Sliding vs Deciding ™

Apparently, Marriage No Longer Matters

2012-01-20T12:28:00.003-07:00

Hello folks. I’m off to a very busy beginning of 2012 and have not had time to write a new posting for 2012. However, I’m not oblivious to news of the day/week, and as many of you know who are interested in relationship issues, a new study came out that got a massive amount of press with one of these types of headlines:

“Marriage is Overrated”
“Marriage, Cohabitation Provide Similar Health Benefits”
“Few Well-being Advantages to Marriage”
“Getting Married May Not be Better than Living Together”

You get the idea. The study getting all this attention was published by the Journal of Marriage and Family in the upcoming, Feb edition. The authors are solid researchers: Kelly Musick at Cornell and Larry Bumpass at the University of Wisconsin. I cannot give people access to the actual journal article but I can steer you to the website for the journal and abstract of this paper (here). [If you do not have library access to journals, there are often earlier versions of such papers online, when the authors are sociologists (more common practice among them than psychologists like me). There is an earlier version of this paper as a working paper online. It may have important differences from the published version. It’s here.]

I have not had a chance to read this paper yet so I cannot tell you what I think about the methods, sample, and conclusions. But since many who read this blog will know I do have some biases in beliefs about benefits of marriage, I will, of course, have some opinion. Therefore, for now, before I can get to reviewing the paper enough to tell you what I think, go ahead and explore the news articles and abstract for the paper (or the whole article if you have access to journal articles) and we’ll all catch up in thinking more about it. It’s clearly an article that caught a major media buzz. For the moment, I will note that people do not always make the best relationship decisions when seriously buzzed, so think carefully about it! People can disagree about lots of things related to families, marriage, and cohabitation, but no one is very likely to argue that thinking about what you are doing in your own relationships is a smart thing to do.

What do you think of the finding? When do you think this is true and not true (that there are no particularly benefits for individuals regarding marriage or cohabitation)? Is there something left out of the discussions of these findings? (There might not be or there might be. I’ve not looked into it all enough to say what I think yet.)

I hope all of you are off to a great year here in 2012! Back to you soon on this new study.

*

Through a Portal in Time

2011-12-17T18:39:00.003-07:00

In my last post, I noted the suggestion made by some to have marriage licenses with certain terms, wherein couples would need to renew their marriage licenses periodically. While this is not yet the law anywhere as far as I know, it is functionally the type of committed romantic relationship many people have these days. Most people want to marry and most people will. But ever greater, large numbers of couples will not marry but will live together and raise a family together, before or without marriage. Perhaps unknown between the partners, each may be periodically be re-making their commitment to the other, internally. There are some people who believe this is the way it should be, even at an almost day-to-day level. To some, it’s a romantic ideal that means each partner is there again, each new day, because he or she chose to be. “I’m here with you and you with me, and we can both see from this that we love and live on together.”

That process, or something like it, is part of marriage as well other relationships. Periodically, people committed to any person, project, or thing will internally reset their sense of commitment—especially if the path taken has included challenging times. I mean, by that, gut check times where you may need to remind yourself that “I committed to this and I believe in this, and I’m going to give it my best.” Unless you have a perfectly blissful union (married or not), and you’ve had no significant challenges, you understand this dynamic. It’s part of what actually builds meaningful, lasting love in a world where relationships are made up of imperfect people.

What does the word “portal” means to you. Perhaps you think of a walking through a tunnel. Maybe you imagine walking through a field-level tunnel of a stadium, like you see in big football games sometimes, emerging into the light of the stadium, and to the cheers of the crowd. Perhaps you are a sci-fi fan, and you think about change-in-place portals (Beam me up, Scottie) or change-in-time portals (H. G. Wells’ time machine). I’m focusing here on change-in-me portals.

Whatever comes to your mind, portals have this characteristic: They are a way of transitioning from one place to another. In some instances, they are the actual pathway and in some instances they are, metaphorically, the pathway. A wedding is a metaphorical portal into a new life.

