MASTERING PHILEO

Phileo is conditional love, so by its nature it increases or decreases based upon the interaction between people. This kind of love must be earned. It may also be unearned. As we feel more Phileo for someone, we like them more. As we feel less, we like them less and may become ambivalent or even start to feel hatred for someone.

There are many theories about what makes a person do the things they do. Ultimately, the bottom line is this: human beings are conditioned to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This simple principle, the Pleasure/Pain Dynamic, explains all of human behavior. This absolutely does not mean that we are helpless before the events in our lives. Behaviorism, the theory that says we are programmed by our environment, only works if people do not make choices.

PLEASURE AND PAIN

As human beings, as wonderfully complex as we are, we can interpret events as pleasurable or painful. We can even make pain seem pleasurable or make pleasure seem painful. It is our interpretations that we associate with pleasure and pain. Our associations are so powerful that we can even override the physiological effects of something, using nicotine, a stimulant, to relax, or using alcohol, a depressant, to have fun. A bodybuilder will associate the physical pain of lifting weights as pleasure because he knows that the particular type of pain he feels means he is growing stronger.

A single thing can have several associations. We sometimes have a complicated set of rules that ultimately tells us what we naturally prefer to do. What you do depends upon how much weight you give each part of the equation and what is more important to you. Or, you could override your natural inclinations and decide, gaining pleasure from the knowledge that you are making a responsible choice no matter how you feel.

Given a choice between pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, we will usually do more to avoid pain than seek pleasure. If something hurts us, we get away quickly unless we see more pain in the escape. Consider physical pain and how quickly we move when something hurts. If we stay in a painful situation, it is because we see more pain in the escape, like people who stay in painful relationships because they think it will be more painful to leave than to stay. Pain is typically about four times more powerful than pleasure.

We naturally tend to make choices based upon immediate experiences rather than future experiences. That means that we will often seek pleasure now, even if it means we will experience pain later. We do this when we procrastinate in favor of things we would like to do more. We do this when we use credit cards and carry a balance buying things we don’t really need. We will also avoid pain now even at the expense of pleasure later. We do this when we put off things we don’t want to do and sabotage our ability to do a good job, like putting off studying even though we’d like to perform well on tests.

If we understand the fundamentals of the Pleasure/Pain Dynamic, it goes far to help us understand human behavior, ours and others, and helps us understand what we can do to use it to defend ourselves. By assuming conscious control over the process and actively using it, we can modify our own behavior by modifying our associations, and we can do the same with our children. These associations don’t normally happen on accident. You have to make choices and decide what things mean to you.

You must do this in your own mind, on purpose, because you have decided to do it. This is an exercise of your Will over your Mind and Emotions. If you let your Emotions have control on this one, you will eventually quit every good thing you do. You can’t even do it with just your Mind. It must be an act of Will, a decision that directs the Mind and guide the Emotions.

What does your marriage mean to you? What would you like it to mean? What do your children mean to you? What does it mean that your parents supported you? What does school mean, your job, anything else worthwhile? Decide, and remind yourself of the definition, and conduct yourself accordingly. There are ways to cement this association, but no matter what technique you use, it begins with a sincere decision, a commitment that this is the way you intend for it to be from now on. Your Will must train your Mind and your Emotions, just as you train your Body. It won’t happen easily or all at once any more than you learn physical skills instantly and easily.

PHILEO BANK ACCOUNT

Willard Harley in his book His Needs, Her Needs developed something he called a Love Bank. While conceptually it was good, at least applied to conditional love, it was a simplistic version of how things work. However, the simple genius of his idea, augmented with more complete information on how Phileo Love works, provides us with a means of seriously thinking about our relationships and understanding how and why feelings develop, change or go away.

The Phileo Bank Account is an idea to help us think about and understand our actions and the results they have on a relationship. This artificial construct is based on Phileo love, the conditional affection people feel for one another. An Agape relationship is stable, but a Phileo relationship is pleasing. If we want to be liked, we need to grow the Phileo Bank Account in the hearts of the others with whom we want a good relationship.

