Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
total, text-book, poster on the Doctrine Examining Room wall, scott/roger couple
Two things: a) while there is currently a ‘blog challenge’ underway that some of the Friends of the Doctrine are participating in, we are not…. at least, not directly (given the clarklike nature of the primary authorship of this blog, this should come as no surprise) 2) each Post will have something to say about the use and abuse of our favorite personality theory
Friend of the Doctrine (and participantinae in the A-II-Z) Jean had a question in her comment last night which is interesting enough to build a post around. She say, “What is a marriage or relationship like for two clarks?”
Good question! But first, we should briefly look to what the Doctrine may have already said about relationships:
Lets talk about COUPLES! Yes, I’m talking about: two of a pair, walkin’ hand in hand, complete each other sentence(s)… let’s hear it for the destroyer of all (non-sexual) friendships the one, the only, because we are so close we are a….can you hear it? …the world is saying it, as one, out of two…. the Couple!
They are not friends…they are a Couple!
OK, fine. What benefit, what added insight does the Wakefield Doctrine claim to offer us, when it comes to the matter of pairings ? I’ll tell you. It gives us a very, very useful (teaching) tool for the Wakefield Doctrine. So, let’s begin with the easiest to identify pairings: rogerian male/scottian female.
Impossible to miss, among the Couples. Both are attractive, in every sense of the word. A ‘good looking couple’ to use a common expression, although …if you want to get technical about it, there is a difference in how they win their admirers: she has (the) ‘sex appeal’ and he has (the) ‘charm’.
They look great together. (Lets review what you should already know about each respective personality type: rogers are innately social, herd based and (they) identify with the group and scotts are aggressive predators (and) prefer to hunt alone, they are always alert to threats and opportunity but will occasionally indulge in playing with their food).But how do you really know that you are meeting a scottian/rogerian Couple? The interaction, not only what they do with each other, but to each other. She will be the more aggressive one, he will appear to be more relaxed. The ‘primary characteristics’ of the scottian female/rogerian male couple is how they talk about themselves, their inaction, their ‘paired public persona‘. She will talk to and about her partner that will have everyone listening believe is affectionate ‘criticisms’.
“Hey! You know what roger here did the other day?” “You should have heard roger at the party the other night”…all presented with an overall tone of, ‘I really love this guy’ kind of vibe. ‘Jokingly’ critical but still on a personal level. And all for the benefit of the crowd standing around our Couple.
At the same time, he does give every impression of enjoying this kind of exchange, the repartee. (The rogerian male), laughs at his partner as much as she appears to be laughing at him.
Well… that should be sufficiently graphic to help Readers at all level of comprehension see what (a) unique insight the Wakefield Doctrine has to offer on relationships of the couplistic persuasion. But Jena’s question was, ‘what would a relationship between a clark and a clark will look like?’
we have in our midst a clark/clark couple with DownSpring Cyndi… so lets wait and see if she gets a minute from under the mountain of work (work-school and school-school) to give us some direct insight. While we wait, let me say briefly: very high level of similarity will provide great strengths and curious weaknesses. One of the primary indicators that you are talking to another clark (provided that you are a clark) is the conversational bumping into each other… we both stop talking and then start again at the same instant. Not overly surprising as clarks being of the same worldview tend to fall into very similar rhythms of thought and interest, humor and … but you will find your interactions curiously clunky, at least at first.
(more to follow…work first)
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Hey de Zee!! de Zee! Day 3 Update
Lizzi (now, keep in mind that Lizzi has the intriguing advantage of living in all of our futures…. so right there, not only does she get to know when the world ends before the rest of us (” authorities confirm that the end of the world begin at 7 am GMT, don’t tell Lizzi’s ‘merican friends, she doesn’t want them to worry) Today from our English friend comes this: ‘Cliffhanger’
zoe… (not far behind our Continental Miss, zoe makes up in sleep deprivation what she lacks in timezones… ) with this (somehow) poetico-scientific exposition on our friends ‘Clouds’
Jean writes daily posts for the ‘hay-u-Me’ challenge an still has made me laugh on occasion and smile (every time) with here Posts, “…can I get a ‘damn!’?” today the Letter ‘C’
Dyanne: the rumors that she has her kindergarden kids doing spellcheck on her posts have been pretty much discredited here she is now the Word is….
About clarkscottroger
FRIST!
AWESOME! Cannot wait to hear more! I remembered my second question from yesterday:
do you know the percentages of clarks to scotts to rogers in the world, or might you be able to guess? I was wondering. thanks for everything and I am looking forward to reading more on here today as I said. jehnay
current thinking (by clarks*) is that overall the human population should be 67 % roger 17% clarks and 23 % scotts
(this might make for a very interesting survey….once we get to the stage where we have local chapters of the Friends of the Wakefield Doctrine established.
*like, who else?
thank you. I wanted to be in the smallest group. darn! You are more special! Heck!
Hey that is 107 percent! hahahahaha
scotts take what they want
clarks see mathematics as purely a subjective experience…
you’re thinking of rogers…. i.e. correct math
we don’t need no steekin multiplication tables!
well, think about it…. scotts get lonely, they totally go out am make more!
lol
hmm. true :)
PS: we have a standing joke about Albee’s great play as filmed by Burton and Taylor here! We just love it! Great photo!!!
Interesting. After seeing several posts on fb recently which linked to this post: http://www.tickld.com/x/the-difference-between-men-and-women, I found myself wondering how the Wakefield doctrine would interpret that scenario.
I certainly could recognize the couple in your example–complaining, or “complaining” about one’s spouse is one of my pet peeves, actually–but I wonder, do female scotts always behave that way? Or is it only in a scott/roger relationship? I’m not sure if the tone of my questions is coming across well–I’m curious, not confrontational.