While we (our research team) do not have quantitative data on this, we have heard numerous cohabiters who are marrying comment that they are not quite sure what they are going to do to make the transition more of a, well, transition. Those that espouse this want the change from not-married to married to be really clear but it ends up feeling sort of blurry. I wish I could tell you how many people struggle with this and what most who do end up doing about it. Maybe I’ll have that data in the future. Of course, there are, I am sure, a great many others who do not worry about this.

I think many people, though, deeply desire for major life transitions to be actually transformative. They want what goes into the portal to come out the other end something different; something fuller and richer and more founded.

How does this concept apply to the renewable marriage license idea? The renewable marriage license idea fairly screams out that there is not anything like a permanent transition going on. I like to be very realistic, and I know that the transition into marriage is very much not a permanent transition for many. Many will be transitioning out of that marriage one day. Some, like Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, transition out in a matter of days. But, I’ll also say this. Because of the nature of commitment, the sense that it is intended to be permanent is really where a lot of the power lies in going through the portal into marriage.

Slowly but steadily, particularly among those who do not graduate from college, marriage is disappearing. Sometimes that is partly because of a diminished sense that marriage matters. Sometimes it’s because of a difficulty in achieving the conditions one feels are necessary to make a marriage work; for example, having a job.

Back to the main point. I believe that the reason why wedding rituals are common around the world (even if weakening today) is that they function as portals through which two people enter and two people exit, but different from when they entered. Two separate identities enter the portal and three identities come out the other side—you, me, and us. Psychologically, this transformation may have happened far earlier, or for some, it happens most powerfully because of the ritual of a wedding. For others, there is no big ritual to see but something happens inside, maybe along the way to the justice of the peace. Let me amplify that a moment. I’ve heard some people say their transition into marriage was more special and meaningful because of wedding with all the rituals. I’ve heard others, however, say that the very reason going to a justice of the peace was most meaningful was because they avoided all the stress and pomp of the wedding industry. And, just to be clear, I am sure there are couples where the inner transition happens and they never marry or do not marry for a long time to come. But I also think that the whole idea of marriage—and all the ways it happens—is really founded on making the inward change an outward act.

For some, there is no transformation with whatever transition is happening. (That’s close to one of the core applications of the principle of sliding versus deciding.) In some instances—maybe in a lot of instances these days—one or both partner avoid anything like a portal taking them from one place to another because one or both know that they are not interested in a life altering transition—at least not with this partner. Maybe the transitional object of their desire will come along in the future.

The nature of major commitments in life is to be transformative. I don’t mean magical, but I do mean symbolic of the inner process of becoming something more than two. So, in the case of love of this sort in life, the deepest desire many have is for transformation that adds something. In contrast, think about a meat grinder. It’s a transition alright, and things do change from going in one end to coming out the other. But what comes out is also nothing more and nothing less than what went in, albeit in a different looking form.

Next time, some more thoughts focused on the nature of rituals and transformation.

*

Bid Adieu or Renew? Thoughts on Renewable Marriage Licenses

2011-11-25T21:21:00.002-07:00

It seems like so many things are renewable. If I do not call Verizon and instruct them otherwise, my mobile plan will automatically renew whenever my current contract is up. My subscription to PC Magazine will renew, also, but only if I send in the little card with a check. With my mobile plan, inertia leads to renewing in that I do not have to act and do something for renewal to occur. It’s automatic. I have to act for it not to renew. In the second case, my PC Magazine subscription will only renew if I send in a check demonstrating my end of commitment to the ongoing relationship. The first type of renewal is what I like to call “inertialized.” The second type is “electable,” as in there being a process of re-election.

Both of these examples portray a commitment process. A choice point came and went, noticed or not, and one path or another was taken, and one left behind. In one case, I passively continue on the same path and, in another, I actively re-up.

What about commitment in marriage? Which is it? Inertialized renewable or elected renewable? This is an interesting question.

This might become a very real question couples marrying in Mexico City face in the near future.

Some assemblymen in Mexico City have proposed that marriage licenses be renewable, sort of like drivers’ licenses. A colleague of mine at DU, Rachel Miller, sent me the link to the story which you can click on here. So, here’s the idea. When you marry, you choose how frequently you want your marriage license to come up for renewal. The minimum is every two years. So, if you so choose, on your anniversary in every other year you not only celebrate but you decide all over again whether you have some “still do” in your “I Do.”

