Give Me a Sign! What Should LoLo and Tebow Look For?

You may have noticed, I think correctly “reading” the signs of commitment in a potential long-term partner/mate is crucial. This is most important earlier on, of course, prior to “settling down” with someone.  Hence, while reading commitment accurately can be useful in marriage or engagement, what I'm really focused on here are those who are dating (or hanging out—I realize fewer people “date” anymore, but you know what I mean).  To clarify further, this whole issue is most important in situations where at least one partner wants to know if the relationship they are in right now has a future. (There are a lot of other posts here about this. I’m going to be more abstract here and then get back to practical in future posts.)

What’s a good signal of commitment? 

Some of the characteristics of good signals of commitment (or commitment potential) are these:

1.  Does the behavior actually relate to something about commitment? For example, if you read my last few posts, you know that there is good reason to believe that someone’s desire to have sex with you may mean nothing about commitment.  I hope that is not a shocking idea to anyone reading this, but people do too often “see” desire and infer commitment. Let’s call that “relationship reading dyslexia.”  What’s on the page does not match what got into the brain. 

Ditto if someone says, “I want to make a baby with you” with no other evidence of commitment like, say, marriage. An even worse indicator of commitment is if someone says to you, “I’d like you to have my baby.” Hm. Context matters a lot here.  It may sound silly to you that I even raise this example, but this is, in fact, a relatively common behavior in some teenager groups, where some males say some version of this to females they are interested in, and some females may be flattered and impressed, and . . . . . Don’t be that male or that female, and help your kids understand this. By the way, while I’d like to see people hold out for a lot more than this, it would be somewhat more impressive if someone said, “I want to raise a child with you.” That statement contains a much greater amount of information, especially if it’s accurate.    

2.  Is the behavior under the control of the one doing it—whatever it is? For behavior to have meaning about commitment, it must be behavior that the person has control over performing. There are tons of extensions of this point. A shotgun wedding has less information in it about the commitment level of the participants than other weddings. As I mentioned in the last post, saying “I love you” contains less information about commitment if it’s in the context of a hormonal rush of chemicals—when the chemistry is driving the bus. Chemistry is fun but it’s not a great bus driver, and some relationships are windy mountain roads without guardrails.   

Just ask LoLo how hard it is to keep the bus on the road!  She has her will and her values and her goal, and she has her chemistry.  Just how great would the gravitational pull be between Tebow and LoLo at this point? How much does a super strong impulse impact volitional choice? And, how well can volitional choice resist the pull of behavior that’s not consistent with one’s values?

3.  Signals contain more information when there are more options. I was inspired to think about this by economists. You don’t usually see the words “inspiring” and “economist” in the same sentence, so if you are an economist, enjoy this moment. I try to avoid being totally infected by their dismal realities but they do get some things right (and they have mad math skills, which must count for something).  [Yes, I added the italics to the word “count” for those who have deficient pun receptors.]

Simply put, if you have little choice over the options you could choose among, what you choose tells other less about what you prefer. You can’t infer true interest in something when there is limited access. 

Think about buying toilet paper in 7-11.  I’m not even sure they have it, but let’s suppose they do. It will be one brand, and in one roll quantities, and it will likely cost you 4 bucks a roll.  7-11 is a great chain of stores but they excel at convenience not low price or variety (except for pop and candy bars and such. They are my “go to” supplier of Junior Mints.). What does this mean? If you badly need a roll of toilet paper (not so badly that you are just heading for a restroom, if they have a public one), you’ll take what they have and forego your desire to get the Charmin Ultra Soft you might normally prefer. You’ll take the individually wrapped roll of Scott’s (my favorite brand, actually, and how far wrong can you go with that brand? Slight over-share there.).

Anyway, with limited options, your choice represents less about your preferences. And that goes for commitment, too. With fewer options, what you choose reflects less about volition and preference, so what you choose may not mean you have much commitment to that choice. 

How’s this apply to dating and mating? Anything that constrains your options, limits the information contained in the choices you make.  In their romantic lives, some people are shopping in 7-11 rather than Safeway.  Some do so by their own actions or past behavior, and some because they truly have poorer quality options in life. More importantly, some people are routinely misinterpreting the behavior of their partners, and thinking things signal commitment that just don’t. 

Okay, enough for now. More on implications of signals in the near future.  (That’s signaling my intention, btw.)

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Love Me, Love Me Knot: "I thought you loved me!"

I came across this study described in a little write up on the Science of Relationships blog, by Samantha Joel.  An excellent summary on an excellent blog. 

Samantha Joel describes a study published last year (2011) by Joshua Ackerman, Vladas Griskevicius, and Norman Li.  This follows up perfectly from my last post, where I suggested that, on average, it was more critical for women to get clear signals about commitment from men than vice versa as relationships are progressing—or potentially progressing.  This is because women have a lot more at risk simply because they can become pregnant and have babies and men do not.

A lot of commitment dynamics and commitment decoding issues are tied up in that simple biological fact above.  I’ve discussed the importance of this in numerous places.  The findings of Ackerman, Griskevicius, and Li fit perfectly within this thinking.  They use some pretty complex evolutionary and economic theory to make their key points, but I can distill it down pretty clearly for the current themes on my blog:   

On average (it’s always on average, remember that!):

1.  Men tend to express love in a new romantic relationship before women do.

2.  Most people believe it’s the other way around.

3.  Men and women have different emotional reactions to the expression of love before versus after having sex. 

A couple of quotes from the research paper make the important points rather well:

            A presex confession may signal interest in advancing a relationship to include sexual activity,whereas a postsex confession may instead more accurately signal a desire for long-term commitment. (p. 1090)

          On the face of it, this reaction appears to suggest that men are quite interested in early commitment. However, after the onset of sex in a relationship, men exhibited somewhat less positivity to confessions of love. (p. 1090)

LOVE ME, LOVE ME KNOT, LOVE ME NOT

Feelings of feeling in love—and, more importantly, expressions—can be affected by the desire to have sex. That’s why when an immediate desire to have sex with the possibility of having sex make for a confusing picture regarding signals of true long-term interest and commitment.  So, for someone interested in deeper commitment and/or tying the knot, “love me, love me not” decision situations are pretty critical.  Does it mean someone wants to become more intertwined—knotted, if you will—just because he or she says they love you?

As I’ve talked in numerous posts and writings, signals about commitment are a really big deal in understanding what’s going on in relationships. If you are looking at a signal that has little signal value related to what you are trying to discern, you can misread the situation by a wide margin.  And I do think there are fewer clearer signals related to commitment in developing relationships than their used to be.  I’ll talk about Facebook pretty soon, as something pretty interesting has emerged there in this regard—and if you are in the zone of life dealing with all these things personally, you know where I’ll head on that. 

I will end by asking a similar question to the one in the last post. What truly signals commitment? What do you think?  What are you sure of? Does it work the same way for you as for others you might be romantically interested in?  That’s something it may be worth being less sure about.

If you want to read more, two of my papers get pretty far into this whole issue of both signaling issues related to commitment and differences that may often matter related to either gender and/or personality attachment styles.  So, if you want to go deeper, have at it.  Here are links to two papers. 

Our journal article on commitment, signals, attachment, and the formation of commitment:

"Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039217/?tool=pubmed

My article on men and commitment and why men resist marriage but say they value it more (on average) than women.

"What is it with Men and Commitment, Anyway?"

https://www.box.com/s/1zketqdii1ccnqb5vlf9

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Rings, Signals, Sex, and Babies

Plain gold ring on his finger he wore

It was where everyone could see

He belonged to someone, but not me

On his hand was a plain gold ring

            Lyrics to “Plain Gold Ring”

by George Stone (performed by Nina Simone, recently, by Kimbra)

I’ll come back to these lyrics by the end of this post. 

Last time, I left you with a question:  Should Tyra keep the engagement ring she got from Sam?

