Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Doing That Thing You Do (Redux)

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Doing That Thing You Do (Redux)

Here’s a very simple idea for strengthening your relationship. It comes from many things I have written over the years about healthy sacrifices in relationships and marriage.

I think we all know of little things we could do that are good for our relationships that we are not likely to do on any given day. My emphasis on “little things” is very important. On most days, there are too many obstacles in the way of doing big things. Of course, big things are great to do from time to time, but big sacrifices require big opportunities that are rare. Small sacrifices do not require big opportunities. They are thoroughly and routinely doable.

If you want to apply this idea to your own relationship this week, here’s a little exercise for you. Take a few minutes of quiet time and think about some of the things you have done in the past for your partner that fit these characteristics.

1. It is something under your control.

2. It is something small that you can decide to do just about any day or week you want.

3. It is something that you know is good for your relationship and that your partner tends to like.

4. It is something you are NOT all that likely to do today or this week, even though you very well could.

Go ahead and write a few ideas down.

Challenge time. Commit to yourself to do one or two of the things you wrote down in the coming week. Not 10. One or two. Develop some way to remind yourself and get after it. Don’t tell your partner what you are doing, just do it. Your partner may or may not notice everything but he or she will probably notice some of these things. But that's not the point, really. The point is doing a few small things that are good for your relationship. Your relationship will be stronger for it.

If that works for you, try this idea out for a number of weeks (there’s not really any great reason to stop).

It’s point number 4 that really puts this idea into the realm of small but meaningful sacrifice. That’s because you are recognizing in yourself that you are not likely to do this very simple thing that you know your partner appreciates. You have to decide to go out of your way, a tiny bit, to follow through.

It’s not the thought that counts. Ideas that are never put into action may be thoughtful but they are not effective. Your mission is to do something.

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(Redux—Edited from version first posted on 4-27-2009. We now include this idea in many of our books and relationship education materials because we believe it's simple and effective.)

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

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Doing That Thing You Do (Redux)

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