Before you call me crazy for even saying someone is thinking about this, read this quote from the Reuters story:

“The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends,” Leonoel Luna, the Mexico City assemblyman who co-authored the bill, told Reuters. “You wouldn’t have to go through the torturous process of divorce.”

The assemblyman suggests that the great value in this idea is that a marriage that is not fairing so well could end without the ugly or difficult process of divorce. I’ll come back to that in an upcoming post. I think the idea is actually commonly believed and I’ll explain why.

Back to renewable marriage licenses. I have some practical questions. I wonder if you could send out invitations, asking others to attend your renewal decision ceremony. Imagine your friends and family proudly standing around you as you sign the card, pay a fee, and put the renewal card in an envelope to go out in tomorrow’s mail. How could you even sleep through that night? What if it gets lost in the mail? And another thing. Can you get registered for gifts somewhere for a renewal? I also wonder if people would be a lot nicer to their mate as renewals approached, especially if they were uncertain that the renewal they hope for would be a slam dunk.

A little more seriously, I have a few thoughts and I also have a keyboard, so here they come.

Here begins the “duh” or “no kidding” paragraph, but these points are always worth mentioning lest another think one is not in touch with reality. Marriages do not always work out, and for any number of reasons. Some marriages should never have come about in the first place. Worst of all, some marriages are dangerous and damaging. Yet, in general, the whole reason that marriage does work and offers advantages in life (many advantages, on average) is because the commitment is considered to be once and for all. It is this idea that is the core of what marriage is about. Here are a few advantages of settled commitment:

1. You don’t burn a lot of energy re-deciding, periodically, if you are in or out. Deciding takes a lot of energy away from other things like building a better life together.

2. You don’t burn a lot of energy re-wondering, periodically, if your partner is in or out. The whole reason (I believe) that commitment is so important in lasting love in the first place is because it settles anxieties about whether or not there is a future together.

3. Having a strong sense of “us with a future” changes behavior in positive ways. Research demonstrates this in countless studies. People invest when there is a future. People sacrifice when there is a future. People don’t get as upset about small (and sometimes large) problems in the present when there is a sense that “we are here for each other despite our imperfections and annoying habits.” While a settled sense of a future together doesn’t (and shouldn’t) make abuse or infidelity tolerable, it otherwise does wonders for making it okay for you each to be human.

Having said those things, I can imagine one way in which this type of policy could lower the odds of divorce for some people.

Imagine a couple we’ll call Lucy and Ricky. They are planning their wedding. Their wedding is a week or two away and it’s time to go down to the town hall and get their wedding license. They get to the desk and talk to the clerk and ask for a license. The clerk says, “no problem. Just fill out this form and give me a check for the fee.” The clerk points to a section in the middle of the form and says, “Also, you have to check one of these boxes, here, to indicate if you want the renewable-term marriage or not, and if you do, what term you are choosing.”

Lucy starts to fill out the card, and she gets to the term election section. She starts to mark the “non-renewing” box (which, ironically, means perpetually renewing), and Ricky says, “hold on a second. Let’s talk about if we should go for a 5 year or 2 year term. That’s an interesting idea and there must be some advantages.”

Ricky and Lucy are now going to have a special moment. Let’s call it a somewhat late stage DTR. (Define the relationship.) As you might imagine, in their case, it becomes their last serious conversation about a future together.

Here’s my point for today. Temporary commitment is not compatible with a relationship that most people choose in the belief and hope of permanence. If the commitment is temporary, it just is, but we shouldn’t expect the benefits that come with the expectation of permanence to follow from a temporary permit.

I will stay with this theme in the next post or two because there are some more angles to explore that are interesting (or fun) or both. Can you commit to reading just one more blog entry? Two? I’m not asking for a lifetime commitment here.

*

Government Funding and Questions of Impact with Relationship Education

2011-11-17T22:01:00.002-07:00

This is another one of those posts that leans on the heavier side related to policies. Some of you brave souls stuck it out through my posts on selection and science and free will (scroll down to the entry "Did you Decide to Read This" and work your way up if you are interested). In that chain, I got involved in some of the dust up on sociologist Philip Cohen's site about marriage and cohabitation. We're onto another topic now.