My answer is, “yes.”  Tyra clearly feels like she lost something of value to her with Sam breaking off the long engagement—time wasted on her biological clock. In this particular case, the value of the engagement ring is in line with how they came to be commonly used in the US over the past decades:  A promise by a male to a female of following through on the intention to marry. The reason that I feel like the economics writer I noted last time (O’Brian) was wrong about it no longer makes much sense for a female to keep a ring if an engagement ends is that there is one thing that has not changed—biology. Women are the ones who get pregnant.  Yes, there was that one exception and maybe a few others, but . . . ..  Women are also the ones who bear children (goes with the whole pregnant thing).  Lastly, with a growing number of exceptions, women are still far more likely to be the ones who spend the most time on child care. 

Biology affects societal and cultural trends and customs.  This aspect of biology makes women, on average, more vulnerable than men to things going wrong in dating, mating, marriage, and family development. This is why it has been widely recognized that, ON AVERAGE (meaning, there are many exceptions), it’s more critical for females to properly decode the commitment levels of men, early on, than vice versa.  Some aspects of advances for women in careers and earnings counter this, but there is still not way to wipe out the fundamental differences that begin with who can and who cannot have a baby.

While the use of customs to clarify commitment seems to me to be waning, there is a perfectly good rationale for the existence of societal customs that require romantic partners, male or female, to produce clear signals of commitment as a relationship progresses. Further, it’s most crucial that those who stand to lose more if things go South protect themselves by getting the clearest evidence of commitment that’s possible and appropriate for a relationship stage from their partners. Sacrifices made by one for another are one of the clearer kinds of signals one can get about commitment. However, these run more risk of being misinterpreted. Another would be societally sanctioned emblems of public commitment: for example, the engagement ring, Facebook status designations and so forth.

Back to the sexism of biology for a moment: I think there could be a further biological bias in the mix here that makes it harder for the one who is most committed to see accurately how committed a partner is.  Women (and, no doubt some men) have more active oxytocin systems than their partners, and this propels sacrificing behaviors that may be, unfortunately, not shared.  To make a good thing worse, oxytocin can boost trust, but that does not mean it’s boosting trust according to facts.

Looking for lasting love? Here is some advice related to these themes. 

1.  If you can become pregnant, it’s especially important for you to look for, and wait for, clear evidence of a mutual commitment to the future before allowing yourself to get too deeply drawn in.  That’s why there has, historically, been some protection in marriage compared to things like cohabiting (especially without engagement); there is no doubt what commitment is intended and public about marriage.  To be the most protective, that evidence of your partner’s commitment should be seen clearly by you and others. 

Some of you may be thinking, “hey Scott, what do you mean by ‘if you can become pregnant?’” 

Simply this: Is it biologically possible for you to become pregnant?  You may or not be intending to have sex and/or you may be using birth control.  Birth control methods have failure rates.  So do intentions not to have sex.   

2.  Whether or not you can become pregnant, do you attach strongly to people, quickly? If that’s you, you also are at greater risk from not looking for cues about commitment. Your own desire for connection, along with the power of oxytocin, can make you misread the signals about how committed a partner is to you.  Lots of people find out, painfully, that they were “over-giving” to a partner who was never going to become more seriously committed.  Kinda of gives “over-share” a whole new definition.

3.  Think about the markers that you think should give you valid evidence about the commitment level of a partner in a relationship that is progressing. What do you think you need to see? Give some serious weight to what you might look for that is public.  Public displays of commitment beat the snot out of private, ambiguous messages and hints about commitment.  DTRs are nice, but it takes a lot of skill and guts to do them right.  So, it’s good to have clear ideas about what else to look at to decode commitment. 

The haunting lyrics from Plain Gold Ring, posted at the outset here, get what I’m going after as the most protective.  It is an example of an emblem of commitment that is so unambiguous that partners and outsiders know exactly where things stand.   

4.  If you have a friend or two that seems really wise and knows you well, share what you are thinking and see if they can knock some holes in your ideas about correctly decoding commitment.  Love is blind but does not have to be. 

Here are some links to older posts of mine that are directly related to these themes: 

Decoding commitment

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2010/10/decoding-commitment-when-sally-met.html

Is Roulette what You are Playing?

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2009/08/hand-held-hand-played.html

Having the Talk:  DTR I

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2009/05/dtr-dance-avoiding-talk-i-wrote-in.html

Having the Talk:  DTR II

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2009/05/dtr-part-ii.html

Oxytocin and Commitment 

http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2010/03/relationship-development-and-oxytocin.html

Kimbra (amazing new singer coming out of New Zealand) has a wonderful YouTube of Plain Gold Ring, if you are interested.  Here

Rings True

                   If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Beyonce, Single Ladies

Is Beyonce’s famous line sexist or what? What does it mean to put a ring on it? What if you put a ring on it and then wanted the ring off it? That's my focus here, but I'll  come back to other aspects soon.

Do you ever wonder about how certain cultural rituals developed? While marriage is a worldwide phenomenon, the customs around it vary tremendously by culture and era.  If I had another professional life to live, I could enjoy being an anthropologist studying marriage and family. Let’s talk today about engagement rings and a recent story in the news about their history.

While engagement ring customs are not universal, there are universal aspects of marriage customs that govern various factors related to marriage such as courtship, rules about betrothal, and rules about how and if a marriage can end. The customs vary but they often have a lot to do with assuring true intention to follow-through and provisions for the security of a union that is the basis, often, for a family as well as the joining of two families (the latter still being considered very important in many parts of the world).  

Especially in an era where marriages are founded around the principles of intimacy and deeper connection, a central role that commitment plays is to secure romantic attachment. When there is intense attachment to another but unclear commitment, it makes most people anxious about the potential loss of the partner. When commitment is clear and working well between two partners, it promotes safety in the connection and the future of the relationship. People relax and invest when there is safety and clarity in commitment.

Therefore, some customs around romantic relationships represent emblems of commitment and they serve the function of signaling security in commitment.  Enter the ritual of engagement rings.

Matthew O’Brien at the Atlantic writes about business and economics, and recently wrote a piece about engagement rings that a friend noted I’d be interested in. So right. The piece is entitled, “The Strange (and Formerly Sexist) Economics of Engagement Rings.”  It’s an excellent little piece. O’Brien notes the degree to which this custom took hold was propelled in our culture by a marketing campaign by N. W. Ayers on behalf of DeBeer’.  This is fascinating, though it makes me feel about as warm and fuzzy as knowing that greeting card companies started some commemorative days I am emotionally attached to and celebrate. By the way, did I tell you when World Commitment-Related-Blog Day is? It’s coming up, but I have not set the exact date. I have to design a line of digital cards, first, that you can send to friends through my site here, for a fee, of course.  If you’d rather just keep your schedule free from another day where something is celebrated, just send me 5 bucks and forget the card. US funds are preferred.  Old diamond rings, no longer being used, are acceptable as well.

O’Brien points out that there used to be laws about the breach of a promise to marry (similar to how their used to be laws about the breach of promises made in marriage).  These laws allowed women to sue men for failing to follow through on marriage plans. Apparently, since even many decades ago, it was not uncommon for a couple to have sex before marriage, and virginity was highly prized when one became married, males could be forced to compensate females for reducing their value by having sex with them but failing to follow through on the promised marriage (which often became the pretext for the sex happening in the first place).  Note the logic here. Women were more likely to give something of value to men in the context of the male promising commitment to the future.

You may have noticed that times have changed in a few respects here. O’Brien cites work by a legal scholar Margaret Brinig that supports the idea that the engagement ring (expensive engagement rings—with Diamonds, thanks to DeBeers’) became an actual custom performing the same function as the breach of promise laws once those laws started to disappear. So, the legal obligation was replaced in some parts of society with an economic promise of forfeiture should a male promised to a woman not fulfill the promise to marry. Hence began the custom that a woman keeps the ring if the man bails. These days, you’ll see plenty of debates in advice columns about if and when a ring should be returned based on how a marriage has been called off.  O’Brien seems to think this debate is over, but I’m not so sure it is. He considers it somewhat obvious that the woman would give the ring back to a man who did not follow-through on a promise to marry.

All of this raises some interesting questions.  Let’s deal with a few here and then I’ll continue in the next post.

Q:  Why don’t women, historically, give something expensive to the man in case she changes her mind? Is this sexist in the pejorative sense of sexist-bad? Is this sexist in some rationale sense, whether one wants to think it good or bad, related to differences in men and women?  (I’ll come back to this in another post, but have fun thinking about it.)