For purposes of understanding the process, we will assign a value of 1 to 4 for anything a person can do in an interaction with you. If they do something pleasant, they gain a point. If they do something you really like, they might get two. If what they did was incredible, they might get four points. As you have consistent, positive experiences with someone, their account in your heart continues to rise. When they do something you do not like, something that hurts you, they lose points.

If we want someone to Phileo us, we need to conduct ourselves in a manner that provides pleasurable associations to us in the mind of the person with whom we are relating. If we consistently build up points, that person will like us more and more. If we are insensitive, make a mistake, or even just do something mean, we might lose points. If we deplete the account faster than we build it, the relationship will fade and eventually vanish. If we continue to build the account, the relationship will flourish.

Here’s the problem with how positive and negative events impact our minds and memories. If the thing is negative, multiply it by four. Negative events hit our minds with four times the impact of a positive event of similar magnitude. A single critical word can cut more than a single complimentary word can build up. In fact, a single critical word cuts down as well as four compliments build. It seems universal that it is easier to tear things down than to build them. Things break more easily than things are fixed.

That means negative events would have a value of 4 to 16. If someone does many small, good things, totaling 16 points, a single horrible event can wipe out that Phileo Bank account. Since we often underestimate the negative impact of what we do, when considering the impact of something negative we did to someone else, add 1, then multiply it by four for a final number between 8 and 20.

Consider if you have a positive relationship with someone you see only at work. After a while, they’ve built up a positive Phileo Love Account you decide that this person is a friend. You might invite him or her to join your group on an outing. If it is another positive experience, the friendship will continue to build. If you discover that outside of work this person absolutely contradicts your morality, speaks very disdainfully of you and people you respect, and he or she is mean to your other friends, a single evening can destroy the entire Phileo Love Account.

This means that we can destroy a relationship with one really bad day, or a bad week, or by taking our frustrations out on the people to whom we are the closest. They might stand by us because of an Agape relationship, but we will destroy the Phileo relationship.

CREDITS AND DEBITS IN ABSENTIA

The physical presence of a person is not necessary for a Phileo Love Account to rise or fall. No interaction is necessary. Memory and imagination can be enough.

Something that is both good and bad is that we experience strong imagination and memory emotionally at about one-eighth the intensity as the actual experience. That means when we dwell on a good thing, the person receives 1/8th the points of the original event, half a point for a wonderful thing, an eighth of a point for a pleasant gesture.

If you allow your mind to dwell on a magnificent vacation you had with your spouse, you will gain greater affection for your spouse. If you focus your mind on some small, romantic gesture, or a wonderful evening, or an adventure, or any pleasant memory, you build the Phileo Love Account for that person. That means that you have power in how you feel about someone. Falling in and out of love is largely a matter of the Phileo Bank Account, and if we want to feel in love even during those dry times in marriage and other relationships, we can simply dwell on the best of times and continue to build our affection for someone.

However, it also means that when we dwell on the negative, the person continues to lose points. For example, a horrible event such as adultery not only knocks down points when the news is confirmed, but every time the person’s mind dwells on it. A 16 point deficit will really add up when your spouse loses 2 more points every time you think about it. It is possible, and not uncommon, for a single event to completely wipe out an incredibly high account over time. Thus even good relationships can be permanently and irreparably damaged by a single event of sufficient magnitude.

If we do something that is magnificent, we can help others build their affection for us if we gently remind them. This is often accomplished by something as simple as a souvenir or keepsake from a grand event. If we keep in mind that we are building memories so that we not only build the Phileo Love Account at that moment, but we also build it over time from that event.