Philip Cohen recently wrote about the expenditure of federal and state funds on programs to strengthen relationships between unmarried parents, marriages, and fatherhood. He raised strong concerns about what that money was buying us as a culture. These are reasonable questions. At any rate, I could not help but weigh in. So, if you are interested, see his entry here. The link seems to take you to the bottom of the page, where my long comment was on the day I made this entry. Scroll up to see his comments that led to mine. Important stuff to read and consider if it's an area you are interested in it.

Next up, lighter side again. Something interesting about marriage licenses.

*

A Fascinating Site I Just Came Across

2011-11-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

Hello folks. It’s been awhile for a new post because I’ve been attending again to family business (moving my mom to Denver from Florida).

I hope to have a new post up within the next week or so. However, I do have something of substance to share. I just found this great blog by a group of social psychologists. Their blog is at a site called “Science of Relationships.” The blog is excellent. Most of their entries are similar to some of the edgier ones of mine. The write concisely and very well about various emerging findings, and they cover a lot of interesting ground. The site is also exceptionally well organized by categories, if you like to browse. They cover the findings of many interesting studies.

For those of you who follow my work and are more on the conservative side, just note that they are not, so you’ll get a different cultural flavor on some things there than you might get from me. Anyway, their work is fun and provocative and I recommend the site to you. You would not lack for great discussion starters with students or other groups by looking through their site.

More from me soon.

*

What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, Right? Thoughts on Life Before Marriage

2011-10-02T15:57:00.014-06:00

More people are getting married later and later. Last I read, the average age at marriage for men in the US was 28 and for women it was 27. (Clearly, women in their 20s dig older men.) There is an obvious and interesting implication of this that I first a sociologist talk about around 12 years ago. He noted that there exists this increasingly long period of time in human development between when people are sexually maturing (I only mean capable of having sex and making babies) and when people are settling down into marriage. It’s really pretty amazing to think about this. It has huge implications, since the average person is not settling into marriage until 15 years after when they become interested in, and capable of, having sex.

15 years. Hm. What can happen in 15 years? Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you are aware that the answer is really, “quite a lot.” I’m going to ignore a number of interesting and related issues that I will discuss in coming blog entries (things like age at marriage and how young is too young, and the complications in life from having children from different partners).

What I want to focus on here is Vegas. Does what happens in Vegas stay in Vegas? As a side point, it’s an interesting marketing campaign they have going, especially in contrast to their prior years where their marketing was oriented toward getting people to think Vegas was a fabulous place to take the family. Call me suspicious, but I suspect the different ad campaigns were written by different people.

I’m not actually much interested in Vegas but I am interested in the Vegas mindset. The core idea, of course, is that what happens in Vegas does not touch the rest of your life. It’s a no-harm, no-foul, place with a firewall around it. You can do whatever you like in Vegas and it won’t affect the rest of your life. I have a theory about this. It has two parts.

Part 1. What happens romantically between the ages of 18 and 34 (or whenever a person settles down in marriage and family life) affects the rest of life.

Part 2. People are now more likely to believe than in the past that what happens before they settle down will not affect their prospects for life-long love and happiness.

Part 1 is really pretty easy to document. Part 2, then, is the hypothesis that matters here.

Being a geek who like’s gadgets, I decided one day to draw some figures on my iPhone that depicted this theory. In the first figure, what you see is a green line, increasing over time. Let’s say that depicts idyllic growth when it comes to romantic relationships and marriage. Things are smooth and growing toward the future.

Next, let’s make that green line kind of wiggly, because almost no one’s life is as smooth as depicted in that first picture.

Now, contrast that drawing with the next, that has a red line with serious ups and downs in romantic life.

I can be a more specific about the jagged red line. It represents taking the path in life where any or all of the following happen:

- Having children before marriage
- Having children before marriage with more than one partner
- Cohabiting with more than one person prior to marriage
- Having a number of sexual partners (for some, a lot of sexual partners)
- Cohabiting with a partner before marriage, especially before having mutual plans for marriage

Scientifically, all of these things are associated with greater risks. Of course, there are some people who experience all of these things and life turns out fine, anyway. And there are others who avoid all of these things and struggle a lot once they marriage. Nothing is destiny here, but these things are reliably associated with greater risks for struggles in marriage and/or divorce.

