Scripture 9: Contractual Dynamics Theory of the Mind

Every person lives according to a private legal system they never consented to draft. A hidden architecture of clauses. A lifetime of unexamined terms. People think this is psychology. Lawyers think this is metaphor. The joke, of course, is that both are wrong. Contracts do not merely resemble human behaviour. They emerge from the same machinery that produces it.

Don't believe me? Let me give you a quick example so we can move on to the underlying framework with some of your dignity still intact. In standard Contract Law, a non-waiver clause says that if one party doesn’t enforce a right immediately, they haven’t given it up.
Essentially: “I can let it slide today and still nail you for it tomorrow.” This is reasonable and professional. Except YOU use this clause every time you silently swallow something you hated…
only to then bring it up six months later during an argument like a hoarded weapon.

You weren’t “finally expressing yourself.”
You were enforcing a non-waiver.
Retroactively.
With emotional interest.

The engine behind all this is what I call your Standard Form Contract (SFC), drafted through a process I call Autonegotiation. The process usually takes place in childhood, under the supervision of adults who were definitely not emotionally licensed. They inserted the clauses that determine your future behaviour. They showed you which rights are scarce and which obligations are demanded, which penalties await deviation, which exits are permitted, and which performances earn temporary peace. Later in life, lovers, institutions, cultures, traumas, triumphs, and other catastrophes edit the document with the subtlety of post-war reconstruction.

This SFC is not a poetic idea. It is a functional one. Like any legal document, it carries penalty clauses. You know them as guilt, shame, and self punishment. It has termination provisions. You call them withdrawal, shutdown, avoidance, or emotional exit. It contains dispute resolution mechanisms. That is your conflict style. Your apology style. Your grudge holding style. Your capacity to admit fault or demand justice. It has warranties and representations formed from the assurances you learned to provide in order to be valued.

Attraction is simply one domain where the SFC expresses itself clearly. People think they fall for jawlines or humour or a nicely curated Spotify playlist. No. Attraction is unconscious contract evaluation. It is due diligence. Your SFC scans a person and asks the only question that matters. “Do your offered rights match the rights I overvalue, and do your expected obligations match the obligations I have been conditioned to perform relative to those rights?”

Here is the elegantly cruel part. The rights you received the least of during autonegotiation become the ones you later overvalue. Scarcity breeds worship. Difficulty creates devotion. If affection was rationed, you later treat it like a luxury commodity. If praise required acrobatics, you still perform. If stability was unpredictable, you look for it in partners who cannot offer it.

When you receive very little of a particular right during autonegotiation, your mind begins to overvalue that right. You had to overperform to get crumbs. You had to stretch yourself into uncomfortable shapes to earn basic comfort, affection, praise, presence, or attention. You are not drawn to these things because they are moral or wholesome or “your type.” You chase them because the original contract taught you their price was high, and therefore their value must be astronomical.

Years later, you carry that SFC into adulthood. You meet someone. You feel attracted. You think it has something to do with their voice or their jawline or their tragic little smile. No. It is your SFC recognising someone who offers access to the exact right you overvalue. A right you were starved of. And here is the dangerous part. You are willing to overperform once again, because your SFC has already taught you that the only way to receive that right is through disproportionate obligation.

This is why some people chase affection like it is a scarce commodity. This is why others perform emotional labour with Olympic level dedication. This is why someone who received conditional attention as a child will later feel magnetised by partners who offer intermittent warmth. It is the SFC executing the terms it learned. Seduction becomes the performance of offering high value rights with hidden or delayed obligations. Seductive individuals intuitively know which rights people overvalue. They grant access to those rights with ease. They postpone the invoice. The contract signs itself.

And all those pop psychology labels people love throwing around?

"Attachment styles" are simply the public-facing versions of different SFC templates. Anxious individuals learned to overperform because their original contract conditioned them for disproportionate effort. Avoidants learned that closeness carries unbearable obligations, so they devalue the right itself.

"Love languages"? They are preferred benefit structures. They represent the rights that we learned to overvalue during the process of autonegotiation and therefore the rights for which we are willing to accept more contractual obligations in order to receive. The balance between the value of those rights and the burden of obligations are consistent with the balance we store in our SFC. Anxious people overpay. Avoidants underperform. Secure people negotiate fair terms with unsettling ease and then wonder why everyone else is exhausted.

"Trauma bonds" are simply exploitative exchanges where the right you overvalue is tied to unpredictable delivery, creating a perfect storm of high consideration and emotional volatility.

But do not cheapen the model by thinking it only explains romance. Contracts do not stop at attraction and neither do you. Your Standard Form Contract governs everything because the mind behaves like a legal document with a God complex. Attraction is only the example people understand quickest because it stings the fastest. But the model is far more expansive. It connects law and psychology through a single mechanism. Agreement. Expectation. Enforcement. The same engine that governs contracts governs the human psyche. Not symbolically. Structurally.

You have penalty clauses, the internal fines you pay in the form of guilt and self punishment whenever you “breach” the behaviours you were trained into. You have termination clauses, those dramatic emotional shutdowns that end relationships the moment someone crosses the invisible line you swore you would not tolerate again. You have dispute resolution clauses, the learned scripts that tell you whether conflict must be avoided, confronted, appeased, intellectualised, or settled only after one party cries. You have warranties, the promises you overextend to prove you are reliable, lovable, useful, or indispensable. You even have force majeure, those moments when you excuse behaviour because “they were stressed” or “going through something,” as if emotional disasters counted as natural disasters. Every one of these legal structures exists in your mind, drafted during autonegotiation and enforced with the sincerity of someone who believes their personality is a conscious choice.

Once you understand someone’s SFC, you gain predictive power. You can forecast their attraction patterns, their loyalty points, the partners they will choose, the red flags they will ignore, the obligations they will overperform, and the specific emotional currencies that will enchant or terrify them.

This is not magic. It is contract law disguised as intimacy. It is behavioural psychology wearing a tailored suit. It is game theory whispering that humans are not as mysterious as they would like to appear.

Once you see your SFC, the machinery becomes visible. You finally understand why you keep choosing the same people with different faces. Why you chase certain forms of attention with embarrassing hunger. Why you tolerate breaches that would disgust your rational self. Why you perform obligations no one explicitly asked for. Why your emotional penalties feel like divine justice. Why your exits come too late or too early. Why your desires are shaped like wounds.

Once you see your SFC, you gain the ability to rewrite your life by renegotiating terms you never consciously accepted. You can refuse obligations that were written into your life by the wrong authors. You can claim rights you were never permitted to imagine. You stop living under the illusion of inevitability. You become the drafter.

This piece only opens the door into attraction because it is the cleanest place to show the architecture, the easiest room for people to recognise themselves and feel slightly humiliated. But the Contractual Dynamics Theory of the Mind is far larger than desire.

The real work lies in mapping the precise parallels between legal clauses and psychological ones, the way your mind carries penalty clauses, warranties, indemnities, breach thresholds, and yes, even dispute resolution mechanisms drafted long before you knew how to speak. A child who grew up in a home where conflict meant silence learns a “mediation clause” that requires emotional withdrawal at the first sign of tension. A child raised where anger was the only language learns an “arbitration clause” that settles disputes through escalation.

These clauses become part of the SFC and resurface everywhere: in friendships, in boardrooms, in lovers’ quarrels, in every argument where you already know the ending before the first sentence is spoken. What you have read so far is only the attraction exhibit. The full model, the machinery, the legal symmetry, the psychology dressed as contract law... will be unfolded elsewhere with far more precision and detail than an article can contain.

Now depart, for the Scripture has been spoken, and hope that fortune forgets who you truly are.