Q: In the following vignette, should Tyra give the ring back to Sam?

Sam and Tyra started dating when they met at age 26. They got engaged at age 27, and he gave her a really nice ring.  Now they are 32. So, the engagement has gone on for 5 years.  I think this is a new trend, by the way, long engagements. For some, endless engagements reflect a desire to tell others they, as a couple, are more committed than average but it’s not as much a plan to marry as a way to signal this higher level of commitment to others—“we’re off the market but we may never really walk the aisle.”

Anyway, Sam and Tyra are now 32, have been cohabiting for 4 years, and they are still engaged.  Sam starts to fall for a woman at work, and the gravitational pull toward this new woman just grows and grows.  After some anguish and a lot of effort to work through untangling their lives, he achieves enough escape velocity to move on.  (See recent, prior notes on inertia!)

Tyra is feeling VERY burned. Of course, the burning could have happened just as easily either direction, but in this case, Tyra felt that the engagement and the cohabiting were sure signs they were going to get married. She plans to keep the ring and she wishes it were bigger still.  In his article, O’Brien suggest that women would/should generally give rings back in this day an age because are increasingly likely to be the ones with the good jobs, and therefore, do not really need the collateral of the ring. While not stated, I would imagine he and many others these days would also not consider Tyra to have given anything more away than Sam has by them having sex and no longer being virgins. It is an interesting question to consider, though, if she was risking more, even in this, and how that is the case.  Again, maybe something I'll get into in the next post.

At any rate, Tyra doesn’t feel like Sam owes her for her no longer being a virgin. She feels that was pretty mutual and not something to blame him about. And while she's deeply hurt about him leaving her for another man, that's not the biggest reason she feels he owes here, either. She feels Sam owes her for wasting time on her biological clock. You might say she is "ticked" off. Tyra wants children and Tyra wants a nuclear family to raise those children in. Tyra has read a great deal about the biological clock and knows well what her odds are and how they have already changed, and what time might be left on the ticking biological clock. Tyra does believe she has lost something of value because she’s lost some of her window on one of her most deeply held life goals.

Does Tyra keep the ring? Should they have talked about the meaning of the ring in the first place, and what happens if what if happens?

Next up, a post on sexism and commitment and babies.  Should be fun.  I promise you, and if I have your number, I’ll give you a ring when I post it.

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Catalogue of my Blog Entries by Theme/Subject

To all who might be interested, I've started a catalogue of all my blog entries so far that is organized by theme. For example, some of the major themes with multiple blog entries over the years include: 

- Commitment & Series:  Sliding, Deciding, Coasting, Decision Making

- Decision Making 
- Cohabitation
- Sex & Hooking Up 
- Marriage, Babies, Children, and Less Committed Couples 
- Cognitive Dissonance 
- Oxytocin 
- Selection Effects, Free Will, Problems in Science 
- and others 

Just get the document at this link coming up, and you can click and open any of the links you like under these different themes and it will take you to the entries one at a time.

The document is called: Blogs by Scott Stanley The Catalogue 

May you all be groovy, Scott

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Here We Go Again: More Passionate Debating about Cohabiting before Marriage!

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You might take some time looking at the latest dustup about cohabiting before marriage. These fracases used to come up about once a year, then maybe twice a year. I think they are getting more frequent.

The current, new energy around this topic was generated by an editorial in The Sunday New York Times, written by a clinical psychologist (Meg Jay), entitled: “The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage.” Go ahead and read it or skim it. Then come back. You might need to Google it as the NYTs seems to have a way of making the link not work.

Those of you who know our work will recognize how much Meg Jay’s piece hovers around the points we make and our findings at the University of Denver. She is primarily drawing attention to the underappreciated downside to cohabitation. In our work, we call this inertia, noting that the inertia of living together makes is harder to break up than dating without living together. If you want a quick summary of the concept of inertia as we describe and study it, see my post from last week, just below. If you want a sense of the research we (Galena Rhoades and I along with our colleague Howard Markman) have been doing, see the document here. That’s for those of you who want to more deeply absorb our research and the place of it in the empirical literature surrounding these debates.

Back to The New York Times and this cultural moment. I’ll share some links with you where people are reacting to Meg Jay’s piece, and then I’ll make a few comments about each.

Natasha Burton’s: Cohabitation-Divorce Link? I Don't Think So.

1. First off, note her utter certainty about the research, that there is no link between cohabitation before marriage and how marriages do. She suggests this is a debunked idea, so move on. In fact, she links to another blog for more depth on that point (Hanna Rosin’s, here). Note that the research in question focuses only on divorce as an outcome. We show variations of the cohabitation effect (really, the “before mutual plans for marriage” cohabitation effect) in numerous published studies, including in recent samples, particularly on dimension of relationship quality. I also think the divorce effect still exists, but a little less clearly than in the past. There are complex issues about research in play there, which I’ll skip for now. The main point here is that we find that cohabiting before engagement is associated with, on average, lower relationship quality in marriage. The whole reason this is interesting is because of the main point Meg Jay makes—that cohabitation has a downside. In our work, we call it inertia.

2. Burton is dismissive of Jay’s points based on her own belief that the issues being raised are settled matters in social science (which is not true). Jay's points are more consistent with a lot of empirical evidence than Burton realizes.

3. Ironically, Burton falls back on what she criticizes in Jay without apparently noticing it: using anecdotal evidence, but from her own life. She describes her own process of cohabiting in ways I would consider unusually careful and deliberate. In our national sample of cohabiters, we find that 2/3rds describe something more like sliding than deciding in terms of how they began to cohabit. Burton's personal anecdote amounts to showing that she is a decider, yet, this is not remotely what most people actually do. In implying the importance of it, Burton shows substantial agreement with points Jay makes toward the end of her editorial but she gives Jay no credit on this score or any other.

4. Burton references Hannah Rosin’s blog. Rosin notes, rightly I think, that the biggest “train wreck” coming next may be the rise in serial cohabitation. She points out that this pattern is linked to poverty and other background risk factors. Nevertheless, I think this emerging trend has huge implications for children and that it will become common regardless of social strata.

What often seems lost in these discussions are simple things. Serial cohabitation becomes serial because a first cohabitation ended and a second one began, with perhaps others to follow. While there is selection in play (meaning prior risks are involved in the total risk), what a person who's had one cohabiting relationship end does next has to have some influence on their cumulative risk. At times, people talk about selection in this area of research as if they truly do not believe that there is a single thing such a person can do to lower their risks--the risks are just baked in and that's just too bad. Sure, the point is never, ever said harshly like that; but the implication of the thinking is harsh, deterministic, and hopeless.

What if such a person, despite the odds stacked against them, chooses to go slowly and decide if, when, and how they were to cohabit again rather than just sliding into the next round of cohabiting? Maybe especially "what if" if they have children. Is that a crazy idea? For those of you will jump right into the poverty issue on all of this, noting how much more challenging for people in poverty, I want to say, "of course it's more challenging if you are in poverty." But maybe it's especially important to think about the decisions one does have control over when one has the fewest options of all.

This next piece by Anna Weaver, entitled Should Couples Be Wary of Cohabitation? recognizes one of the main points that Meg Jay was driving toward.

1. Anna Weaver focuses on a key point Meg Jay made: “Whether you agree with premarital cohabitation or not, Jay's point is well-taken. Before you combine utilities or your coffee mug collections, how about a little discussion of where this all is leading?”

2. It seems to me that people have to be pretty stridently offended by any sense that there could be a downside to cohabiting before marriage (or before engagement) to react the way some seem to react to a piece like Meg Jay’s. Anna Weaver is not offended; she gets the obvious point.

One more blog to check on here today. And thank you, Bill Coffin, for pointing me to so many of these today.

Check out this piece on a blog called “Cheap Talk,” entitled Living Together Before Marriage Leads To Divorce?

The author of this entry, Jeff, writes: “Does this make any sense? Isn’t a couple who goes straight to the sliding in before getting married ultimately just as locked in as a couple who completely abstains from sliding in until they are locked in by the bonds of wedlock?”