Now, take a look again at the last drawing above. You may not have noticed it, but it expresses my theory about what I think many people believe. Note that it suggests that one can go through their 20s and follow that red line up and down, and when ready to settle down, be right back on the green line as if nothing happened in between. That’s Vegas. It’s a visual depiction of the belief that “whatever I do in my love life before I settle down has no bearing on the rest of my life.”

I think something like the next drawing is closer to the truth for too many people. It shows one’s future options being affected. It suggests that what happens in the Vegas of romantic lives in earlier adulthood doesn't stay in Vegas for some people. In fact, for some, what happens in Vegas might not even stay in Nevada.

There is a parallel to this way of thinking in the computing world. Geeks know that you can create what are called virtual machines within a computer that can be used to surf the web or do whatever, and whatEVER happens in that virtual computer will affect nothing else about the real computer. No virus or Trojan-horse program or anything else can touch what matters. It’s walled off. In fact, some refer to this as a sandbox, conveying the idea that there is a container for playing within that you can simply leave when done. Not even a grain of sand will stick to your foot.

In thinking about this, I’m suggesting something pretty simple and not very radical. More people should think about what is going on in their love lives, go more slowly, and make the best decisions they can, rather than letting things slide in ways that put their futures at risk.

Vegas wants you to think you can do whatever you want and leave with all your options intact—all your options except for having as much spending money or savings as you had before you got there. Obviously, they want you to leave with a lighter wallet. But is real life like Vegas? Is there a magical place in a person’s love life where nothing they do matters to their future prospects? That’s what Vegas is selling: The illusion of a place without risk or consequence to the rest of your life. How about you? Do you think that life works that way?

Here’s one recent editorial making the case that life may not be like Vegas, after all. Click here.

*

Marriage and Cohabitation: Another Take, Building on the Discussion of Selection

2011-09-09T17:09:00.011-06:00

This post is about cohabitation and marriage and commitment. It is also the last of five posts on key scientific issues that affect all of science, social science, and have been huge issues in discussions and debates about cohabitation. I plan for this one to be the last major, heavy science piece on those themes for awhile. For full context, see preceding posts.

I hope to put some less deep, less long, interesting posts up soon after this one has had a good run.

* * *
Backdrop for the Blog Entry Below

The Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project just released the third edition of a report entitled Why Marriage Matters. It is a document authored by sociologist Brad Wilcox, who heads up the National Marriage Project, and co-signed by a group of family scholars, including myself. You can find out more about the report, order a copy, or download the press release, executive summary, endnotes (all the references cited) by clicking on the title above.

The report created quite a stir, and reignited the continual debate among scholars about the importance of marriage and the implications of cohabitation. One particularly strong example of the debate on such matters comes from the blog of sociologist Philip Cohen. You can see Cohen’s comments on the issues as well as comments from various people in reply, including Brad Wilcox and other family scholars, on his site by clicking here. There are follow-ups in the next blog entry of Cohen, as well.

In thinking about the various issues raised in the Why Marriage Matters report as well as on Cohen’s blog and elsewhere, I wrote the following thoughts. So, here you go. Plenty to chew on and think about.

* * *
My Thoughts

Every responsible scientist in the family field understands that there are potent selection factors involved in romantic trajectories and family outcomes. Further, the income/education/poverty aspects of selection are particularly compelling and raise concerns about how individuals’ aspirations can get hammered by environments. In comparison to sociology, though, psychologists like me have an orientation toward intervention at the individual level while accepting selection. To many of us, evidence for selection is knowledge that can be used to identify people at greatest risk who may need help more than others. For example, there must be a large amount of selection involved in having low birth weight babies. Such knowledge can be used to guide policy at the macro level while also informing what to try to change at the micro, individual level. One of the concerns that I (and colleagues like Galena Rhoades) have is that selection is too often taken to imply that only the macro, societal level of risk matters. I think there is a bias in sociology in this direction because the scientists are primed to think about macro effects.