Also, if we do something that is horrible, we need to try to remove the things that will constantly trigger that memory. In the adultery case, a spouse might need to know where to find you every moment of the day and night and have the full and complete right to call and make certain that you are really there. It isn’t just a matter of trust, it’s a matter of creating a certainty that the same thing isn’t happening again so the memory can fade. If one time you can’t be found, then the flood of pain will come back again and the Phileo Bank Account will crash.

INTERPRETATIONS

If you are generally someone who accentuates the negative, you will eliminate the Phileo Bank Account of spouses, family, friends and co-workers quickly as you interpret things negatively. However, if you accentuate the positive, then you will gain affection for others in like manner.

If you interpret events in the best possible light, you will build affection for others. Other people have very little control over this part of a Phileo relationship because it happens entirely in your own mind. This also means you have no control over this aspect of your Phileo relationship with others. You may lose points for what you thought was a good thing, and you may gain points for what you thought was a bad thing - though this is rare - all based upon how the other person interpreted what you did.

We can make it easier for us to like others by interpreting events in the best possible light. There seems to be a human tendency to interpret events negatively, and that can kill friendships. If we want vital, pleasing relationships with others, we should try to grow our Phileo Bank Accounts with others and likewise make it as easy as possible for others to gain points with us.

If someone is late for a meeting, why? Does that mean that they are being disrespectful? Or does it mean that they are absent minded. Which interpretation will cost them more points? If you think that a friend or spouse being late means complete disregard for you as person and devaluing your time, then you have debited their Phileo Love Account much more greatly than if you just considered it absent minded.

You could even choose to take it positively in some instances. If a husband is late getting home from work because he stopped to buy flowers, being late might turn into a positive. If the news reported that their was a traffic accident on the road between here and there, there might be no impact on the account at all. It becomes as much a matter of interpretation as reality.

INTENSITY

A particular aspect of Interpretation that is also often overlooked is intensity. If we magnify our emotional response and thinking in a particular event or interaction, it will change how much it affects our Phileo. Many people who magnify their feelings do so in the negative things and not the positive. Considering that we know that negative feelings have four times the strength of positive feelings, this is particularly destructive. However, since it happens within the mind of the receiver, the giver has very limited control.

This also means that when we are the receiver of actions by others, we have power over this aspect. Magnification can be a powerful tool to help us Phileo others. We can turn up the intensity of positive interactions and turn down the intensity of negative interactions.

For example, say someone says or does something that hurts us, and that the action is typical of members of that sex. We can start a tirade against the particular action, and expand it to what it means, what it means about the whole sex, what else the sex does that’s annoying, and get ourselves all worked up about it. What might be just a 1 or 2 point debit, something that should have only 4 to 8 points of consequence in the Phileo Bank Account, we turn into something much, much more devastating. Then they, and we, often wonder why we don’t like the person.

If, however, in the exact same circumstance, we can look at the hurtful action typical of members of that sex and turn down the intensity. We can go into how such action might be thoughtless, but normal, and part of the downside of a package that makes that sex so wonderful and so desirable. We can view it as a small, typical thing, while still being hurt, while still seeing it as a problem, and approach it emotionally as something we understand and accept about that sex. Then when we discuss it, we can approach it much more productively. We can turn the 1 or 2 point item that would cause a 4 to 8 point debit, and if we are effective at minimizing it properly (not dismissing it as okay - still recognizing that it hurt us), we might reduce it to a much smaller debit, perhaps just a point or two.

Doing this often requires speaking out loud. We should talk our ways through it and check the intensity and meaning in our own voice. We should close our eyes and remember the event and see how big, intense, colorful, and imposing the picture is in our mind. We can turn it down, push it away, slow it down, whatever mental exercise will give us enough emotional distance to think about it differently.

When dealing with positive interactions, we can intentionally magnify. We can do the exact same things in reverse. When we have a good time, we can magnify that good time in our mind to make it a fantastic time, full of meaning and hope and promise. We can make our memory more intense, more involved, and more meaningful. We can turn up the color, magnify the sound, make the picture bigger in our mind, draw ourselves into the memory, and we can think about it and talk about it often.