I can’t tell who Jeff is, but he understands something about the research in this area and something about selection. He does not seem to me to be aware of a lot of research, but some.

I think Jeff’s argument gets close to the whole point but misses the critical part. There are many types of relationship situations that are more constrained than others: cohabiting is more constrained than dating, most of the time, and marriage is more constrained than cohabiting, most of the time. I think this is the crucial piece too many people don't see clearly about cohabiting compared to dating. Now, add the fact that most couples slide into cohabiting. That means people are often giving up options before making a choice. That’s part of why being married or at least engaged before cohabiting can matter to how things turn out. (Again, we find this over and over again in our studies.) Back to Jeff. When a couple gets married, everyone realizes that their marriage may not last and could even be disastrous. But in marrying, everyone also knows that the two people are choosing to be more constrained together rather than sliding into more constraint. The decision precedes the big increase in constraints. Sliding into cohabitation is something different, entirely. That's too often the whole point, of course; one or both partners may not be ready to make a deeper commitment and sliding avoids confronting this issue. Of course, that turns out particularly badly if one partner is pretty committed and only finds out later that the other never was. There is a reason--a serious reason--why the book "He's Just Not That Into You" has been a bestseller.

To be fair about the research, many couples slide and do fine. In fact, in this current dustup, there are countless comments from folks pinned to the various articles around the web about how it all turned out fine for them and they have been married for X number of years. That's good for them. It’s just that the odds of it not turning out so fine go up when we take lightly transitions of any sort that increases constraints when we are not even noticing how that is happening. The less clarity there is about what cohabiting is and what it means for a couple (either because they are not already married or engaged, or they have not talked about it openly and clearly), the more risk there is of getting stuck. Some couples get stuck a long time, and you can see it in their lower marital quality. And I'm not even raising, right now, the issues of how children are involved. See a few posts back if you want to bring that issue into the mix, here.

It doesn't seem to me to be all that radical to raise questions about why cohabiting does not always work out the way people think it will. Or maybe it is? People sure get energized about this topic. Compounding all this, media arguments about cohabitation often pretend to be centered on science. But the science here is very complex, and patterns and risks vary such that different people have different risks related to the same behaviors. None of the references to the science on cohabitation in all the stories I have seen this week show any kind of sophistication in understanding the research or the phenomena. It's like we, as a culture, are the couple that can't talk clearly about what's really happening when we begin to cohabit, so we slide.

For those of you who are skeptical of there being any issues of risk involved in how Americans cohabit before marriage, just how far do you want to go to argue that there is nothing worth pondering in all this? How believable is it, really, that it just does not matter how or when or why a person enters a relationship pattern that can make it harder to break-up?

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From Playlist to Paylist: iPods, iPhones, and the iNertia of Cohabitation

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I’ve always been into music. You didn’t ask but my tastes are very eclectic if you’d like to know. My father, who passed on last year, was a geek before the word was popular. He was an electrical engineer with a pocket protector, but on top of that, he was into music—playing it (piano, organ) and listening to it with top-of-the-line audio equipment. That means I grew up around great speakers, tape players, and high quality turntables. (You could call the latter “record players” but seriously, we called them turntables. They sort of looked like things you’ll see some Hip Hop bands using now-a-days, in case you’ve never seen one.)

What would have been unimaginable when I was growing up was the mp3 player. When I was little, the closest things we had to something small you could carry around and listen to were transistor radios. A 9 transistor radio was a sign of impressive technology, back then. “Wow, bummer Tim, but it looks like you only have 6 transistors.”

The revolution in music listening, for me, came when mp3 players were out for a while and I realized you could pack a lot of music onto the little things and stick it in your pocket and have it with you wherever you went.

It was obvious to me, from even early on, that there was inertia built into whatever pathway one chose into digital music. Early decisions could take on a lot of weight in terms of how you’d be listening to music (and how much you’d pay) years and years later, or how often you’d have to re-rip your CDs or rebuy your mp3 songs. I resisted iPods for a long time for three reasons. First, I just didn’t want to be assimilated into the Borg. You had to commit to the Apple eco-system to get the most out of iPods. I was a PC guy then and really still am (though, geek that I am, I so have a MacBook, and I like it. For a little PC Mac humor, see my past entry here.)

Second, being into PCs more than Macs, I went with Microsoft’s commitment to the WMA format. Apple and iPods used the AAC format, and you could not play the files from one system in the other (for the most part). Third, I had always thought, and still do, that there are some non-iPod players that just sound better than any iPod device o iPhone ever made—like just about any model Sony mp3 player, for example. I will spare you the technical reasons why this is true.

I finally succumbed to iPod and now iPhone; not because of sound quality but because of ease of use.

ABRUPT SHIFT TO RELATIONSHIPS HERE

I and my colleagues have been working with a theory of what’s risky about cohabitation prior to marriage. It goes like this: all other things being equal, compared to dating without cohabiting, if two people are sharing one address, they will have a harder time breaking up, even if the relationship has serious weaknesses or problems. The reason is that cohabitation has more inertia than dating but not cohabiting. Whether or not one believes it is right to live together outside of, or before, marriage is determined by values and religious beliefs. That’s not my topic in this post. I’m focusing here on inertia, here.

Inertia is a great concept from physics speaking to the amount of energy it would take to move something a different direction than it’s already going (or to get an object at rest moving at all). I and my colleagues (especially Galena Rhoades) have been testing just about every prediction we can related to the theory of inertia and cohabitation. We have consistent, extensive evidence for it. What about cohabitation creates inertia? I’m not going to take space to give you a list, but just pause for a moment and think about it. Really. Just take a minute. You’ll think of a lot of things that can make it harder to break up after a couple moves in together and lives together for a while.

An easy way to think of why inertia matters comes from thinking about two different types of commitment: Dedication and Constraint. The inertia problem with cohabitation comes from the fact that too many couples increase their constraints for staying together before they fully have clarified their mutual dedication to be together. That gets to why, for example, we have predicted and found, over and over again, that couples who wait until marriage or at least engagement (or some other serious, mutual, public plans to marry) report, on average, more marital happiness, less conflict, more compatibility, and on and on. [For those who believe that one should not cohabit before marriage, engaged or not, realize that I’m focusing here on one of the major explanations for why cohabitation can be a risky, not making a recommendation for how to cohabit before marriage.]

PLAYLISTS AND PAYLISTS

Okay, to repeat. I’m a geek. I read the computer magazines regularly and I read a lot about the stuff on the web. I was delighted this week to come across a wonderful article where a real tech writer likened her experiences with her iPhone to all the points I made above about relationships. The author’s name is Marguerite Reardon, and you can read her whole article here. Please check it out after you finish reading tis post. I’m going to give you a few quotes from her write-up.

She writes:

But sadly now I’m feeling a bit stuck with Apple. I’d like to check out other smartphone platforms, but doing so is going to require some work on my part. Like many who have been sucked into Apple’s clutches, it was innocent in the beginning. . . . Initially, I didn’t realize the commitment I was making. I didn’t think about the fact that I was locking myself into a platform for the rest of my life. But with each new product I bought from Apple, the deeper I fell into the borg. And now I feel like it would be painful to break up with Apple. Not because I love the products or company so much, but because it would be a huge pain in the butt to transfer all my stuff to a new platform.

This is a great definition of what I now officially dub iNertia.

iNertia = That effort it would take to move all your stuff to a new platform.

You moved in with iPhone? How much effort would it take to move out and move in with Android? (I do suspect an Android might be better at doing the things around the home you hate to do.) Or to move to, or back to, Windows Mobile?

And now for my favorite lines in Marguerite Reardon’s piece:

It reminds me of my mother’s relationship advice: Never move in with a boyfriend before you’re married. Not only will you not have any place of your own to go when you have a fight, but when you start combining your lives before you’ve really made that life-long commitment to marriage, it’s much harder to break up if things don’t work out. It starts feeling more like a divorce than a run-of-the-mill break-up.

This is a smart woman with a smart mom. I bet her mom has a pocket protector. She has to, since she has such an excellent grasp on prevention. I can’t really sum up what inertia says any better than that. She gets how iNertia has built up around her use of iPhones, iPods, and the whole Mac ecosystem, and she gets how this is exactly how some people get on the wrong path with this or that partner in life.

