According to the Humours

This post owes some of its ideas to a blog written by Montana_Gal. The post was removed for some reason, but I'd like to posit a theory about relationships that is due in some part to her.

Romantic relationships can be split into parts. MG chose the following divisions: romance, home, children and work. I expect that you can add other categories such as friends, family, or recreation as your particular relationship dictates. MG believes that you need only invest in one division if another area is lacking. This, according to her will balance matters. For example if children are causing problems, invest more time in romance in order to keep the relationship strong.

I pointed out my criticism of her theory (I hope that isn't the reason why the entry has now disappeared). It draws heavily on the humours.

Hippocrates believed that the body was made up of four liquids (humours): blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. He linked them to medicine and believe that if the body's liquids were out of balance then disease would result. Galen added/adapted this theory to include the human temperments: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic.

It is important, accroding to the thinkers, to keep the humours in balance. If they are unbalanced then the body reacts by either getting sick (according to Hippocrates) or behaving irrationally (a la Galen).

Would it not be possible that for a relationship to work the couple must ensure that all aspects of the relationship are in balance? If a couple spends all of their time renovating their house and fail to attend to the romance then the relationship may struggle and die out (or may just become choleric). Maintaining a balance of the divisions of a relationship hardly seems ground breaking, but isn't always an easy task.

What furthers this theory is the timeline of a relationship. New romantic relations are intensely personal and passionate: new lovers can't keep their hands off each other. In time, the passion (unfortunately) cools. Why might that be? Perhaps it is the divisions of the realtionship; we add more parts. It is easy to keep a strong realtionship when it's just the two of you. Throw in a house, kids, and work and it's tougher to keep everything in balance.

How many times do we wish we could stop working so hard and just spend the evening with our partner, a bottle of wine, and no reason to get up early the next morning? How often do we try to fill our communication problems with home repair? These are not healthy relationships, because the parts of the relationship are not balanced. Like a load of clothes in the machine, pile too much on one side and the machine creates quite a racket.

So what good does this do anyone? I'm not entirely sure. Keep it simple? Don't have kids? Don't buy a house? I'm guilty of not balancing the scales as much as anyone. Perhaps a new Wikipedia entry needs to include my theory. That chart would look great with Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Nugget on there, wouldn't it?