Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Fear and Humiliation

Monday, March 16, 2009

Fear and Humiliation

I recently was able to hear a talk by Robert Brooks. He is a researcher and psychologist specializing in the resilience of children. He has a book called “Raising Resilient Children.” The book is excellent. In the talk I heard him give, he said something I found interesting. (Actually, he said a number of interesting things, but I’ll focus.) He said that people fear humiliation more than failure. Since he focuses on children, his point was that to help a child be resilient we need to overcome his or her fear of humiliation.

To me, one thing this means is that parents and other caregivers need to help children have experiences where failure is an option but humiliation is not. Success and failure can teach one how to grow. Humiliation teaches a person he’s defective.

How might this apply to adults and romantic relationships? In all our books and materials for couples, my colleagues and I stress the power of emotional safety. It’s what people seem to want most and it’s something relationships cannot do (well) without. It’s also not easy to hang onto it when times are tough. Most everyone can do a bit better—or a lot better—than they often do in order to make it safe for loved ones to connect. If more families were humiliation free zones, a lot of things would go a lot better in life.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this area, Galena Rhoades, and the work of other scholars on how couples go through important relationship transitions. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means, especially regarding commitment. An important paper by Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock (2005) was influential in our thinking about how couples transitioned into living together. They conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it or make any decision, but simply slid into doing so. Another paper having a large influence on this thinking was written by Jo Lindsey (2000). She found that the cohabiting couples she interviewed could not articulate how they came to be living together. In fact, as she puts it, it seemed like they had no agency in how it happened. Lindsay concluded that the fundamental characteristic of cohabitation was ambiguity, a theme we often discuss. Manning and Smock, Lindsay, and other researchers have noted that, for most couples, moving in together was nothing like a clear decision about what the couple was doing. Thus, it very often is not anything like a how people form a clear commitment. In one of our quantitative studies of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

We believe this sliding vs. deciding dynamic which is quite obvious in how couples come to live together is common in many important relationship transitions, including pregnancy, having children, work, as well as in how couples drift into regular patterns of who does what. In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."

Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog

Monday, March 16, 2009

Fear and Humiliation

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