The game of chess can be and has been successfully used as a model for problem-solving and decision-making in many different fields. Historically, it has been used to aid in enterprises of war and conquest; today it can be used to aid in decision-making in business and macroeconomics. Following the tradition of many writers for which "the game of chess was an allegory of human relationships", I want to suggest how the principles of chess apply to one of the most important and prevalent of human relationships: love and marriage. Although a comparison between chess and romantic relationships is by no means apparent, I feel that important lessons that are applicable to interpersonal relationships can be drawn from the different styles of playing chess.

Chess is a system in which the rules are set and the ultimate goal is clearly defined. Nevertheless, in spite of its rigid structure, it is impossible to link the beginning of the game to the final outcome (although the possibilities of movements and combinations are finite, they are so large that it is virtually impossible to calculate all the different possibilities, and then choose from these possibilities). Chess is a zero-sum game in which there are only two possible outcomes: one player wins over the other, or there is a stalemate. There is no win-win possibility.

Human relationships are obviously more complex. There is no clearly defined goal in human relationships, and the rules, if any, are at best changing and ambiguous. In amicable human relationships, the win-win situation is possibly the most desirable one, while in chess it is not even a possibility. However, as in chess, there is no way of linking the initial conditions with a desired outcome. And, as in chess, there are various approaches that can be used to make decisions that we hope will lead us to our ultimate goal. It is in the evaluation of our current position and in the decision-making strategy that chess becomes a valuable tool for analyzing human relationships.

Marriage has been called by some the most difficult and yet the most important of all human enterprises. In the success or failure of marriage depends most of our happiness or misery, and furthermore, if we view marriage as the vehicle for successful continuation of our species, in it lies the future of humankind. And in spite of its known importance, about half of the marriages in the United States end in divorce; we can only speculate about how many of those which do not are in dysfunctional states. What makes some marriages succeed and others fail? All couples marry with the intention of staying together, and with the conviction that they will make their marriages work. They feel certain that they know the person that they are marrying and that their marriage will provide them both with love, happiness, and security. Why do relationships change to the point where coexistence is no longer even tolerable? How do the individual decisions influence the whole?

In chess, there are two basic approaches to making decisions: reactive and selective. In the reactive approach, the player reacts to the opponent’s immediate move. The player bases his decision on rules of thumb (stereotypes), reflex, or instinct. Although this method has the advantage of providing players with quick and straightforward decisions, it does not by any means ensure a good decision. Heuristics and rules of thumb do not work by scanning, evaluating, and then selecting amongst different alternatives, they simply follow conventional wisdom, at the expense of overlooking better alternatives. In the selective approach, the player recognizes that he has several viable options to choose from, and then makes a decision according to what he judges to be the best alternative.

The selective approach is itself subdivided into two categories: combinational and positional. The combinational style involves choosing an intermediate goal and developing a plan to achieve such a goal. The positional style focuses on taking small steps to improve the players overall position. In a positional style, it is not necessary to have a clearly defined intermediate goal, only a general direction of development. In chess, a positional game must ultimately enact a combination in order to achieve the final goal that of capturing the king.

Let us, for the sake of argument, define a goal for marriage: love and happiness for both parties involved. Let us define a few basic rules: a marriage will consist of two people who have willfully joined together with the expectation of staying together in the long-run. How can we link the initial conditions (being in love, wanting to share a lifetime, believing that you know your partner) to the final outcome, or, in the lack of an outcome, to an intermediate position? As in chess, the possibilities are endless, and we must use some method of decision-making in an attempt to secure the best possible outcome. Unlike chess, the two players are not placed against each other, but rather should be working to improve both of their positions mutually.

Early in romantic relationships, a reactive method of behavior is common. Because early on people have not invested a lot of time, money or emotional energy in the relationship, it is common to be short-sighted and respond to the immediate cues given by the other party. Decisions based on stereotypes and rules of thumb are common. At this point, people are rarely thinking of improving their overall position — they tend to focus only on their present move. Thus, a girl may react to whether or not he called the next day, a boy may react to how close she let him sit. This is obviously not sustainable in the long-run. In order for a relationship to move beyond this stage it is necessary to change the style in which the two people are playing. Partners must stop responding to immediate behavior and focus on overall strategy.

As relationships progress, the focus shifts towards a combinational style of behavior. People set intermediate goals and develop a plan to achieve these goals. So, while a boy may plan on how to get her to accept another date and a girl may plan on how to get him to a higher level of commitment, they both plan on how to move beyond just dating and start living together. The danger with the combinational style in relationships is the same as in chess: in the struggle to achieve an intermediate goal, the overall position might be neglected.

