Marital Arts

By Caroline DeVore Markett

I was a weirdo in high school and college. I wanted to hang out with boys instead of girls and never could understand it. Hardly any girls wanted to hang out with me either, so I was a loner.

Then when I became an adult, I had a personality profile done and discovered that a male member of our church had the same personality as I did. I was amazed! Then my light bulb turned on when I learned that only 15% of the people with my profile were females. My friend suggested that I write a book oriented toward that 15% so they could relate more easily to their husbands. So here it is!

This book differs from others based on psychology in that it has a Christian basis and helps Christian women to understand themselves better. Also, I have heard that most women with this profile do not become Christians; hopefully this book will inspire them to do so.

So how can I possibly know enough to write a book like this? I took psychology courses in college and have a Masters degree in Bible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453581407

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Front Door

Fred was a good looking man saturated mentally with wisdom, a widower and a friend of a lady named Jane who lived across the street. At that time, she had a housemate named Carol (me). He was looking forward to marrying Jane but she kept finding reasons that they couldn’t do it. One day he was on a ladder in his living room, painting the ceiling. He was able to listen to the TV while doing the job, so he tuned in to a Christian show. Suddenly, he heard God say, Marry Carol. He almost fell off the ladder!

And when I heard him talk about it, I wanted to go away.

I had never desired to be married because all the women I’d known whose husbands had died had gone through incomparable intervals of loneliness. To me it would be living in the Swamp of Despair, surrounded by mud and thorny bushes, with no food to eat and no dry place to sleep.

Are you interested in being prepared to enhance your relationship with your husband or your boyfriend? This book will be particularly useful if you have taken a personality profile test and know you are an INTJ or a melancholy/choleric.

If you were curious about the title of the book and are checking it out because you are a reader and want to know why in the world anybody would write a book with a title like this, here is the information you were looking for. We won’t help our relationship if we practice martial arts: no I did not misspell the title. 87464-MARK-layout-low.pdf

Marital arts require offensive and defensive abilities. We need to know how to practice offense in a friendly way instead of aiming at the heart with a sword. There really is a sword we can aim with—we’ll talk about that later on.

Now let’s talk about the initials in the personality profile name. The I stands for introvert and the N stands for intuition. The T stands for thinker and the J stands for one who judges whether or not what s/he hears is valid and then makes decisions based on his or her judgment.

Because of the characteristics of our personality, we naturally think like males do. Anomaly: I know at least one man who had the opposite personality profile. He was relationship oriented, listened to a radio twenty-four hours a day and assumed the meaning of what he heard by what he thought it meant instead of asking questions to learn what the speaker meant. He liked to find out things he didn’t yet know by talking to people and incorporating what he learned into what he already knew. Do you have a relationship with someone like that? It can be frustrating.

Another frustration can come from relating to a person who thinks more slowly than I do. As a matter of fact, I can think about two things at the same time. I still remember the day when I was accomplishing five tasks at one time; it took all morning and I was mentally exhausted by noon.

Thoughts to consider:

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CHAPTER 2

Personality Profiles

First, we will think about two types of personality profiling. One is Myers Briggs, which classifies as introvert/extrovert, intuitive/sensitive, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving. The other is Personality Plus, which classifies personality as melancholy, sanguine, choleric and phlegmatic.

Now we will consider the first classification from the Personality Plus profile. Here are some quotations from Wikipedia:

"Choleric: This is the commander-type. Cholerics are dominant, strong, decisive, stubborn and even arrogant.

Melancholy: This is the mental-type. Their typical behavior involves thinking, assessing, making lists, evaluating the positives and negatives, and general analysis of facts.

Sanguine: This is the social-type. Sanguines enjoy fun, socializing, chatting, telling stories—and are fond of promising the world, because that’s the friendly thing to do.

Phlegmatic: This is the flat-type. They are easy going, laid back, nonchalant, unexcitable and relaxed. Desiring a peaceful environment is above all else."

Cholerics are focused on getting things done, but can run rough-shod over others. Cholerics are decisive and stubborn.

Melancholies are highly talented people; they have brilliant ideas, although sometimes they can paralyze themselves with over-analysis. Lists and doing things the right way are characteristics of this personality type.

Sanguines get along well with people and can cause others to become excited about issues, but they cannot always be relied upon to get things done. They love interacting with others and play the role of the entertainer in group interactions. They have a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver.

