Book Review: Two Sides of Love

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Two Sides of Love

Author: Gary Smalley and John Trent

Date: 1990

Publisher: Tyndale

ISBN: 1-56179-071-0

Length: 190 pages

Quote: “It’s essential that we learn to balance love’s hard and soft sides.”

This “Focus on the Family” book was written by, for, and about fathers. That’s what I don’t like. If you’re not a father, some things in this book may still be useful to you, but you’re auditing someone else’s class. If you are a father, what can a woman say about this book? It’s well recommended by men.

But I can describe the contents of the book. It’s about “the hard side of love,” which includes fatherly behavior like teaching sons to work, and “the soft side of love,” which includes fatherly behavior like playing with children and telling them you love them.

Building on this base, the authors move on to discuss their version of the four-temperaments personality model. As if either the traditional/classical or the current/scientific names for the four best documented personality traits were subject to copyright, they choose to characterize people as otters, beavers, lions, or golden retrievers. That grating, grinding noise I hear in my mind’s ear is not just cognitive dissonance from knowing that more precise names for these traits exist, but also cognitive dissonance from knowing that the behavior of otters and golden retrievers does not clearly illustrate the difference between HSP and ADD humans.

While psychologists used to postulate one “normal, balanced” kind of personality, they now recognize that there are actually more than four hereditary physical traits that will always shape our individual personalities in distinct ways. These physical traits can be “seen” in medical tests, although they may or may not be even loosely linked with more obvious traits like height or color. They are permanent characteristics of physically healthy people, as distinct from the influences various unhealthy conditions can also have on personality.

Ancient philosophers identified four (or three) personality types with the “elements” or conditions of physical existence: liquid/water, solid/earth, gas/air, or energy/fire. They did not agree on the imagined connections, and some of their imaginings of how the connections might work have been disproved, but the four personality types Hippocrates recognized are easy to find among people we know today. Their traditional/classical names are Melancholy, Phlegmatic, Choleric, and Sanguine (capital letters to distinguish the types from the moods thought to be specific to each type). More recent, scientific studies identify the personality traits as High Sensory Perceptivity, Long Brain Stem, "strong will," and attention deficiency.

Humans are not rigidly bound into the behavior patterns that go with these traits. We can choose to act differently than we feel.

Fastidious HSP fathers who don’t like mess and noise can change diapers.

Quiet LBS fathers who seldom think much needs to be said can advocate for their children’s educational needs.

Aggressive strong-willed fathers can remind themselves to be patient with the slow growth rate of human children.

Scatterbrained ADD fathers can force themselves to go to work every day and find “excitement” in their job, rather than wandering off in search of “excitement.”

However, the harder people try to will themselves to “be” like someone other than themselves, the more often they run up against the fact that they’re not that person and they never will be.

HSP’s, who do care about other people (at least in the way we care about trees) and have active consciences, have been bullied away from attending churches where anyone is ever allowed to utter poisonous lies like “You should be more outgoing.” We can listen to that kind of garbage, become depressed, blow our minds on booze and pills, and make everyone miserable, without ever “being outgoing” enough to satisfy extroverts who’ve been allowed to imagine that their condition is or should be normal. Or we can use “be more outgoing” as a reminder to go out and never come back, and live happily ever after in our own not-so-much-of-a-minority, longer-healthier-life-associated way. 

HSP’s do want and benefit from social activity, and social activity works best for us when we keep our expectations reasonable: “I will go to church, pray silently, sing hymns, listen to a sermon, and reply politely to any polite, unintrusive conversation people may make from a good healthy distance on the way out of the building. I will walk away from anything that seems as if it might be or become a gossip fest, extrovert social bullying session, or encroachment on my family and/or quiet time. I will loudly thank God for giving me the strength to refrain from violence as I walk away from any uninvited touching and, for the good of the offender as well as other people, I will not presume to pardon the offender until he or she repents.” 

When we keep this kind of resolutions, we may be viciously cast out of some churches and social groups. We need to persist and persevere. We are not actually as much of a minority as the extrovert social bullies would like to think. We can form churches and social groups that uphold norms of etiquette that work for us, and consciously enforce a rule that extroverts, when they try to get in to our groups, will have to make their own resolutions: “I will go to church, pray silently, sing hymns, listen to a sermon, and make only polite, unintrusive conversation, only from a good healthy distance, only on the way out of the building. I will keep my conversation impersonal, watching that my personality doesn’t become overbearing and boring just as a 300-pound man has to watch that he doesn’t step on other people. I will keep my hands in my own pockets at all times unless, and until, someone else reaches out to shake my hand first, and under no circumstances will I stand closer to anyone than is necessary to allow me to reach out when that person reaches out to shake hands.” 

Such behavioral contracts allow introverts and extroverts to mingle for a few hours at a time without harm, and possibly with some benefit, to one another...as long as everyone is mindful that they are  choosing to do things for a few hours, not changing the way they “be.”

Writing in 1990, Smalley and Trent don’t go quite so far as reaching that level of insight. They do, however, offer encouraging words for each type of Christian father. Apart from the animal metaphors their insights reflected the freshest psychological studies of their time, which can still be useful for many people:

“Danny always got high marks...until he reached the fourth grade. A few months into the new academic year, Danny...would it for hours in his room with the door closed, ostensibly studying. But still his grades were suffering.” Danny, a bright, conscientious HSP, had been assigned to a teacher whose idea of “challenging students to do their best” felt to Danny like persecution. Inventing “challenges,” “testing” people with anything less than your most pleasant, respectful, congenial behavior, is something extroverts typically do to convince introverts (who don’t have that craving to fight or compete with other people) that the extroverts are enemies, which is likely to “challenge” us to do our worst! Luckily for young Danny, his father was able to persuade his teacher to stop bullying his top student.

“Lions and otters” (extroverts) “can’t wait to change something even if it’s for no other reason than just to put their mark on something.” Smalley and Trent having annoyed a co-worker “when we walked in...an hour before the program started and began to switch the location and arrangement...For us, it was just the fun of having something else to change.” But they “finally realized” that this behavior was obnoxious, and “backed off and asked his forgiveness.”

“We once counseled a couple in which the man, a strong lion, was used to roaring at those at work and at home and always getting his way...I (John) made the comment that the primary way he communicated was by intimidating people. Instantly he stood up, grabbed the edge of the table, and leaned over toward me. ‘My goal isn’t to intimidate anybody!’ he shouted, staring...” The ministerial team was able to work with him only after Trent roared back at him, braced for a brawl. The man’s next reaction was to yell at his wife, “Why don’t you ever stand up to me like he has?” In societies where marriages are not arranged, where people who marry people like this man probably like his style, it was plausible for Smalley and Trent to believe that his marriage could be saved—and, they report, it was.

Even if it’s auditing someone else’s class, anything that helps extroverts recognize how much they have to repent of is recommended.

Dr. Trent is still alive, so this is a Fair Trade Book. When you send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to this web site, as explained on the Payment Information Page, out of that base price of $10 we'll send 10%, or $1, to Trent or a charity of his choice. If you buy other books by him, we'll add 10% of the base price of each book to that payment.