Cold differentiation, fusion and stuff.

[Burgbud]

Hey Cac (that looks weird capitalized...maybe I'll just call you Chuck). Much to your future chagrin I've been thinking about you and David Deida; specifically something I noticed in going thru TWofSM here lately that didn't jump out at me before. I know Deida is about as appealing to you as a no-brand router with a shoddy, undocumented driver so I'll try to make it short.

Deida says, "The amazing thing is that 90% of a woman's emotional problems stem from feeling unloved. So don't stand back and analyze her, like a doctor diagnosing a patient, or like a therapist questioning a client. Give her your love -- the same love that is motivating your questioning -- immediately and unmistakably. Walk over to her, look deeply into her eyes, hold her and stroke her, tell her how much you love her, smile, hum her favorite song and dance with her, and chances are, her emotional problem will evaporate. She may still have some situation to deal with, and you may be able to help her with that, but the emotional aspect will be converted to love."

Chuck, I think you're in an ideal place to do a little experiment and test Deida's notion about women's emotional problems being 90% from feeling unloved. This might well appeal to the engineer in you, as well. Women are a b!tch because there's no input-output correlation, right? You can't do anything to make them happy, they don't know themselves what makes them happy, you solve their problem or help them solve their own problem and they're still not happy. Whatever you did that made them happy last week is just pissing them off this week. It's an engineer's nightmare.

I'm imagining myself as a software engineer (which actually takes zero imagination...thank GAWD for network engineers, because *somebody* has to do that crap...) and I'm dealing with a project that I can't seem to get to work no matter what I try. Code that worked yesterday is flipping out today. Stuff I thought was broken all of a sudden magically works, then breaks again. I'm dealing with interfaces that seem very clearly documented but don't do at all what they're very clearly supposed to do. (Pretend for the moment that I'm making that up for the sake of analogy, and that it's not my every day reality.)

In that situation, I'd love nothing more than for my boss to come over, observe my predicament, then say, "90% of the time these problems will be fixed if you call the foo() method and send it the BlackVoodooMagic parameter. That pretty much always clears things up, and if it doesn't fix everything, at least what's left will then be manageable." (Engineers aren't like scientists...we don't have to understand everything. We just need everything to work.)

So here's my thought for you: take Deida at his word. When you and the Mrs. get to going around about something and she's getting upset or irritated (for purposes of this experiment we'll assume "upset" and "irritated" are "emotional problems" in the Deida sense and we'll expect his 90% theory to hold under those conditions) and you can't figure out what the hell her problem is, just assume that she's not feeling loved and do whatever you can to make her feel your love. If she wants to talk about your day and you don't have much to say and she seems disappointed or a bit put out, assume she's not feeling loved and maybe say something like, "We could talk about my day or we could just kiss for five minutes." Or go for a walk around the block while holding hands. Or maybe tell her, "I don't want to talk about my day but I'll help you with the dishes," if helping with the dishes would make her feel loved. If you always do the dishes anyway, then that probably wouldn't count. Btw, if doing the dishes *does* count and you choose that instead of making out for five minutes then you're a nut. But hey, you're a network engineer and I'm trying not to judge.

If it works, that's an engineer's wet dream. Maybe literally. Problem frickin' SOLVED.

If it doesn't work, you've proven Deida wrong. Win/win for you, near as I can tell.