When we discuss it, we can talk about it with more excitement, more joy, more love. When we say things out loud, they have more meaning since we not only think it, we say it and hear it. When we hear our own voice, it carries more weight with our mind because of our innate desire to believe that whatever we say is true. The more we play it up when we talk about it, the more intense it will become for us. The more intense and more frequent it is, the more points we give the other person and the more Phileo we will feel.

Using this technique, we can turn a 2 point positive experience into something that gives the other person dozens of points over weeks or months. Imagine the power of anchoring your thoughts and feelings for someone to the best things about them. Imagine the destruction of doing the opposite.

This is something we tend to do naturally early in a relationship. Because the relationship is in it’s early stages and we have very few references for what things mean, we read into words and actions, magnifying them to their potential meaning - either with hope for what might come, or fear. If we take intentional, conscious control, we can greatly improve our feelings for others with whom we want to maintain a close relationship. We can also turn this around when we need to emotionally distance ourselves from someone destructive.

ASSOCIATIONS

Like Interpretations and Intensity, Associations are another factor in Phileo relationships about which we can do very little. This simply means that whatever someone mentally links with a positive or negative event will affect the Phileo relationship. For example, if someone had a really bad experience in a past workplace relationship, that person might associate workplace relationships with pain and avoid them entirely, no matter the quality of the otherwise wonderful professional relationship. They might have taken a specific instance and generalized it to the category of “workplace relationship.” If someone has generalized and magnified their experience, this factor could be so powerful as to be virtually impossible to overcome.

On the other hand, if someone had a particularly wonderful experience with someone from a particular group, such as a cultural or religious background, that person might be drawn to others of that group if the wonderful experience was associated to the group. The association may or may not be rational, but it exists on an emotional level. The more intense the association and the more generalized the assumption, the more difficult it would be to prove an exception to the person.

Racism, sexism, classism, and all the various forms of prejudice by label or group, all derive from association. Certain traits or behaviors are ascribed based upon membership in a group, and anyone to whom the label applies is presumed to have those traits. Sometimes this is true, even defining. For example, it would be perfectly normal and acceptable to generalize that taller people are better at reaching things high on a shelf. Few people would consider that prejudice, though it actually is prejudging someone’s ability from physical appearance. In this case, the association is so obvious as to make opposing it seem ridiculous.

While we can do little about previously existing associations in other’s minds, we can watch for new associations that involve us directly. One problem that comes up is that a person is constantly around during bad times. A husband might come home in a particularly bad mood after a hard workday and complain to a wife who lovingly listens. However, he’s upset and sees her, and after a while, the two become linked somewhere deep in his mind. The loving wife suddenly finds that she is associated with the anger and frustration he felt for those months of career challenges and there’s nothing she can do about it.

When we catch ourselves building associations like this, we need to take control and turn them around. We can do the same thing if we see the association building in the heart of another. Complete the link to feeling better. Purposefully take the bad feelings and work through them so the person becomes associated with feeling better no matter how bad it started. As this association builds, just being around someone will make you feel better. Associations can be built with intense, unique pleasure, the kind of exciting, fun stuff that makes up Eros, to be addressed shortly.

INTIMACY ACCENTUATES THE FLAWS

Imagine looking at yourself in the mirror by the the light of day. Look closely at your face, your hair and your body. Look closely. Imagine pulling out a magnifying glass and really taking a very close look. What do you see?

Then imagine the same picture by candlelight or moonlight. Imagine how you look from a distance. Imagine catching a glimpse of you for just a moment. We’ve all experienced this when we see others. Often the distant view looks better than the up close view. As we get closer to people physically, their flaws become more apparent. From a distance, the flawed and the perfect appear virtually identical. That’s why gemologists use great magnification to look closely at stones for what they call “inclusions,” in other words, flaws.

