I bought Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies as soon as it came out and I'm about three-quarters of the way through it. I am finding it more insightful than I expected, with things I want to remember in each chapter.
We had a chat about the Four Tendencies in the not-very-distant past, remember? Rubin's quiz told me that I was an Upholder, but I'm definitely an Upholder with some Obliger inclinations. I could take on a ten-year Dickens project happily, but I am more consistent about reading x amount of Dickens every single day if I am hosting a Dickens read-along than if I am just doing it on my own. Rubin writes about the Upholder tendency to be rigid and I was like, "Oh, hi, have you been spying on me?" I remember once when I was following FlyLady pretty closely and Christmas fell on a Monday, I felt genuinely flummoxed. I was supposed to clean my house on Monday, because Weekly Home Blessing Hour is always on Monday, and yet I was supposed to avoid unnecessary work because it was a holy day of obligation. There are many solutions to this difficulty, I can see in hindsight, but at the time I thought I might short-circuit something inside my brain deciding what to do.
I wish I had known about this framework earlier. My oldest son is a Questioner, probably with Rebel leanings, and it took me far too long to figure out that talking to him about the importance of rules was not an effective strategy. My second son is an Upholder with Questioner leanings, and I remember how distressed he would get when he was small about learning that he had violated some unfamiliar expectation -- weeping by the side of the pool, resolving never to return, when the lifeguard said he wasn't allowed to wear his floaty vest in the water.
My husband is also a Questioner with Rebel leanings, and he is completely unconvinced about Rubin's divisions. This is a response she expects from Questioners, but my husband finds her assertion that Questioners gonna question to be utterly unpersuasive. Somehow our conversation took a turn in which we were speculating about the roads we might have traveled if we hadn't married each other. "You'd probably be living in a big city and have a tattooed hipster girlfriend," I said. You would have thought I'd been speaking Urdu. "Tattooed? hipster? girlfriend?" he queried. "Um, what are you talking about?" I tried to imagine my alternate Elwood-less life and came up empty. Would I even be Catholic? What if I'd settled down with another rule-follower and never learned to push back against my own worst tendencies? I'm glad he loosens me up; he's glad I make the trains run on time around here (though I like to think I am more pleasant than Mussolini). I had my planner open and he was teasing me gently as he read over my shoulder. "EARLY BEDTIME in all caps, I see," he commented. "That's because it's like today's MASS and RUN entries," I told him. "It's something that will make me feel better if I do it for myself but that's easy to push aside."
Obliger tendencies in action, you see. Can I get myself to bed in five minutes? Probably not, but off I go to see how close I can come.
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