Is the person you are in love with slightly different from the one you met? Were they a bit more unreasonable on your first date? There could be a reason for this.
The testing of a bond
Some biologists believe that a little unreasonableness at the start of a relationship works as a test. The Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi called it “the testing of a bond”: by imposing a small cost on someone, you find out how committed they are and how they behave under pressure. If a minor provocation sends your date absolutely bananas, you have learned something important about them before either of you has invested very much. If they stay calm and good-humoured, they have passed.
Whether this is really an evolved instinct is still argued over, and the evidence for it is thin. But the logic behind it is sound, and the idea itself is far older than dating.
The test piece
In certain crafts, someone applying for a job or an apprenticeship would be asked to make a test piece. A stonemason would cut a test stone; a carpenter would produce a small piece of work. It was not really about the object. It was a trial of willingness as much as of skill: a way of finding out, before anyone had invested very much, whether this person was serious.
I have come to believe this principle matters far beyond the workshop.
The person who will not be helped
Most of us know the experience. Someone comes to you in a terrible situation. Their life is not going well, they seem desperate, and you find yourself moved to help. So you dedicate your heart and mind to doing everything you possibly can, and they will not comply. Nothing you offer is taken up. Slowly you discover the reason they are in the situation in the first place: it is a trap of their own making, and they will fight any attempt to get them out of it.
Why we guard our own prisons
Why we become caught in our own cycles of unhappiness is the subject of a great deal of Buddhist wisdom. The image they use is a wheel, turning and always turning, and the extraordinary thing about it is that nobody is turning it but us.
We are not usually attached to our suffering. We are attached to the story the suffering supports. A man who has decided the world is against him has, in that decision, an explanation for everything that has ever gone wrong and a permanent excuse for everything still to come. It is a poor bargain, but it is a bargain, and it has been paying out for years. To take his hand and pull him out is not simply to relieve him. It is to ask him to give up the only account of himself he has.
No wonder he resists. He is not being ungrateful. He is defending the walls.
The Wheel is a whole teaching in itself, and I would happily make it a paper if anyone would like to see one.
The small task
But to come back to the point. If you want to know whether someone is genuinely ready to make a change and will work with you, the simplest test is to give them a task. It does not have to be a large one. You will be surprised how quickly it works.
If someone tells you they badly need help with their business, ask them to send you a small piece of information about it by email. If someone tells you they need physical help moving house, ask them for a photograph of the specific items they need moved. You will find that the great majority of situations in which your help would have been futile, where the person was not willing to help themselves, simply disappear. Those who do come back through the filter are genuinely ready, and willing to put their own effort into their own advancement.
The kindness hidden in the test
Put in these terms, it might sound cold, as though one were sorting people. It is the opposite.
Help poured into someone who will not move does not stay neutral. It sours. The helper grows tired, then resentful, and eventually says something he cannot take back. The one being helped accumulates a debt he has no way of repaying, and begins to avoid the person he owes it to. Both are worse off than before, and a friendship that could have survived a plain no has instead been drowned in generosity.
The small task prevents all of it. It is asked before anything has been spent, and it is asked of someone who is still free to walk away without shame. A test at the beginning is a mercy. A judgement at the end is not.
Those who speak and those who do
There is a related situation worth knowing about: the difference between those who speak and those who do.
In almost any organisation you will find people who know exactly how everything could be done better by somebody else, and who are very vocal about it. I have found the best response is to listen to their ideas properly, and then to give them a small duty, something that reflects in miniature the bigger picture they believe could be improved. Very often you discover that they themselves lack the energy and the impetus to make it work.
The ashlar in your own hand
A Freemason will have recognised all this some paragraphs ago, because it is built into the Mark ceremonies. We are not admitted on the strength of what we say we are. We arrive rough, we are handed tools, and everything that follows depends on whether we go away and use them. The rough ashlar was never a remark about other people.
Which is where the principle finally turns and looks back at us.
It is easy, and rather enjoyable, to apply this outwards, to sort the sincere from the merely eloquent. The same measure works inwardly, and is far less comfortable. The next time you find yourself announcing a great intention (the practice you will take up, the book you will write, the change you will finally make), set yourself a test task. Something so small there is no dignity in it. Ten minutes tomorrow morning. One page. One telephone call.
Then watch what you actually do, and take that, rather than the announcement, as the truth about you.
Why the small trial has lasted
Advice on how things ought to be organised is never in short supply. It is the doing that is rare, and a small task is the quickest way to tell one from the other.
That is why the small trial has lasted so long. It is tried and tested, and I am certain it can help us all navigate the world. But it is also something we can use for our own self-development, by applying the same principle to ourselves.
Setting myself a test
One thing I have consistently found in my own personality is the wish to change things, or to take on more. So I often give myself a test similar to those I give others. If I want to take up a new hobby, a martial art or a form of exercise, I say to myself: just practise for 33 days, or 108 days, and if you finish that, then you can join a class. If I am still practising at the end, I know the motivation is real. You can set yourself tests like this often. For me it is a real way of finding out where I am, and it helps me shift my inner emotional landscape.
I suspect people with less passion, or who are not used to such long-term commitments, might find shorter trials easier. That is no bad thing. We see parents do exactly this when they ask a child to use the school ukulele for a month before buying one. I think it is a very good practice to keep for ourselves.
All in all, a small test tells us a little about how something might progress, and a great deal about whether we were serious in the first place.