The same thing happens with people and relationships. The closer we get to people, the more our flaws show. From a distance, flaws have to be obvious to be noticed, or the choices that we make may spark a reaction from others. Unless there is something in our appearance that puts someone off, especially things under our control, minor and ordinary character flaws are revealed only in relationship.

The closer and more intimate that relationship, the more our flaws will become evident. The more those flaws interact with the other person, the greater the likelihood of making debits in our Phileo Love Bank Account.

INTIMACY ACCENTUATES MISMATCHES

Just as our flaws and the flaws of others become more evident as we grow closer, the more mismatches show. This is not necessarily a matter of flaws, just of traits that don’t match up. While there is nothing wrong with being an extrovert, someone who starts introverted because of shyness who opens up as the relationship grows closer may find that the once held back extrovertness damages the relationship.

Sometimes there are issues that do not come up in casual relationships that will come up in closer ones. The pure professional business relationship may not involve any of a coworker’s personal life, but as soon as the relationship becomes more friendly, with lunch or an after-work snack, personal issues will almost always come up.

Those may be a radical mismatch. One might be looking for a relationship and the other isn’t, or one might enjoy winding down with a drink and cigarette while the other is anti-drinking and anti-smoking. One might be liberal and the other a conservative, or they might simply find that they have nothing to discuss but work.

Even if this more superficial level of friendship works out, there might be issues that arise only as they grow closer than that. Two men might find that they get along great at work, at sporting events, playing in gold tournaments, but when they get together with their spouses, one might find that he doesn’t like the way his friend treats his wife.

MAINTAINING DISTANCE TO IDEAL RANGES

The best solution for the impact of flaws or mismatches is to develop the relationship no farther in the ideal range for the best relationship. That means that if someone’s personal political opinions conflict with yours, stay away from the issue. This will cost some intimacy and maintain some distance in the friendship, but it is actually the best way to build the best relationship. Always pushing for more intimacy can destroy a relationship.

This is not always a good idea, however. Sometimes we have a relationship established that requires intimacy in order for the relationship to be fulfilling. The most obvious of these is marriage. It doesn’t matter about the flaws and mismatches. The two should be one. In this case the flaws should be constructively addressed by the person who has them. In the event of mismatches, the mismatch must be navigated. Only in less committed or uncommitted relationships is distance the answer.

Keep in mind that working on one’s flaws can be difficult. Also keep in mind that navigating mismatches is not nearly as easy as avoiding them. Fortunately, for those who are interested, these things are possible if we are more committed to building a future than to adhering to a past.

MULTIPLE MEANS

If we understand the Phileo Bank Account concept and how it works, it will help us work through how we handle situations. If, for example, the wife did something that annoyed her husband, she had just made a withdrawal from her Phileo Account in his heart. If he acts out of hurt and says something cruel back, then he has also made a withdrawal. The exchange can easily continue and both with be angry.

If, on the other hand, the husband responded well, he might avoid making a withdrawal from the Phileo Love Account in his wife’s heart and could stop the ping pong withdrawals right away. In fact, if he is able to lovingly handle his wife’s annoying statement, he might even gain points as they navigate the difficulty. He might find that she isn’t upset at him at all, but at someone else, perhaps even herself, for something that happened earlier that day. She might just need to get it all out and have someone listen and assure her that she is still loved and is okay.

When there is more than one way to handle things, we must quickly examine our options and choose the means that will create the biggest deposit or the smallest debit. This is our marriage, after all, and the two have become one. It makes no sense for a couple, as a unit, to tear at each other. Anyone interested in maintaining a friendship should know that it makes no sense for friends to be at each other’s throats when there was a diplomatic and constructive way to handle the same situation.

Sometimes there isn’t a good way to handle a situation. Sometimes there is no right way and wrong way, only a choice between hurtful and perhaps even traumatizing ways to address an issue. In this case we simple have to choose. There will be Phileo consequences for almost every action, good consequences and bad, but we have to decide what is most important.