Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Help for Your Marriage

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Help for Your Marriage

This list of resources has been as a downloadable link on the side (over there > > >) on my blog for years and I decided to make an entry out of it so that it's more accessible for people.

The list is necessarily limited. There are many other resources that many people have found helpful. I am listing things what I believe may appeal to different segments of people who follow my work. That means listing some resources that are secular and others that are faith-based—and some that are in between. Also, I only list books and web-based interventions and not countless other resources on the web (e.g., counseling centers, blogs, ministries). Look around to find what best meets your needs.

Disclosure: I am co-author or author of three of the books listed here and I am a partner in the company that publishes the online intervention ePREP listed below.

Books authored or co-authored by me and colleagues

Markman, H. J., Stanley, S. M., & Blumberg, S. L. (2010). Fighting for Your Marriage. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Stanley, S. M. (2005). The Power of Commitment. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, Inc.

Stanley, S., Trathen, D., McCain, S., & Bryan, M. (2014). A Lasting Promise: The Christian Guide to Fighting for Your Marriage. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, Inc.

Other great books (Alphabetical order, by author)

Chapman, G. (2015). The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts. Chicago: Northfield Publishing.

Christensen, A., Doss, B. D., & Jacobson, N. S. (2014). Reconcilable Differences: Rebuild Your Relationship by Rediscovering the Partner You Love--Without Losing Yourself. New York: Guilford Press.

Davis, M. Weiner. (1993). Divorce Busting: A Step-by-Step Approach to Making Your Marriage Loving Again. Fireside Books.

Deal, R. L. (2014). The Smart Stepfamily: Seven Steps to a Healthy Family. Ada, MI: Bethany House.

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2000). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. New York: Harmony.

Hendrix, H. (2007). Getting the Love You Want. New York: Holt.

Web-based interventions for relationships

There is excellent research on ePREP and Our Relationship.

ePREP: Relationship/Marriage help at LoveTakesLearning.com

Our Relationship

The Power of Two: An online alternative to marriage counseling

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

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Help for Your Marriage

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