Think about romantic relationships before marriage. Metaphorically, what in romantic life has the same type of implications as the path one is on in terms of music format choices, device options, and an ever expanding list of apps? Don’t just think about cohabitation. Cohabitation is just the easiest way to explain inertia as it affects developing romantic relationships. There are many other aspects of how relationships develop that have the same effects. Can you see them? Are you living them?

If you are looking for the love of your life, you don’t have to be assimilated by the Borg. You can at least keep it from happening by accident.


NOTE: If you’d like a more formal review of our research on cohabitation and inertia, see the link at the left of this page (under “Linkage”) for a document you can download that reviews our published studies. It’s the “summary of our research on cohabitation” link. We have a lot more coming, in the pipeline.

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Attachment and the Perfect Storm

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In my recent posts, I noted how there was sometimes way too little attention to how societal trends and family dynamics affect children in the ongoing and varied discussions of cohabitation, marriage, and family. Here, I want to pick up on a basic point that seems to me most important in all of these matters: the development of attachment systems in children.

ATTACHMENT

Starting in the late 1950s, John Bowlby (a psychiatrist) and Mary Ainsworth (a developmental psychologist) refined and put forth a whole system of thoughts about the importance of attachment in human relationships. They focused on the ways in which the early interactions with caregivers (usually parents but also other key adults around children) in the life of a child set up powerful dynamics of security and insecurity in relationships. In a paper that became a watershed in the field of adult attachment theory, Hazan and Shaver (1987) showed how attachment dynamics beginning in childhood have important implications for adult relationships, both romantic and otherwise. While I do not believe that there is a theory of everything in psychology, many people believe that attachment theory is about as close to that as exists—at least when it comes to human interaction and associations.

In a nutshell, the entire system speaks to what happens in human relationships when children start out in life by either getting a secure sense of the dependability and availability of others or a sense that there is little security in important relationships. To break down a lot of thought into the simplest elements, many talk about the differences in adult behavior between those who started with secure attachment versus those with insecure attachment, who may then demonstrate either avoidance of attachment in later relationships or anxiety about attachment to others (with behaviors like dependency and clinginess being hallmarks of anxious attachment styles).

For my purposes here, just realize that the whole system has a massive amount of logic and empirical evidence, and it generally strongly supports the idea that secure relationships with caregivers when children are young is really crucial to both the future of an individual child as well as the overall functioning of society.

THE PERFECT STORM

I often talk publicly about the metaphor of The Perfect Storm. You may have seen the movie. I was riveted when I watched it. The movie was about what happened in 1991 when a commercial fishing boat, the Andrea Gail, got caught in a legendary Atlantic storm. The Perfect Storm itself was caused by the unusual alignment of 3 powerful weather systems that essentially mixed over the Atlantic to create, well, you guessed it, The Perfect Storm. The name arose among climatologists who were awed by the nature of the storm—or the storm of nature. Wikipedia has information about it, if you want to read more (click here).

I like the metaphor of the storm because I believe that we may be approaching a time where such powerful systems are going to collide in such a way that the vessel of society has some serious difficulty staying afloat.

To be clear, I’m generally an optimist. Yet, to be honest, I’m really good at doom. My wife, Nancy, sometimes refers to me as her “husband of doom.” Let’s just say I have a gift for identifying risks—a gift that is not always appreciated though it is very often useful. People argue (there are books on this very point) about whether or not we are growing into an ever better society with increasing peace and health and other benefits for the greatest number of people. I understand the arguments that say we are on that path and the evidence that supports that view (there is a lot of it). But in my own world of research and thought, there is one very large, dark horizon that I worry about, and it’s this.

To me the perfect storm for society is forming from three facts.

1. Attachment is an unalterable, important human need and reality, and how attachment systems form in individuals really matters for everything else that really matters.
2. With an ever greater amount of family instability for young children, I think we pretty much have to be raising the greatest number of children ever who will grow up with serious attachment issues.
3. The cultural systems and structures that always have helped couples clarify, form, and maintain strong commitments have been steadily eroding (with an interesting exception here or there).

Point 3 is important because, in my view, one of the most essential roles of commitment in adult relationships is to secure attachment. Point 2 is important because I think we’re generating greater needs for ways to secure attachments even as we're eroding systems that helped people accomplish this. Points 2 and 3 are important because point 1 is not going away, ever. (If you want to read a paper by me and colleagues on point 3, including with some thoughts about point 2, you can click here.)

I will come back to point 3 in a future post, though you can read more thought on that in the article linked above now if you like. I want to focus, briefly, on point 2 in coming to a conclusion in this post.

STORM GENERATION

I mentioned the work of Sara McLanahan in my post below, “Is Marriage Irrelevant.” I want to pick up on one simple, crucial point she makes in recent talks and writings, and it’s this. Because more and more children are being born in the context of an unstable (or non-existent) relationship between their biological parents, ever fewer numbers of children in the U.S. are going to have both their own parents raising them. And that has serious implications for how well people in society can attach to others.

Let’s get to the nitty gritty. When a baby’s parents do not have enough commitment in their own relationship to sustain it as a parenting relationship, they will break-up (if there was a relationship in the first place). After that break-up, the child is in the primary or sole custody of just one parent, who is most often his or her mother (it matters little which for the rest of my points). By the way, the sole or dual parent thing here is not part of my main point. Dual is great as long as the parents are not "dual"ing. Sole parents can and often do an awesome job though they have some disadvantages compared to dual parents. That’s not where I’m heading in this post.

That parent who most affects this child’s life is fairly unlikely to suddenly lose interest in having romantic connection, or even a committed partner in his or her life. That parent will become attracted to a new partner(s). Perhaps that relationship becomes serious for a while, but then it breaks up. Given the way things are, some of these romances become cohabiting relationships that maybe last longer but often break up. That intensifies what I’m trying to describe.

McLanahan notes that children born to unmarried parents are much more likely to experience these transitions in the romantic partners of their parents than other children; on average, they will experience the turn-over in romantic partner of that parent they live with a number of times. The storm that brews here is contained in this simple fact that informs the important observations of McLanahan. Let’s give it some detail:

Imagine you are 2 years old, and your mother falls in love with a man, who moves in for 13 months, and then moves on. At the very least, your world is impacted by the amount of energy your mother expends in that new romance (and new romances are very powerful). (Again, just reverse if you like if the primary parent is the father.) So, your parent is somewhat less available than before while romantically charged up. Let’s also assume that it’s pretty likely that you will be around this romantic partner a good deal, particularly if your parent and him or her start to cohabit. But that relationship ends. Now that person you attached to is gone, and often, suddenly.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Think about a child experiencing that scenario two or three times by the age of 5. I’ve not read all of what he wrote, but I don’t imagine Bowlby, in his time, could even have contemplated such a change in the way families develop at the kind of scale we’re looking at now as a society. It does not take any kind of scientist to see the implications for the growth of fundamental insecurities in the most basic human attachment systems of people as they are forming. And it really does not seem too hard to imagine the kinds of outcomes that leads to throughout society.

I could be wrong about the current direction. Sure, our society could make successful adaptations that mostly mitigate the potential force of these trends. Yet, I’m concerned about this version of the perfect storm. I do not see how it all blows over. Grab something to hang onto.

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Addendum on Prior Post Regarding Marriage and Cohabitation

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If you have not yet read the prior note (below), please do so—if you are looking for my chief thoughts on the journal article by Musick and Bumpass. Here, I have a little addendum. In addition to the major points below, it’s also worth keeping in mind that the outcome variables that Musick and Bumpass focused on are related to individual wellbeing; that is to say, variables such as global happiness, self-esteem, and depression. The work is not focusing on relationship quality differences or similarities between marrieds and cohabiters, but how the transition into marriage or cohabitation affects how an individual feels as an individual in the relatively earlier years of such relationships.

