Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Many Moral Attitudes Have Changed, But Infidelity Remains Very Unacceptible

Friday, May 30, 2014

Many Moral Attitudes Have Changed, But Infidelity Remains Very Unacceptible

Gallup has a nice graphic out today and story about rates of acceptance of various things having to do with moral positions people hold, entitled New Record Highs in Moral Acceptability. As the Gallup piece notes, many things that used to be unacceptable have become more acceptable. But tolerance for a person having sex with someone other than their spouse is not one of them. Here is their graphic.

One of the oddities of how things have changed and not changed is that while romantic and sexual relationships are more ambiguous than ever, with increasingly diffuse boundaries sexually and otherwise, people, married or not, still remain strongly negative about the idea of a person having sex with someone other than their partner if they are in a relationship. For example, people in dating and cohabiting relationships also tend to expect fidelity outside of marriage. But having similar expectations about unmarried relationships does not mean the behavior is the same. People's behavior tilts strongly toward increased faithfulness in marriage while cohabitation is not actually associated with higher levels of fidelity. Many people believe that it is or should be but, in fact, cohabiters have levels of faithfulness similar to daters.

To read more about unmarrieds and extradyadic sex, I have a couple of posts from last year that might interest you (based on research in our lab). Just click here.

*

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

Friday, May 30, 2014

Many Moral Attitudes Have Changed, But Infidelity Remains Very Unacceptible

Blog Archive

Privacy Policy