Virtue Chart as Relationship Tool
Many relationship conflicts are conflicts of virtues. Virtues come in opposing pairs. If a man is particularly alive to a virtue, it is likely to be the case that he has a harder time recognizing the vice that distorts the virtue. If he is particularly alive to a virtue, it is likely he can see even the faintest hint of the opposing vice, and reacts in horror. Which means he has a harder time seeing the opposing virtue.
So when a husband and wife have opposing virtues–and they will, somewhere–each one is particularly likely to stray into the vice that is paired with the virtue, and each one is particularly likely to sound the alarm at the opposing virtue even when there isn’t much of the vice in it if at all.
Because our natural virtues and natural vices are often the results of some character trait that is neither good nor bad in itself. The angel in the Great Divorce asks the man who carries his sin around with him in the form of a whispering reptile for permission to kill it. The man is terrified, there is dialogue, and finally the man agrees in a whimper. The angel slashes . . . but when the lizard falls dead, it transforms into a unicorn that the man rides off on. The virtue is the redeemed face of the vice. The vice was the corrupted form of the virtue.
It takes a lot of effort to see the virtue that opposes yours, and the vice that accompanies yours. But it is part of the process of refining your virtue, making it more virtuous. And beyond that, of achieving the higher virtue that is usually the synthesis between the two opposing virtues.
Here is an example. Men are generally more risk-taking, so I picked an example that fits lots of marriages.
Filed under: Deseret Review | Tags: LDS, marriage, Virtue Chart
sute
September 14, 2020
The idea of a woman being fearful of risk got the contrarian in me thinking, “But what about marriage? That’s the biggest risk of all for a woman to ‘give herself’ to a man she doesn’t and may never completely know.” Then it occurred to me that women are in fact marrying less. There’s been all kinds of reasons attributed to why (including sexual revolution, crude commerce, milk and cow analogies).
But thinking of marriage as a potentially reckless endeavor since more a concept of modernity. A couple hundred years ago, living without a man was extremely difficult for a woman outside the comfort of the big city (and even then by no means easy). And a couple hundred years before that and a woman making a life on her own was virtually impossible.
That’s all to say…
For most of human history, marriage to a man was a way to mitigate risks from outside threats, be it nature or human.
Woman raises man. Who creates and builds civilization. Over the generations, women raise and build men, just as the men in turn add to civilization. Civilization, built by man-woman, leaves man in many ways practically unnecessary to woman.
Obviously more complex than that. But a man is less crucial to household in our times than Joseph Smiths, and even more so when you go back to George Washington, and earlier.