People continue to play combinational in relationships throughout their lives. Only those with great insight can move from a combinational style to a positional style. Here, I believe, is the reason that most marriages deteriorate instead of developing into fruitful relationships. For example, suppose a happily engaged couple that has been living together for some time now finally gets married. After the marriage, their parameters have changed. In the simplest example: whereas previously each had their own money (even when they lived together — each paid for half of the rent, but my money was still my money), after marriage my money and your money suddenly become our money. This change in material parameters is easy to identify; the mistake comes from failing to identify the deeper, more meaningful change in the relational parameters that results from the change in material parameters. A couple in which one or both partners is playing combinational will tend to focus on the problem at hand — how to spend the common money — and in combinational fashion, will try to make himself or herself happy, usually neglecting the positional aim of making both parties happy.

If a relationship is to succeed, both parties must play in the positional style. Partners who use a positional style of decision-making understand that in order to achieve the final goal — love and happiness — it is necessary to take small yet frequent steps to improve their overall position. Instead of simply reacting to each other or trying to achieve a preset goal, they recognize that they can only move in a certain direction of development, and that this movement sometimes involves actions that seem unnecessary, and sometimes involves significant sacrifice.

The same problem that arises in chess with regards to the positional style arises in relationships: how do you evaluate a position, and how do you choose your next move? In chess, there are five approaches to evaluating a position: functional, structural, operational, operator, and genesis. All are valuable, and all are applicable in marital relationships.

The function of a position involves the induction of the environment. A good position must be able to absorb unexpected outcomes in your favor, or at least minimize the negative consequences of unexpected outcomes. The structural approach tries to determine how to structure a position which is better, as uses certain parameters (material, positional, value of material, value of positional) that serve as variables in an equation in order to give quantitative values to a position, so that it is possible to compare different positions. The variables can be of conditional, semi-conditional, or unconditional nature. In both chess and relationships, any judging of a position is extremely subjective. Even assigning parameters becomes subjective when speaking of relationships. Just as in chess we have an observable number of pieces in observable positions, and yet there is controversy in assigning value to the pieces and their positions, in marriage it is often difficult to determine which material parameters are important. One couple might place extreme importance on geography (and if she definitely wants to live in Chicago and he in New York, there is a problem), others in goods such as house and cars, others in the absolute wealth and other financial matters.

The operational aspect tries to develop an algorithm for choosing between two alternatives. In chess, this algorithm involves a trade off between broadness (evaluating as many branches as possible) and deepness (going far into the future when evaluating these branches). Human beings are able to cut out branches that do not seem promising, and focus only on the viable ones. However, only a grand master can really know which possibilities to cut out and which to evaluate. And again, this evaluative process is completely subjective. The operator states that different players have different modes of operation and different abilities, and decisions will vary vastly depending on who is playing the game. Finally, the genesis approach tries to determine how players came into their present position an whether the initial conditions are important in evaluating a position. All of these approaches are highly subjective, because the judgment of one operator might not coincide with the judgment of another. However, it is from this subjectivism that chess draws its biggest strength as a tool for certain aspects of life.

How does this relate to marriage? It is easy to see that judging of a position in marriage is an extremely subjective thing. It is also obvious that the judgment will depend largely on the individual’s attitude, experience, and ability. But what kind of parameters should be considered when judging a position in this case?

First of all are the external parameters. These include material parameters such as money and property, as well as structural relational parameters such as societal acceptance and parental approval (everybody knows how difficult a relationship can be if one of the parents is against it or if society as a whole views it as unacceptable). Then there are parameters that are internal to the marriage, but are still external to the individuals, such as personal habits, interests, hobbies, etc. Finally, there are relational parameters such as communication, thoughtfulness, selflessness, and compatibility (both in personality and sexually), which are dependent on the relationship between both partners.

Before we can assign values to these parameters, it is important to remember that we must define the direction of development properly. We have already stated that the final goal is love and happiness. We must further clarify some of the assumptions about the nature of positions in marriage. Unlike chess, it is not a zero-sum game. However, since both partners are individual people with individual positions, each must work to improve his or her position in relation to each other, in a way that benefits both partners. This is unlike chess, in which players try to improve their position relative to each other in order to have an advantage over the opponent. In marriage there is no opponent — an improvement in the position of one partner should improve both positions simultaneously.