Embedded in my major point about children is this very point issue. The focus of the analyses that they conducted—which, I’ll reiterate, seem reasonable to me—is on individual wellbeing. There is a related issue in research that focuses on how the transition to parenthood affects couples. That issue is simply this. Even in that area, where much research does focus on relationship quality, I have a feeling something is missing. What is missing, often in our field, is an assessment of something one might call family happiness and contentment, which goes beyond relationship quality per se, and certainly beyond individual happiness as often conceptualized. This is important, because, like the issue of what advantages children in life, there may be other really important things in all such research that are either not being analyzed or not even being measured.

Now, if you have not read the post below yet, please do. If you want to read more about the whole issue of a concept of family happiness relative to individual or couple happiness, see one of my earlier blog entries HERE, which is one of my favorite all time entries.

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Is Marriage Irrelevant?

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I’ve been pre-occupied with some projects and travel, so it’s taken me awhile to swing back to this article about marriage being overrated that I noted in my prior post. I have now carefully read the paper and have some observations to share.

THE RESEARCH IS SOLID

The paper by Musick and Bumpass is well executed. The methods are clear and represent a strong approach to answering the hypotheses the authors set out to address. The researchers are solid and respected, and the paper is about as clear as it can be given the complex nature of the sample and the decisions the authors made in how to use it. The most important thing these scholars did that is different from many prior studies is that they looked at changes within individuals as they moved into either marriage or cohabitation rather than comparing people who are either in one or the other groups already. The latter type of analysis exaggerates the differences found in such studies compared to what these authors did in examining how transition into one or the other (or both) affected the individuals.

There are some important weaknesses in this study, noted by the authors. First, they had to include in the category of “single,” people who could have been in very substantial, high quality, dating relationships but who were not living together. They could not form a really clear contrast for what “single” means, therefore. Also, the data set is quite old now for addressing questions on contemporary relationship patterns (nearly 20 years so). Maybe the most important weakness here is that the before and after relationship transition measurements on these individuals were captured around 6 years apart. There are a lot of interesting things that happen in six years in romantic relationships, including break-ups and how those affect what you are measuring as effects at the second time point. These issues create complexities I will not go into further, but these do create challenges in addressing the hypotheses. Overall, though, I have no major quibbles with the methods, analyses, and, within some boundaries, the conclusions.

THE CONCLUSIONS SEEM SOUND, BUT ARE THEY SURPRISING?

You likely caught the sarcasm in the title of my last posting. That’s not directed at this study, per se, but at the type of headlines the study led to around the world. While I believe the findings are sound, the factoid in the headline is anything but—and such headlines foster ignorance about important aspects of life. I was recently in London, and people there where very well aware of this study and the conclusion in the fast-food type of headlines this study generated. In fact, one of the more clear and concise reports on the study had one of the most unfortunate and misleading headlines: “Marriage is overrated and health and happiness benefits for wedded couples are a MYTH.”

Headlines such as this are digested and overgeneralized in the mind of the average person, contributing to a growing belief among those in the next generation that marriage really does not matter. What does this study actually show? In a nutshell:

1. Quoting from the abstract: “The effects of marriage and cohabitation are found to be similar across a range of measures tapping psychological well-being, health, and social ties.”
2. The strongest, positive effects of moving into marriage or a cohabiting relationship are early on and dissipate within a few years.
3. Moving into cohabiting compared to marriage was associated with increases, on average, in self-esteem.
4. Contrary to some suggestions in past literature about marriage, movement into either cohabitation or marriage was associated with reduced contact with friends and family.

Here is the “so what?” point. Keep in mind the nature of the headlines that this study garnered. The headlines were everywhere and they “educated” millions of young people that marriage provides few benefits over cohabiting. Yet, what the results actually showed is that being in love, and moving closer to a partner—physically, and presumably emotionally—is typically associated with gains personal wellbeing. And, at least in the relative short-run, these effects are similar for cohabitation and marriage. Is that surprising when viewed in that light? Being in love and feeling connected to another is usually associated with increases in one’s personal sense of wellbeing. This is a lot different, though, from the headlined inference that marriage may be irrelevant.

THE GLARING OMISSION (at least in media discussions)

What’s missing? I did not see this issue raised, much less discussed, anywhere in the journal article itself or in any media story related to it: Does the status of a couple’s relationship matter for family stability? Does it matter at all for children?

As it happens, in the time between my last post and this one, the New York Times broke a story about the fact that most births to women under 30 in the US are now to unmarried mothers. This story by Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise, published on February 17th, puts much of this entire discussion in perspective. (DeParle is a highly respected chronicler of poverty and families in America. I encourage you to read that article after finishing this.)

The fact is that a child born to married parents is much more likely to be raised by his or her two parents than a child born to cohabiting parents. For example, a baby born to cohabiting parents is about five times more likely than a baby born to married parents to experience the dissolution of his or her parents relationship by age two (research by Child Trends presented in Galston’s 2008 report, The Changing Twenties). Data presented last year, by Sheela Kennedy and Larry Bumpass at the 2011 Population Association meeting, suggested that, by age 12, a child born to cohabiting parents was roughly 2.5 times more likely to experience the dissolution of his or her parent’s relationship than a child born to married parents. (See also the recent review by Smock and Greenland (2010) in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and a paper by Manning, Smock, and Majumbar, 2004, in Population Research and Policy Review).

For the elegance of simplicity, you cannot beat this one liner by one of the most respected scholars in the study of fragile families, Sara McLanahan, in a forthcoming chapter: “Martial status at birth is a reasonably good proxy for whether children will grow up in a stable household.” (McLanahan, in press)

I will repeat what I wrote about in earlier posts about cohabitation and marriage: Such findings do not mean that married people are better parents or even better able to be good parents. What these findings really mean is that a couple who has married before having children is more likely to have settled their intentions to be a family and be committed to one another for the long-term. Does that guarantee they make it? Of course it does not. But marriage does provide a clearer, more settled foundation for family life. This is, itself, important because so many studies show that children who are raised by their own two parents have, on average, a leg up in life.

So, here’s the real issue at the heart of the media flash about the study by Musick and Bumpass. It gave a strong, consistent impression that marriage really does not have benefits over cohabitation. Whether it does or doesn’t for adults, and on what type of outcomes, and in what circumstances, are interesting academic questions and fodder for social debates. (I would argue that, because of how marriage can be used to clarify commitment, it is also likely to provide a stronger foundation for long-term benefits for adults in comparison to cohabitation.) The really obvious omission from the media discussions is how marriage and cohabitation figure in the stability and early development of children. Marriage seems to matter a great deal in child outcomes. Maybe marriage is not “overrated” as a context for bearing and raising children. The individual wellbeing of adults is important, but it’s not the only thing that matters in evaluating marriage.

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Apparently, Marriage No Longer Matters

Hello folks. I’m off to a very busy beginning of 2012 and have not had time to write a new posting for 2012. However, I’m not oblivious to news of the day/week, and as many of you know who are interested in relationship issues, a new study came out that got a massive amount of press with one of these types of headlines:

“Marriage is Overrated”
“Marriage, Cohabitation Provide Similar Health Benefits”
“Few Well-being Advantages to Marriage”
“Getting Married May Not be Better than Living Together”

You get the idea. The study getting all this attention was published by the Journal of Marriage and Family in the upcoming, Feb edition. The authors are solid researchers: Kelly Musick at Cornell and Larry Bumpass at the University of Wisconsin. I cannot give people access to the actual journal article but I can steer you to the website for the journal and abstract of this paper (here). [If you do not have library access to journals, there are often earlier versions of such papers online, when the authors are sociologists (more common practice among them than psychologists like me). There is an earlier version of this paper as a working paper online. It may have important differences from the published version. It’s here.]

I have not had a chance to read this paper yet so I cannot tell you what I think about the methods, sample, and conclusions. But since many who read this blog will know I do have some biases in beliefs about benefits of marriage, I will, of course, have some opinion. Therefore, for now, before I can get to reviewing the paper enough to tell you what I think, go ahead and explore the news articles and abstract for the paper (or the whole article if you have access to journal articles) and we’ll all catch up in thinking more about it. It’s clearly an article that caught a major media buzz. For the moment, I will note that people do not always make the best relationship decisions when seriously buzzed, so think carefully about it! People can disagree about lots of things related to families, marriage, and cohabitation, but no one is very likely to argue that thinking about what you are doing in your own relationships is a smart thing to do.

