How Math Helps Make Relationships Work by Tim Kellis

Today's special guest is Tim Kellis, author of Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage.

The journey through Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage includes a trip through history, where the most significant lessons civilization has learned over the last few thousand years are used to demonstrate not only the way to set up a positive relationship, but the causes of that relationship turning negative.

Additionally, Kellis dives into the science of psychology to answer the most basic question anyone asks who goes through the pain of divorce, “why didn’t we work out”?

The basic premise of the book is that we have a 50% divorce rate yet there doesn’t appear to be anything happening to help solve this problem. Just because divorce has become a significant part of our culture doesn’t mean we should simply sit back while countless families suffer through the agony of splitting up.

The toll to society tomorrow because of our culture of divorce today is impossible to determine but future generations will have to deal with this change to the culture that has occurred over the last two generations.

For the first time in history Kellis elaborates on a psychological solution to our psychological problems so that couples can learn how to change the direction of their negative relationships. In essence, the psychological objective is to understand what happens mentally between two people who make one of the most important decisions of their lives, to get married.

The objective of this book is to provide real, logical help to couples so they can learn how to stay out of the divorce trap. The bottom line is to learn how to set up your relationship so that you can maintain a happy, healthy, harmonious, loving, affectionate, intimate marriage.

Tim's Turn:

How math helps make relationships work?

Almost without exception, observed the great 20th Century philosopher Bertrand Russell in his exhaustive study of the history of Western philosophy, modern Platonists “are ignorant of mathematics, in spite of the immense importance Plato attached to arithmetic and geometry, and the immense influence that they had on his philosophy”.

As it turns out math provides the foundation to not only science, but philosophy and psychology. What Bertrand Russell is saying here is modern thinkers in the field of philosophy have forgotten logic as the basis for thought. I am extending this thought to include the psychology industry, for as it turns out psychology has been misplaced as an educational tool. Psychology, as an extension of the psychiatry industry, has been brought up as an extension to the medical field.

Consequently, because of Freud’s biology theory, the focus of therapy is almost exclusively the research of not only the brain, but also the emotional side of our mental lives. The basic component of therapy is referred to as “cognitive behavioral therapy” where clients of therapists discuss feelings behind the behavior within the relationship, and completely leave out the logical side of our mental lives.

And this is the fundamental basic reason why modern psychology has not been able to solve the marriage problem. My joke is of the 100 books that went into the research for my book, all were non-fiction, with the lone exception of the relationship books. No we are not from different planets, despite the success of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. There is no logic to that concept, but that concept permeates relationships today.

The key to solving the relationship problem is by using our logical mental lives to solve our relationship problems, even the emotional side of our psyche. And math provides the foundation for logic. No the answer isn’t as simple as a math problem, but the philosophical notion that we can think through our mental problems. This is the point that Betrand Russell is making with his statement. Math can provide the foundation for solving our relationship problems, not literally but philosophically.



After a successful career that eventually landed him on Wall Street, Tim Kellis met what he thought was the girl of his dreams, only to see that relationship end with bitterness and anger. The journey included work with a marital therapist, and after he discovered the therapist wasn’t really helping decided to tackle the issue himself.

Ambition and a strong aptitude for math helped lead Kellis to discover how to make relationships work. His math skills led directly to an engineering degree, nine years in the telecommunications industry, an MBA in finance, and finally on to Wall Street, where he became the very first semiconductor analyst to focus on the communications market.

After publishing a 300-page initiation piece entitled "Initiating Coverage of the Semiconductor Industry: Riding the Bandwidth Wave", Kellis became a leading semiconductor analyst at one of the biggest firms on Wall Street. The experience he gained as a Wall Street analyst provided an excellent backdrop for becoming an expert on relationships, and resulted in his relationship book entitled Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage.

You can visit his website at www.happyrelationships.com or his blog at http://questforthehappymarriage.blogspot.com/.