Given this, the problem of assigning values to the parameters and of judging a position still remains. Since this is, by its very nature, highly subjective, it is impossible to devise a precise formula. However, some general guidelines can be developed. External parameters, such as material, are the most visible and can cause the most immediate problems, therefore they should be dealt with first. Only after couples have developed a way to deal with differences in external parameters (how much money they should spend and how they should spend it, freeing themselves from undue influences of their families, adjusting personal habits to allow for peaceful cohabitation) can they attend to more important but less apparent components of the position.

The more important parameters in a position are those like communication and thoughtfulness. Partners must be aware of these parameters at all times, and here is where this style of game falls into place: taking small steps to improve the overall position. Communication is probably the most important of these parameters. So much depends on the partner’s perception of each other and of each other’s actions, that open channels of communication become key. Each partner wants to ensure that the other is getting the correct message, and this is the only way to ensure that. This is, of course, terribly difficult, since partners tend to assume that because they know each other so well, the other partner will be able to decipher one’s needs and wants without clear communication, but simply by interpreting signals. Because so many other aspects of a relationship depend on open communication, it is necessary to underscore the importance of this attribute. Things such as sexual compatibility (which is viewed by many as one of the most important aspects of a marriage) will depend enormously on the overall state of the relationship and on the ability of partners to communicate their desires to each other.

Another aspect of positional improvement in which communication is key is in that of absorbing change. Absorbing external change, such as the loss of a job or the move to a different city, is easy when communication is good. Absorbing internal change is harder. In a marriage, both partners maintain their own individuality, and as individuals it is unavoidable that they will grow and change. The challenge for a marriage is recognizing these changes and absorbing them to their advantage. Couples must work hard at growing together, and changing so as to make their relationship stronger. The only way in which this is possible is by continuously being aware of the current position of both partners and of making very thoughtful, conscientious moves to improve this position. This involves not only informing a partner about changes in one’s perceptions, attitudes, likes and dislikes, in short, in one’s life (both external and internal), but also listening (to both spoken and silent forms of communication) to the other partner — being able to recognize changes in him/her and be interested in incorporating those changes into the present position and the future plan. Only if a marriage can successfully deal with the individual changes of the partners can it succeed.

One more aspect of marriage has to be evaluated: children. Although children are commonly believed to be the ultimate achievement of a marriage, the raison d’être, it is frequently the opposite. If a marriage is strong in all of the above parameters, and if both partners are playing an thoroughly positional game, then children can be viewed as a change that can be positively absorbed, and can become the source of immense happiness and fulfillment. However, it is often the case that when child rearing becomes the focus of a marriage, partners lose sight of their positions with each other, and they fail to make the changes and adjustments that work to improve, or at the very least maintain, their present position. Therefore, their positions begin to crumble, becoming weaker and weaker with time and negligence. And by the time children are grown up and leave the family, partners realize that they have failed to communicate, to recognize changes in each other, to be thoughtful and warm and caring, and to grow together. They no longer have viable positions, and they must either work very hard towards building a good position, or dissolve their marriage (the other option, the equivalent of a stalemate, is that they will both remain positionless, unhappy, and married).

Even when partners are playing a positional game, it is frequent to have lapses in which the dynamics of the relationship resemble a combinational style. So, when one partner wants something very badly he/she will try to manipulate the other in order to achieve it. This type of game-playing is unavoidable in relationships, but it will not become harmful as long as both partners keep the whole position in mind when deciding how to proceed. It is only when the position is overlooked or neglected for the sake of a combination that this can be potentially fatal.

We must remember that all of these positional characteristics are extremely subjective. In fact, "It is the uncertainty about the future of the game that makes positional judgments so subjective; indeed, the position in question is going to be played by a particular player and no one can tell ahead of time what the outcome may be." It is from their subjectivity that marriage and chess draw their similarities. And although individual parameters and evaluations of positions are highly subjective, happiness and love are also highly subjective, so that as long as the subjective evaluations of a partner lead to (a subjective measure of) happiness, the positional style is worth pursuing.

In conclusion, I must recognize that the ability to play positional in marriage, as in chess, depends significantly on the innate talent and ability of the operator. It is a grim thing to state that only those with a certain degree of talent can succeed in marriage, but I am not sure that the ability to evaluate all these different parameters and to make decisions based on the overall position on an ongoing, daily basis can be learned. However, it is possible that people without this innate talent to make relationships work can benefit from the knowledge of those who have this talent. So we see a proliferation of marriage counselors, who believe that if both partners are committed to making the relationship work, and take the steps they suggest, they will be able to succeed. Although the effectiveness of this approach is uncertain, given the happiness and security that can be derived from marriage, and the pain and anguish of the alternative, it is worth a try.

Katsenelinboigen, Aron. Selected Topics in Indeterministic Systems. Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1989.

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