What do you think of the finding? When do you think this is true and not true (that there are no particularly benefits for individuals regarding marriage or cohabitation)? Is there something left out of the discussions of these findings? (There might not be or there might be. I’ve not looked into it all enough to say what I think yet.)

I hope all of you are off to a great year here in 2012! Back to you soon on this new study.

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Through a Portal in Time

In my last post, I noted the suggestion made by some to have marriage licenses with certain terms, wherein couples would need to renew their marriage licenses periodically. While this is not yet the law anywhere as far as I know, it is functionally the type of committed romantic relationship many people have these days. Most people want to marry and most people will. But ever greater, large numbers of couples will not marry but will live together and raise a family together, before or without marriage. Perhaps unknown between the partners, each may be periodically be re-making their commitment to the other, internally. There are some people who believe this is the way it should be, even at an almost day-to-day level. To some, it’s a romantic ideal that means each partner is there again, each new day, because he or she chose to be. “I’m here with you and you with me, and we can both see from this that we love and live on together.”

That process, or something like it, is part of marriage as well other relationships. Periodically, people committed to any person, project, or thing will internally reset their sense of commitment—especially if the path taken has included challenging times. I mean, by that, gut check times where you may need to remind yourself that “I committed to this and I believe in this, and I’m going to give it my best.” Unless you have a perfectly blissful union (married or not), and you’ve had no significant challenges, you understand this dynamic. It’s part of what actually builds meaningful, lasting love in a world where relationships are made up of imperfect people.

What does the word “portal” means to you. Perhaps you think of a walking through a tunnel. Maybe you imagine walking through a field-level tunnel of a stadium, like you see in big football games sometimes, emerging into the light of the stadium, and to the cheers of the crowd. Perhaps you are a sci-fi fan, and you think about change-in-place portals (Beam me up, Scottie) or change-in-time portals (H. G. Wells’ time machine). I’m focusing here on change-in-me portals.

Whatever comes to your mind, portals have this characteristic: They are a way of transitioning from one place to another. In some instances, they are the actual pathway and in some instances they are, metaphorically, the pathway. A wedding is a metaphorical portal into a new life.

While we (our research team) do not have quantitative data on this, we have heard numerous cohabiters who are marrying comment that they are not quite sure what they are going to do to make the transition more of a, well, transition. Those that espouse this want the change from not-married to married to be really clear but it ends up feeling sort of blurry. I wish I could tell you how many people struggle with this and what most who do end up doing about it. Maybe I’ll have that data in the future. Of course, there are, I am sure, a great many others who do not worry about this.

I think many people, though, deeply desire for major life transitions to be actually transformative. They want what goes into the portal to come out the other end something different; something fuller and richer and more founded.

How does this concept apply to the renewable marriage license idea? The renewable marriage license idea fairly screams out that there is not anything like a permanent transition going on. I like to be very realistic, and I know that the transition into marriage is very much not a permanent transition for many. Many will be transitioning out of that marriage one day. Some, like Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, transition out in a matter of days. But, I’ll also say this. Because of the nature of commitment, the sense that it is intended to be permanent is really where a lot of the power lies in going through the portal into marriage.

Slowly but steadily, particularly among those who do not graduate from college, marriage is disappearing. Sometimes that is partly because of a diminished sense that marriage matters. Sometimes it’s because of a difficulty in achieving the conditions one feels are necessary to make a marriage work; for example, having a job.

Back to the main point. I believe that the reason why wedding rituals are common around the world (even if weakening today) is that they function as portals through which two people enter and two people exit, but different from when they entered. Two separate identities enter the portal and three identities come out the other side—you, me, and us. Psychologically, this transformation may have happened far earlier, or for some, it happens most powerfully because of the ritual of a wedding. For others, there is no big ritual to see but something happens inside, maybe along the way to the justice of the peace. Let me amplify that a moment. I’ve heard some people say their transition into marriage was more special and meaningful because of wedding with all the rituals. I’ve heard others, however, say that the very reason going to a justice of the peace was most meaningful was because they avoided all the stress and pomp of the wedding industry. And, just to be clear, I am sure there are couples where the inner transition happens and they never marry or do not marry for a long time to come. But I also think that the whole idea of marriage—and all the ways it happens—is really founded on making the inward change an outward act.

For some, there is no transformation with whatever transition is happening. (That’s close to one of the core applications of the principle of sliding versus deciding.) In some instances—maybe in a lot of instances these days—one or both partner avoid anything like a portal taking them from one place to another because one or both know that they are not interested in a life altering transition—at least not with this partner. Maybe the transitional object of their desire will come along in the future.

The nature of major commitments in life is to be transformative. I don’t mean magical, but I do mean symbolic of the inner process of becoming something more than two. So, in the case of love of this sort in life, the deepest desire many have is for transformation that adds something. In contrast, think about a meat grinder. It’s a transition alright, and things do change from going in one end to coming out the other. But what comes out is also nothing more and nothing less than what went in, albeit in a different looking form.

Next time, some more thoughts focused on the nature of rituals and transformation.

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Bid Adieu or Renew? Thoughts on Renewable Marriage Licenses

It seems like so many things are renewable. If I do not call Verizon and instruct them otherwise, my mobile plan will automatically renew whenever my current contract is up. My subscription to PC Magazine will renew, also, but only if I send in the little card with a check. With my mobile plan, inertia leads to renewing in that I do not have to act and do something for renewal to occur. It’s automatic. I have to act for it not to renew. In the second case, my PC Magazine subscription will only renew if I send in a check demonstrating my end of commitment to the ongoing relationship. The first type of renewal is what I like to call “inertialized.” The second type is “electable,” as in there being a process of re-election.

Both of these examples portray a commitment process. A choice point came and went, noticed or not, and one path or another was taken, and one left behind. In one case, I passively continue on the same path and, in another, I actively re-up.

What about commitment in marriage? Which is it? Inertialized renewable or elected renewable? This is an interesting question.

This might become a very real question couples marrying in Mexico City face in the near future.

Some assemblymen in Mexico City have proposed that marriage licenses be renewable, sort of like drivers’ licenses. A colleague of mine at DU, Rachel Miller, sent me the link to the story which you can click on here. So, here’s the idea. When you marry, you choose how frequently you want your marriage license to come up for renewal. The minimum is every two years. So, if you so choose, on your anniversary in every other year you not only celebrate but you decide all over again whether you have some “still do” in your “I Do.”

Before you call me crazy for even saying someone is thinking about this, read this quote from the Reuters story:

“The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends,” Leonoel Luna, the Mexico City assemblyman who co-authored the bill, told Reuters. “You wouldn’t have to go through the torturous process of divorce.”

The assemblyman suggests that the great value in this idea is that a marriage that is not fairing so well could end without the ugly or difficult process of divorce. I’ll come back to that in an upcoming post. I think the idea is actually commonly believed and I’ll explain why.

Back to renewable marriage licenses. I have some practical questions. I wonder if you could send out invitations, asking others to attend your renewal decision ceremony. Imagine your friends and family proudly standing around you as you sign the card, pay a fee, and put the renewal card in an envelope to go out in tomorrow’s mail. How could you even sleep through that night? What if it gets lost in the mail? And another thing. Can you get registered for gifts somewhere for a renewal? I also wonder if people would be a lot nicer to their mate as renewals approached, especially if they were uncertain that the renewal they hope for would be a slam dunk.

A little more seriously, I have a few thoughts and I also have a keyboard, so here they come.

Here begins the “duh” or “no kidding” paragraph, but these points are always worth mentioning lest another think one is not in touch with reality. Marriages do not always work out, and for any number of reasons. Some marriages should never have come about in the first place. Worst of all, some marriages are dangerous and damaging. Yet, in general, the whole reason that marriage does work and offers advantages in life (many advantages, on average) is because the commitment is considered to be once and for all. It is this idea that is the core of what marriage is about. Here are a few advantages of settled commitment:

1. You don’t burn a lot of energy re-deciding, periodically, if you are in or out. Deciding takes a lot of energy away from other things like building a better life together.

2. You don’t burn a lot of energy re-wondering, periodically, if your partner is in or out. The whole reason (I believe) that commitment is so important in lasting love in the first place is because it settles anxieties about whether or not there is a future together.

