Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: What Women Want (and men, too)

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

What Women Want (and men, too)

Various studies show that people are not always very accurate in understanding their choices, including choices in dating. Love may not always be blind but 20/20 vision seems pretty much out of the question.

Here’s an example from a study published last year (2008) by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel at Northwestern University. To make a (very) complicated story brief, they found, on average, that men say that what they are looking for most in a woman is good looks while women say that what they are looking for most in a man is earning potential. Those are tendencies found in various studies over many years, so this is not shocking. However, using speed-dating methods with follow-ups over time, the researchers found that both men and women were most influenced by physical attraction followed by earning potential. Men and women seem to want physically attractive partners who also bring home the bacon. Sizzle.

This could mean that women have become more like men or it could be that there has always been less of a real difference between men and women, and newer methods are better at uncovering what people may really want. I personally think things have changed in how attraction, dating, and mating work. It’s worth thinking about what all this means when it comes to life-long love, since that’s what most people want. If you are looking for love, it’s especially important to think about what you want and need on a host of dimensions so that everything does not ride on looks or money.

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

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

What Women Want (and men, too)

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