

I have written before about how I really had no excuse for failing to understand who Wife was, back when I married her -- about how the data was all there in front of me and I overlooked it, perhaps out of wishful thinking, perhaps out of romance, perhaps out of obstinacy, or some combination of the above. But when I read this I wondered, What if I had known this then? Would it have helped me organize my thoughts? Probably not, of course -- wishful thinking and romance and obstinacy are all pretty powerful things. Still, it seemed a interesting exercise.

So, sticking only with things that I could have seen then (but with today's perspective on what proved important), here's what I come up with:

Intelligence: Pretty much the first thing I ever knew about Wife, back when we were first introduced, was that she belonged to Phi Beta Kappa. So that should have meant that she had the intelligence part wired. And truthfully, Wife has been pretty sharp for much of our marriage. But even then there were little signs that she was missing a kind of intellectual agility or flexibility. I remember when she told me she had been unable to balance her checkbook for months. I sat down with it and balanced it straightaway -- there wasn't anything weird in it. That may have been the first really personal service I did for her (if you leave out fucking, I mean). Or the first time we discussed politics, she asked me what political position I favored. I hesitated because this was something I thought about a lot, and I had not really worked out a political philosophy for myself that satisfied me yet. So she made it simpler by saying, "Well, at any rate are you against [a fellow who was very prominent on the political landscape back then]?" And I thought "Huh? Just 'against this guy'? Isn't that kind of a broad-brush oversimplification?" I didn't think about it much back then, because heck, she was Phi Beta Kappa wasn't she? But in retrospect it sheds light on her cartoonish misunderstandings of the emotional issues I have tried to explain over the years, not to mention less savory aspects of her character like her racism (which I had no clue about back then).

Drive: Here too I was mislead by superficialities. Wife talked a lot back then about her ambitions, and she certainly seemed a bundle of energy. If I had been asked about her drive, I would have said she had more drive than I did. But then the author quotes a psychologist in New York who says, "You want to see that [people] assess themselves in a healthy way. That includes recognizing the randomness of life. An unhealthy person rages against ill luck." And I think of the time we were walking in a nearby park and Wife was railing against some setback that had just cropped up, I no longer remember what it was. It was just the kind of random shit that could happen to anybody. And she buttonholed me, demanding "Why did this have to happen to me? Why??" ... not in a purely rhetorical way but as if that question had an answer and I should have given it to her! "Rages against ill luck" ...? Yup.

Friendship: Here too, I thought she was doing better than I was. When we met, I was a thousand miles away from the town where I had gone to college; my friends were all over. But we were in the town where she had gone to college and all her friends were still nearby; so what I saw was that she had friends around and I didn't. Plus, I knew how hard it was for me to make friends and how lonely I was, all results of my shyness. And yet, the article says, "Perhaps the strongest signal of problems in the friendship realm is the existence of cutoffs. A string of ex-friendships is a sign of rigidity, indicator of an inability to tolerate conflict or stress in relationships or work out their complexities." So what should I have thought when she told me -- with amusement, really -- that "I hold grudges close to my heart and nurture them well"? At the time I thought it was a witty remark, funny even -- and it was. But shouldn't I have paid a little more attention?

Intimacy: The article suggests you look how well your intended gets along with her/his family of origin. The answer for Wife is that her family of origin was an ongoing soap opera. I'll skip the details for now, because they would take hours. But she was still angry, deeply resentful and angry, over things that had happened years before. The article points out that not everyone has a happy childhood, but "Even a person whose early experience was less than ideal will reveal in tone and attitude—anger, wistfulness, regret—whether they've declared a truce with history." I surely had enough information to know that she hadn't declared any truces.

Happiness: Well having a girlfriend sure made me happy, and at first Wife was plenty giddy about it too. By the time we were getting married, though, I had seen plenty of what I would later understand were depressive episodes. How much importance should I have given them? I think I resisted seeing a pattern here, even though I must have known that she could be set off by little things. But also, ... remember up above, where we were walking in the park and she was so angrily and bitterly asking me "Why, why why??" When she wanted a concrete answer to why bad things always happened to her, and why her luck was always worse than anybody else's? The article goes on to say, "psychologists have come to see that in large measure [happiness] is a reflection of how we think. Cognitive behavioral therapy [or CBT, see, e.g., here or here] is founded on the fact that we consistently engage in automatic patterns of thinking about experience, of which we are generally unaware, that pitch us into positive or negative mood states. Underlying a propensity to depression are not merely encounters with adversity but assumptions about the experience and beliefs about oneself that are in fact distortions of reality." It goes on to talk about how unhealthy it is for someone to "awfullize" ... to assume the worst possible consequences from any bump in the road, and then run with them. She did that too, of course, in spades. But the point is made.

Goodness: Back then I probably would have measured "goodness" by someone's willingness to stand up for principled behavior, and I would have seen it in Wife's insistence (as a high-school teacher) on giving a student the grade he earned, even if that meant failing the star quarterback. Or I would have reached the opposite conclusion by looking at her readiness to lie. But the article talks about empathy. Did I have any occasion to judge Wife's capacity for empathy, outside of her romance with me? I'm not sure I did. Or rather, ... there were plenty of family stories about how she and her mother were always coming to the rescue of one or another of her siblings, who had gotten into an awful jam. (See my remarks above about an ongoing soap opera.) Back then I probably would have given her high marks for empathy on the stength of those stories. Now I look at them and see that their main value may have been as a way to advertise "Look how much better I am than my siblings!" But I'm sure I didn't see that then.

It probably wouldn't have made any difference if this article had been published back then or not. If I was willing to make excuses for her (which I was), I would have made them in the context of the article too. But it's still kind of an interesting exercise.

Remember, you can kind of tell these things ....