Kristi
being a clark and, therefore hardly ever accused of being overly direct with people, let me say with the maximum fondness that, it would not occur to me that you were being confrontational…ever.
Having said that, I invite all to confront and argue and challenge (and everything else) the Doctrine because I’m choosing to believe that it would be done in the best of spirits… (we ain’t seen no haters here yet).
good question! my feeling is that the marked ‘Virginia Woolf’ interaction is pretty much specific to (female)scotts and (male) rogers… (lol hold on to your comments…. lol) I think I (female) scott might try this with a (male) clark…. but it would never become an established ‘style of interaction’… at least once the clark came back to the planet earth to notice lol
the Doctrine says that scotts are aggressive…so everything that they do is pushing to the edge, including genuine affection so what we see when we see scott/roger is a function of the roger more than the scott. (we can assume) that she would act in effectively the same manner if her partner were a clark… but a clark would perceive it differently, not as positively as a roger… (in fact, while a roger may seem to be the passive one in the scenario we’re working with, they are not… there is a rogerian perception referred to as ‘leading from behind’ that can be observed if one look closely)
damn! what a great topic, I apologize for my inability to be simple and concise in my response
(to be cont’d)
very tongue in cheek article but there are some truths there… clark, did you read the article in the link from Kristi? I am definitely in the role of the male…luckily so was the hub.
zoe
no, have not (yet) found the time to do more than keep up with the Commentation…. will try to get to it this pm
Wtf….????? what, do you work or something for a living?
I knooooooooooooow! REALLY
:)
lol
I just read the story (at the other end of the link)…damn! that’s Dave Barry who used to be one of my favorite writers of ‘funny-articles-that-show-up-in-newspapers-back-when-the-newspapers-covered-more-than-sports-and-celebrity-kidnapings’….
(in answer to one of you: a roger with a secondary clark)
truely clunky initial communication at least until you realize the other is just working on your same wavelength and the silences become comfortable… as the other half of a clark couple we didnt figure out a way to talk to each other for at least 6 months (and we saw each other every week free of other people during that time)… really ridiculous when I think of it.
that is so sweet xoxox
zoe
but very much consistent with the worldviews of clarks, including the inter-actionary effects! cool
That’s a LORRA LORRA rogers….I guess we need ’em.
…translation?
lol (you people have me slipping backwards out of Understanding-ville)
But I suspect that whatever you said, we will be in agreement that, from the Doctrine perspective, the ‘tone/style’ of the relationship will be a function of the individual worldviews (nothing shocking there)….where it’s really cool is how clearly the characteristics of each of our three worldview are illustrated.
“Lorra lorra” = contraction of ‘lot of’ in scouse…
What is life like for the clark/clark couple? It’s a clark-like existence, for sure. We almost always have wine or beer while chatting about our days and chatting about politics, religion, personal enlightenment…while cooking dinner. Husby parks himself on the Discovery, History, or Science channel in the evenings, while I park myself in front of the computer to read articles and “relax.” Mornings around here are leisurely: we each get our news, wake up with coffee for him, tea for me and we share about what our day will look like. Husby always makes breakfast; I always make dinner (or nearly always) because it’s teamwork, yo. We call ourselves the Calhoun team because there are things I do that he doesn’t have to and vice-versa. He’s a gear-head by nature, so he’s always toiling and LOVES to fix things. I’m more artsy, so I’m always thinking about what I want to do to my house to “improve” it. When we work at home, he has his space and I have mine, but we “visit” each other. We have different interests, but it provides for good conversation later on. I’m a linguist (Spanish teacher) who also likes to write. Husby appreciates a good read…by Stephen King or something like that. I prefer those intense life-changing books like something Margaret Atwood would write….
Occasionally we’ll have close friends over – but only people that are in our small circle of trusted friends – people we deem to actually understand us and who can keep up with our conversation. It’s not that we’re stuck with our noses in the air – at all. It’s that we’re always talking, thinking, dreaming, and imagining – for rogers, I know this can be overwhelming. Otherwise, we’re content to spend evenings quietly at home. We love visiting family on the weekends or going mountain biking together. In the winter, we go skiing together.
When we travel, we love off-the-road kinds of places. For our honeymoon, we ended up at some little-known resort in the Florida Keys. We saw one or two of the “tourist attractions” but crowds can be overwhelming. So we went on lots of hikes and watched sunsets from various beach locations up and down the Keys. We had the hike of danger where I nearly lost an arm due to a poisonous tree and husby nearly fell into a snake hole, and then we had to dodge these crab-like spiders who were trying to attack us. No, seriously. But it’s the best honeymoon story, ever. That and we ended up at some Grateful Dead cafe to have some burgers and fries.
So, life as a clark/clark couple is sort of like having two clarks around for everything. I’m more scottian than he is, so I’m more of a firecracker. We both will “tell it like it is” when we get pissed off.
But, that doesn’t happen often. Our desire to minimize confrontation and accept each other as we are, coupled with our ability to be flexible means that we’re pretty forgiving of each other’s shortcomings.
We tend to think very similarly when it comes to religion/spirituality. And we have similar liberal views, so…hopefully we don’t sound too boring, but we’re content. :)
Cyndi
Thank you for that insight. You have given us a good insight into how one worldview responds and interacts and modifies another, mostly depending on which of the two we are looking from, and that, as we all know is an essential element, seeing from the perspective of the other person, but judging only when we qualify it with, ‘this is me, not them’
I really thought it was great! Thank you!
clark: could you do scott woman, clark man sometime?
thanks ! jenwhe
we have been together since 1985, married since 1990. I threw all the chairs off of the deck into the woods two floors down in the back to make him get engaged to me in 1985!!! :)
I was tired of waiting!