Strategy
There was strategy involved in love, Shikamaru thought, nursing a sore head on the couch, listening to his wife thumping around upstairs, wincing as he heard several fairly valuable, not to mention potentially destructive, objects being throw about the room. There was, for instance, the way you didn't tell the truth when your wife asked you if her dress made her look fat. Particularly if said wife is eight months pregnant and therefore not only, well, fat, but also very hormonal, and touchy about her figure. That was kind of the wrong move, he thought.
But strategy appeared in love in other ways as well. There was the way you waited for the right moment to ask a girl out, for instance, not right after she'd broken up with her fiance of five years for an unspecified guy. He winced. Well, he'd made the wrong move there, too.
But strategy was in other places, right? Places where he hadn't messed up. For instance, he'd kissed her at an opportune time...while she was on the Ferris Wheel with him and too scared to anything. Which practically counts a sexual assault. Okay, so maybe he'd messed that up. But he hadn't messed up the proposal, right? Well, she had been half drunk at the time...alright, guilty of failure there too. And as for asking permission of the next of kin, well, he'd made the mistake of asking Gaara about it when he was in a bad mood, out in the dessert, with an ample amount of sand...and he'd asked Kankuro just after he'd mastered multiple puppet Jutsu, while standing in a room full of puppets. Those had been bad choices. Really, really, bad, scar-causing choices.
So if he hadn't fufilled the strategies of love, why had they still married. Why were they still (mostly) happy together?
It was because there is no strategy in love. Oh, there's strategy to romance, but true love works out no matter what you do. In fact, true love is more likely to mess up the most perfect strategies, because we don't take it's all-consuming power to heart. We pass over it. So, while one must use strategy to have a successful romance, love needs no strategy.
For instance, strategy required staying out Temari's way as much as possible. But love demanded going to her, apologizing on his knees, and asking forgivness. As well as a few white lies about Temari's baby-swollen waist. So which was he to choose?
The same one that had caused him to get married to the most annoying, loud, overbearing, know-it-all, touchy, sexy, unreasonable, the most troublesome woman ever. So Shikamaru followed love's strategy, and went upstairs, preparing his mind and mouth for apology, followed quickly by flattery. And the rest of his body for the...unseemly relations which would probably follow. Blast all hormones.
