kind, affectionate, friendly, compliant, understanding, warm, sensitive, and trusting. People often say an agreeable man is masculine but with a feminine touch.
Neuroticism, Tashiro continues, is what you want to avoid. It seems exciting and dramatic at first, but neurotic people are tense, moody, prone to sadness. Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotions such as anger and anxiety with great force. “Neurotic individuals tend to have a history of turbulent and unstable relationships with others, including family and friends. They also tend to be prone to what looks like bad luck, but with time, one often sees that there are ways that their neuroticism evokes unfortunate events from their environment,” he writes. “I cannot stress enough how important it is to dispel any wishful thinking that neuroticism will simply go away because there are remarkably consistent findings about the tendency of neuroticism to remain constant across the life span.”
The second lens to apply when making a marriage decision is the emotional lens. This means asking questions about the nature of your love for each other. The Greeks distinguished between three types of love: philia (friendship), eros (passion), and agape (selfless giving). You can sometimes feel eros toward a person, without philia or agape, in which case all you have is an infatuation. Or you can have agape without philia and eros, in which case all you have is admiration. Or, more likely, you may just be experiencing philia with a little eros but without agape. The person makes you happy. But somehow the explosive burst of selfless love never erupts. This is a wonderful friendship, but not the basis of a lifelong devotion. If an enchantment is going to be one of your life-defining commitments, it will already have elements of all three: intimacy, desire, and self-sacrificial love.
Some relationships simply stop at the level of beautiful friends. Both people really admire each other but somehow they never quite touch each other at the depths of their soul, and they can’t figure out why, because the relationship makes so much sense. They may tell each other that they love each other, they may feel real love for each other, but somehow it’s not the kind of love that makes it painful to be away from the person, the kind of love that stirs up turmoils of fear that the other person might go away, the kind of love that produces enchantment and deep happiness when the two of you are just next to each other doing nothing, the kind of love that calls forth the everyday service and constant solicitude that marriage requires.
Medium-depth relationships are the hardest to break off, because friendship and admiration are there, but for whatever reason they do not exist at the depth of heart and soul, and in marriage there will be untapped layers that will feel like loneliness and separation.
Finally, there is the moral lens. This is an important lens, because admiration of the other person will carry you through times when the emotional well goes dry; admiration will carry you through the times when you get a little annoyed at the other person’s personality quirks. Good character will endure through those times things are going badly. So the essential questions are: Is this person honest? Does she have integrity?
Disagreement is inevitable, and marriages survive it, but contempt is deadly and always kills a marital bond. So a crucial question is, Do I deeply admire this person? When you are making a marital commitment, you are making a vow, a promise. So another crucial question is, Does this person keep his or her promises? When you are choosing a spouse, you are choosing the mother or father to your children. So the question is, Does this person have the qualities you would want passed down to your precious kids? Sooner or later in any marriage, sickness or ill fortune or something else will strip you down to your essentials. So the question is, What is at the core of this person, after you take away the education, the skills, the accomplishments, and the brands? Marriage involves a thousand decisions as you navigate your way. So the question is, Do I often second-guess his or her judgment? Marriage is lived out in the day-to-day realities of life. So the question becomes, Does this person ever brag about behavior that he should be ashamed of—cheating other people to get ahead, being cruel to underlings to establish dominance, manipulating other people to get what he