Phlegmatics are neutral—phlegmatics tend not to upset people in an active way, but their indifference may frustrate people. They try not to make decisions, and generally go for the status quo. They care about people and harmony.

Now we will think about relationships between different personalities. Here’s an illustration of interesting experiences we can go through: I’m ready to go to the customer’s house to repair her washing machine. Sig (significant other) hasn’t even gotten up yet!

A Choleric might get frustrated by a Phlegmatic who doesn’t seem to want to get things done now. This pairing, however, can work well, though, because Cholerics tend to tell people what to do, and Phlegmatics tend to do what they are told. These couplings often have relationships with each other—although interestingly this may introduce a downward spiral, where the Choleric becomes increasingly commanding, and the Phlegmatic becomes more indifferent through their interactions. Melancholies might make lists and work through them point by point, and get frustrated by Sanguines who tend to bounce from one idea to the next, often without completing the first.

Here’s some more information from Wikipedia: A simplification might be that a Choleric likes it my way, a Melancholy likes it the right way, a Sanguine likes it the fun way, and a Phlegmatic likes it the easy way.

The Myers-Briggs scale is another well-known system for generalizing personalities. Personality Plus is more about how people relate than how they are in their own right. Nevertheless, it is instructive to compare the different scales.

Introvert/Extrovert: Sanguines love socializing, and Cholerics have the confidence to interact socially. A Melancholy can be more of an intellectual, and thus somewhat anti-social (or perhaps just less social), and Phlegmatics just don’t mind either way.

Sensing/Intuition: A Melancholy seeks facts to come to conclusions; a Sanguine may go with what feels right; while a Choleric’s decisions are based on his or her own opinion—without those opinions necessarily being fact-driven, although they could of course be so done.

Thinking/Feeling: This is about how people process the world around them, and the most evident observations are that Melancholies like facts, whereas Sanguines have a leaning towards emotions.

Judging/Perceiving: Whereas perceiving is all about simply making observations, judging involves allocating value to the observations (right/wrong, good/bad, etc.).

Since Melancholies are oriented toward the right way, and Cholerics are about my way, they tend to be more on the judgmental scale. Phlegmatics, being easy way, are more about perceiving. Since I am a melancholy/choleric, I have to do it the right way and then analyze it to make sure it’s my way.

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CHAPTER 3

More Differences

Here are some more comparisons. I am task oriented and my opposite is relationship oriented. My opposite is an optimist and I am, by nature, a pessimist. When I go to the car to get the checkbook from my billfold I automatically think, ‘now where is it? Where did I leave it?’ Even before I open the billfold!!

I am visually oriented and my opposite is audibly oriented. So when we are thinking about the same subject, I read to him/her and we both understand it better. S/he has to be encouraged to read anything. I encourage him/her to work on crossword puzzles to keep his/her mind active. Guess what? I get to read the clues aloud!!

I am proactive and my opposite is reactive. I plan to take action on many things, while my opposite thinks about it and comments on it and then, maybe, takes some kind of action, more often than not, verbal action. She loves to give personal thoughts and opinions in classes or discussion groups. And quite often, the listeners relish the thoughts they hear.

I am in excellent health. I am seventy-five years old and take no medication. My opposite was disabled, rode in a go cart or wheelchair. When he walked, he used a walker or a cane. He stayed in bed for hours, lying awake and watching TV or listening to the radio. He had time to read the mail but was not particularly interested in it, being audibly oriented. And he took medication two or three times a day.

I often wondered, Am I a wife/caregiver or a caregiver/wife?

I am a morning person and he was an evening person. I wake up early in the morning, sometimes at 4 a.m., even if I have only slept five hours. If my mind becomes active while my body is still horizontal and I lie awake for thirty minutes, then my mind tells my body it’s time to get up.

Cheer up! Here is a joke I read somewhere, to get us started off happily. This really happened:

My cousin was growing cabbages and sending them to a market in New York. One day, they picked some cabbages that had black edges on the leaves. So the women pulled off the little black spots before the cabbages were packed and shipped. The owner of the packing house notified them. You need to keep those chickens out of the cabbage patch!!

These are actual experiences I have had:

I saw a man at the super market wearing a shirt that had a message on the back. It said I chose my wife for her looks, but not for the looks that I get today. I stopped him