Man, relationships. They always feel like running a marathon blindfolded, right? I hit a wall recently, a proper big one with my partner. We were stuck in this cycle—I’d snap, they’d withdraw, nothing ever really moved forward. It was exhausting. We’d go weeks just tiptoeing around each other, scared to bring up the important stuff because we both knew it would just blow up in our faces. It got so bad that I was seriously considering just throwing in the towel. We were financially stable, living together happily 90% of the time, but that remaining 10% was absolute toxicity, and it was infecting everything else.
I needed a heavy reset button, something outside of our typical arguments. Therapy felt too big a commitment right then, so I turned to my usual source of strange, brutal honesty: the I Ching.
The Setup: Throwing the Sticks and Getting a Shock
I usually lean on the Yi Jing when things get truly messy, not for simple stuff, but for those deep structural flaws you can’t see straight. I decided to pull out my old coin set—the big, heavy ones I’ve used for years, the ones that feel heavy with history. I needed to see the actual rotten foundation of this emotional mess we built.
I focused hard, really zeroed in on the question: What do we need to understand right now about the health and potential longevity of this relationship? This wasn’t a casual question. This was me, sweating, trying to figure out if I needed to pack a bag.
I tossed the coins, six times, slow and deliberate. The resulting hexagram stared back at me: Hexagram 4, Meng. Youthful Folly. Immature Growth. I actually choked out a laugh right there. Are you kidding me? We’re both well past 40, paying taxes and arguing about whose turn it is to clean the cat litter, and the cosmos tells me we’re acting like teenagers? I was expecting something heavy, like Hexagram 23 (Splitting Apart) or maybe 29 (The Abysmal). But 4? Folly? That felt insulting.
I immediately felt resistant. My initial gut reaction was, “This reading is useless. We are mature adults. This is a grown-up problem, not some silly first-date drama.” I shoved the coins back in the box and walked away for half an hour, trying to shake the frustration. But I’ve learned you gotta push past that resistance. If the reading stings, it’s usually hitting something perfectly true. It stings because it’s embarrassing.
Diving Deep into the Meaning: The Discipline Test
I forced myself to return to the table. I pulled out my notes and started cross-referencing. Hexagram 4 isn’t just about being dumb; it’s about the student-teacher dynamic. You’ve got the mountain (stillness, firmness) over the water (danger, deep feeling). It means that the immaturity needs structure to grow, like a strict parent or a good teacher. You can’t just yell at the foolishness; you have to educate it. The text even warns against repeated readings—it implies that the Folly (the immature aspect) will only respond once to a firm direction.
The core message I extracted and decided to test was this: The relationship itself is immature, meaning it hasn’t learned how to fight fair or communicate effectively yet. We need to introduce discipline and structure, almost like running a boot camp for our emotions, not just reacting to them.
This felt like homework, frankly, not romance. But hey, I signed up for the experiment, and I was desperate enough to try anything that smelled like a solution.
The Implementation: Introducing ‘Curriculum’
I sat my partner down and showed them the reading. They were skeptical—they usually just roll their eyes at my “woo-woo” stuff—but they saw how frustrated I was, and they knew the situation was critical. I proposed a radical shift in how we handled conflict, based directly on the idea of ‘disciplining the folly.’
Here’s the specific structure I hammered out and we mutually agreed upon:
- Rule 1 (Firmness of the Mountain): No walking away mid-argument. You stay and finish the thought, even if it’s uncomfortable. If you need a break, you must explicitly state, “I need 15 minutes to regulate my anger, and I promise to return.”
- Rule 2 (Seeking the Folly): When we fight, we must pause for five minutes and each write down the actual root feeling behind our anger (e.g., “I feel ignored,” not “You always do X”). This was mandatory journaling during conflict.
- Rule 3 (The Teacher’s Patience): We committed to treating the other person’s reaction, however childish, not as an attack, but as a signal of a need they don’t know how to articulate yet. This was the hardest part, forcing us to stop reacting personally.
For the first few weeks, it was brutal. We kept slipping up. I caught myself shouting multiple times, and the urge to just shut down was overwhelming. My partner tried to storm out twice, slamming doors and generally acting like they were 16. Every single time, I forced us to adhere to the structure. I’d grab the notebook and pen and remind us, “Nope. Hexagram 4 says we are students right now. We need the structure. Write down the feeling.” It felt mechanical, awful, and totally anti-spontaneous. But we stuck to it because the alternative was ending things.
The Result: Folly Turning to Foundation
What I observed after roughly six weeks completely changed my view on this hexagram in a love context. It isn’t good for love if you define love as easy, flowing romance where everyone magically understands each other. But it is damn good for building sustainable, adult love.
We started recognizing the pattern. We were forced to slow down and observe our own immaturity. The truth was, our relationship wasn’t mature enough to handle adult stress, and we had never actually learned the basics of partnership communication. We were still operating on assumption and emotional reactivity.
The discipline broke the cycle of reaction. It didn’t magically solve the core problems—those still exist—but it gave us a framework to approach them without tearing each other apart. The “folly” didn’t disappear, but it found a teacher. Now, when tension starts building, we can usually skip the screaming part and jump straight to the structured communication, sometimes even joking, “Looks like someone needs to write down their feeling, Student 4.”
So, is Hexagram 4 good for love? My practical record concludes this: If your relationship is already smooth sailing, maybe skip it. But if you’re stuck, fighting dirty, and feeling like the relationship is emotionally childish—even if you’re both old enough to know better—Hexagram 4 is essential. It demands structure, demands learning, and forces you to grow up together. It’s hard work, maybe the hardest work, but damn, it works.