3. Having a strong sense of “us with a future” changes behavior in positive ways. Research demonstrates this in countless studies. People invest when there is a future. People sacrifice when there is a future. People don’t get as upset about small (and sometimes large) problems in the present when there is a sense that “we are here for each other despite our imperfections and annoying habits.” While a settled sense of a future together doesn’t (and shouldn’t) make abuse or infidelity tolerable, it otherwise does wonders for making it okay for you each to be human.

Having said those things, I can imagine one way in which this type of policy could lower the odds of divorce for some people.

Imagine a couple we’ll call Lucy and Ricky. They are planning their wedding. Their wedding is a week or two away and it’s time to go down to the town hall and get their wedding license. They get to the desk and talk to the clerk and ask for a license. The clerk says, “no problem. Just fill out this form and give me a check for the fee.” The clerk points to a section in the middle of the form and says, “Also, you have to check one of these boxes, here, to indicate if you want the renewable-term marriage or not, and if you do, what term you are choosing.”

Lucy starts to fill out the card, and she gets to the term election section. She starts to mark the “non-renewing” box (which, ironically, means perpetually renewing), and Ricky says, “hold on a second. Let’s talk about if we should go for a 5 year or 2 year term. That’s an interesting idea and there must be some advantages.”

Ricky and Lucy are now going to have a special moment. Let’s call it a somewhat late stage DTR. (Define the relationship.) As you might imagine, in their case, it becomes their last serious conversation about a future together.

Here’s my point for today. Temporary commitment is not compatible with a relationship that most people choose in the belief and hope of permanence. If the commitment is temporary, it just is, but we shouldn’t expect the benefits that come with the expectation of permanence to follow from a temporary permit.


I will stay with this theme in the next post or two because there are some more angles to explore that are interesting (or fun) or both. Can you commit to reading just one more blog entry? Two? I’m not asking for a lifetime commitment here.

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Government Funding and Questions of Impact with Relationship Education

This is another one of those posts that leans on the heavier side related to policies. Some of you brave souls stuck it out through my posts on selection and science and free will (scroll down to the entry "Did you Decide to Read This" and work your way up if you are interested). In that chain, I got involved in some of the dust up on sociologist Philip Cohen's site about marriage and cohabitation. We're onto another topic now.

Philip Cohen recently wrote about the expenditure of federal and state funds on programs to strengthen relationships between unmarried parents, marriages, and fatherhood. He raised strong concerns about what that money was buying us as a culture. These are reasonable questions. At any rate, I could not help but weigh in. So, if you are interested, see his entry here. The link seems to take you to the bottom of the page, where my long comment was on the day I made this entry. Scroll up to see his comments that led to mine. Important stuff to read and consider if it's an area you are interested in it.

Next up, lighter side again. Something interesting about marriage licenses.

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A Fascinating Site I Just Came Across

Hello folks. It’s been awhile for a new post because I’ve been attending again to family business (moving my mom to Denver from Florida).

I hope to have a new post up within the next week or so. However, I do have something of substance to share. I just found this great blog by a group of social psychologists. Their blog is at a site called “Science of Relationships.” The blog is excellent. Most of their entries are similar to some of the edgier ones of mine. The write concisely and very well about various emerging findings, and they cover a lot of interesting ground. The site is also exceptionally well organized by categories, if you like to browse. They cover the findings of many interesting studies.

For those of you who follow my work and are more on the conservative side, just note that they are not, so you’ll get a different cultural flavor on some things there than you might get from me. Anyway, their work is fun and provocative and I recommend the site to you. You would not lack for great discussion starters with students or other groups by looking through their site.

More from me soon.

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What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, Right? Thoughts on Life Before Marriage

More people are getting married later and later. Last I read, the average age at marriage for men in the US was 28 and for women it was 27. (Clearly, women in their 20s dig older men.) There is an obvious and interesting implication of this that I first a sociologist talk about around 12 years ago. He noted that there exists this increasingly long period of time in human development between when people are sexually maturing (I only mean capable of having sex and making babies) and when people are settling down into marriage. It’s really pretty amazing to think about this. It has huge implications, since the average person is not settling into marriage until 15 years after when they become interested in, and capable of, having sex.

15 years. Hm. What can happen in 15 years? Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you are aware that the answer is really, “quite a lot.” I’m going to ignore a number of interesting and related issues that I will discuss in coming blog entries (things like age at marriage and how young is too young, and the complications in life from having children from different partners).

What I want to focus on here is Vegas. Does what happens in Vegas stay in Vegas? As a side point, it’s an interesting marketing campaign they have going, especially in contrast to their prior years where their marketing was oriented toward getting people to think Vegas was a fabulous place to take the family. Call me suspicious, but I suspect the different ad campaigns were written by different people.

I’m not actually much interested in Vegas but I am interested in the Vegas mindset. The core idea, of course, is that what happens in Vegas does not touch the rest of your life. It’s a no-harm, no-foul, place with a firewall around it. You can do whatever you like in Vegas and it won’t affect the rest of your life. I have a theory about this. It has two parts.

Part 1. What happens romantically between the ages of 18 and 34 (or whenever a person settles down in marriage and family life) affects the rest of life.

Part 2. People are now more likely to believe than in the past that what happens before they settle down will not affect their prospects for life-long love and happiness.

Part 1 is really pretty easy to document. Part 2, then, is the hypothesis that matters here.

Being a geek who like’s gadgets, I decided one day to draw some figures on my iPhone that depicted this theory. In the first figure, what you see is a green line, increasing over time. Let’s say that depicts idyllic growth when it comes to romantic relationships and marriage. Things are smooth and growing toward the future.

Next, let’s make that green line kind of wiggly, because almost no one’s life is as smooth as depicted in that first picture.

Now, contrast that drawing with the next, that has a red line with serious ups and downs in romantic life.

I can be a more specific about the jagged red line. It represents taking the path in life where any or all of the following happen:

- Having children before marriage
- Having children before marriage with more than one partner
- Cohabiting with more than one person prior to marriage
- Having a number of sexual partners (for some, a lot of sexual partners)
- Cohabiting with a partner before marriage, especially before having mutual plans for marriage

Scientifically, all of these things are associated with greater risks. Of course, there are some people who experience all of these things and life turns out fine, anyway. And there are others who avoid all of these things and struggle a lot once they marriage. Nothing is destiny here, but these things are reliably associated with greater risks for struggles in marriage and/or divorce.

Now, take a look again at the last drawing above. You may not have noticed it, but it expresses my theory about what I think many people believe. Note that it suggests that one can go through their 20s and follow that red line up and down, and when ready to settle down, be right back on the green line as if nothing happened in between. That’s Vegas. It’s a visual depiction of the belief that “whatever I do in my love life before I settle down has no bearing on the rest of my life.”

I think something like the next drawing is closer to the truth for too many people. It shows one’s future options being affected. It suggests that what happens in the Vegas of romantic lives in earlier adulthood doesn't stay in Vegas for some people. In fact, for some, what happens in Vegas might not even stay in Nevada.

There is a parallel to this way of thinking in the computing world. Geeks know that you can create what are called virtual machines within a computer that can be used to surf the web or do whatever, and whatEVER happens in that virtual computer will affect nothing else about the real computer. No virus or Trojan-horse program or anything else can touch what matters. It’s walled off. In fact, some refer to this as a sandbox, conveying the idea that there is a container for playing within that you can simply leave when done. Not even a grain of sand will stick to your foot.

In thinking about this, I’m suggesting something pretty simple and not very radical. More people should think about what is going on in their love lives, go more slowly, and make the best decisions they can, rather than letting things slide in ways that put their futures at risk.

Vegas wants you to think you can do whatever you want and leave with all your options intact—all your options except for having as much spending money or savings as you had before you got there. Obviously, they want you to leave with a lighter wallet. But is real life like Vegas? Is there a magical place in a person’s love life where nothing they do matters to their future prospects? That’s what Vegas is selling: The illusion of a place without risk or consequence to the rest of your life. How about you? Do you think that life works that way?

Here’s one recent editorial making the case that life may not be like Vegas, after all. Click here.


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