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My father stood there smiling. "That all sounds so nice," he said. "But how do I do this right and make the right choice for psychuous pleasures? I have never been able to experience real romantic love."
You must know perhaps the two most common causes of judgment error: 1. Infatuation is a subtle and often a dangerous judgment error, especially when it occurs without realizing the error. Infatuation is the focusing on a single attractive or desirable characteristic of another person and then considering the total person as that one positive attribute. Infatuation is not only an unfair burden placed on the person being judged, but can lead to long-range disillusionment and pain for the person making the erroneous judgment. The infatuation-judgment error is a common "true-love-turns-sour" theme so often used in movies, novels, and magazine fiction.
2. Reverse Infatuation is perhaps the most subtle form of judgment error. Still, reverse infatuation is a common error that can cause losses of potential values and happiness. Reverse infatuation involves the focusing on a negative characteristic of an individual and then considering that total person as that one negative attribute. That judgment error can be blinding, depriving, and unjust in obscuring areas of earned values and worth in other individuals. Even minor reverse-infatuation puts unjust penalties on the person being judged. While valid criticisms about an individual should be identified and expressed when appropriate, the criticism should explicitly focus on those specific issues, not on the whole person.
Segmented judging is a method to decrease judgment errors. This method provides a more fair, accurate, and valuable way to judge individuals, especially those important to one's life. This method is particularly important for judging potential romantic-love partners.
First, you must recognize that people are many-faceted combinations of complex character traits -- usually combinations consisting mainly of objectively positive traits with some, often hidden, negative traits. And second, you must break down those various character traits into separate components.
Once that breakdown is done, you can make more fair and accurate judgments by weighing specific positive traits against specific negative traits, "positive to me" values versus "negative to me" values. The extent that the positive values outweigh the negative values is the extent you make a positive moral judgment. Similarly, the extent that "positive to me" values outweigh the "negative to me" disvalues is the extent you make a positive personal-value judgment. Many personal values are merely preferences and tastes that develop from your past experiences, interests, and motivations that are not grounded in right or wrong issues, but arise from the uniqueness of you and your past experiences and development.
The most useful and accurate method to judge a potential romantic-love partner, or any person, is on a segmented "value-scale" basis. You cannot judge the whole of an individual on any specific aspect of his or her character, personality, actions, words, or behavior. Exclusively focusing on specific aspects of a person yields distorted, infatuation-type judgments. Instead, you should judge an individual by placing all the known characteristics and qualities of that person on either the "value to me" side or the "disvalue to me" side of the balance scale. You then judge the person by the extent that the scale tips to the value side or to the disvalue side.
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