In terms of cohabitation and selection, my colleagues (Galena Rhoades & Howard Markman) and I find that you can robustly control for selection and still demonstrate risks associated with cohabiting prior to engagement (the risk of cohabiting prior to marriage appears to be clearly moderated by this). That’s not to say that we’re done studying this. We would particularly like to get longer-term marital and cohabiting outcomes in a large, national longitudinal sample we have wherein we measure a massive number of potential selection variables along with relationship status changes, relationship quality, and information about how transitions occur. Regarding the latter, we originally began to test for the presence or absence of mutual plans for marriage at the time cohabiting begins based on a theory we have that cohabitation has more inertia for continuance than dating without cohabiting. In other words, what people often miss in thinking about cohabitation is that it makes it harder to break up (once you share a single address). Yes, people are quite likely to break-up in cohabitation, but that’s in comparison to marriage. The comparison to dating is more apt for understanding some of the issues involved.

For many, moving in together allows constraints to build prior to the development of mutual, or at least clear, dedication between the partners. We have shown in a number of studies that constraints build up steadily in cohabitation and that constraints predict relationship stability net of dedication. In the latest analyses, we examine changes resulting from the transition to cohabitation using within-subjects analyses (providing a strong control for selection). Among a myriad of findings, the analyses show that constraints take a marked jump up in level at cohabitation and then start to grow at a faster pace during cohabitation. (This paper goes out for review soon.)

This brings me to one key point I’d raise related to the flurry of postings on Philip Cohen's site. Cohabitation often occurs well before marital intentions are mutually clear and public. This means that, for many couples, various forces to remain together (constraints) increase earlier in the mate selection or pair-bonding process than before, at least in modern history. Further, the type of cohabitation we believe is most associated with risk from inertia is now the most common (cohabitation prior to mutual plans to marry). (For those who would want to take marriage and/or engagement out of the picture in thinking about risk, simply insert the idea that the commitment to the future—its mutuality and symmetry—is important prior to going through a transition that is potentially constraining. Like transitions into cohabitation or having a child.)

There is a lot of selection involved in who cohabits prior to having clear, mutual plans for marriage. However, on top of those selection characteristics, cohabitation adds to the picture by making some of these already riskier relationships harder to leave. This does not prevent a child from being born to two cohabiting parents. With more children being born and raised in cohabitation, children increasingly are in homes with parents who are in higher risk relationships that have, on average, lower levels of dedication and other characteristics of higher risk. There are, of course, marriages with the same characteristics and there are many cohabiting unions without these characteristics. However, on balance, we believe cohabitation plays a causal role in risk on top of selection because of the increased constraints inherent in it. (And for some people, cohabitation likely lowers their risks, though this is more challenging to demonstrate.)

This model of cohabitation risk based on inertia fully embraces selection. In this way of thinking, cohabitation may not causes poorer parenting but it may well increase the number of couples who have or bear children who are not well matched and who will have difficulty parenting together. Hence, one can predict that a net societal increase in cohabitation that begins before partners have a clear and mutual commitment will lead to a greater number of children living in difficult contexts.

Serial cohabitation is illustrative of some points about selection at one level and individual choice at another level. Serial cohabitation is associated with later difficulties in marriage and/or family stability. Selection is involved (on average, it’s more likely for those growing up in a single parent home, those with economic disadvantage, etc.). A person who has those and other background factors is definitely at higher risk no matter if they cohabit with a number of people or not. Yet, does it seem far-fetched to suggest also that a person with such background risks can improve their odds if they raise the bar on conditions under which they would begin to cohabit with someone (e.g., strong mutual commitment, engagement, or marriage)? In line with inertia, a person doing so would make it less likely she or he will get stuck, at least for a while, in a difficult spot. More importantly, if a single parent avoids extra cohabiting relationships, they also reduce the degree to which their children are exposed to significant attachments that end. Further, there is reason to believe that such a person could reduce the possibility of child maltreatment since the odds of that occurring are greater with live-in partners. Even with selection, a person making such adjustments in their personal life is changing here-and-now behavior that matters. Fortunately, this is one area where experiments may show if the chain of logic holds up. Such an experiment was designed by my colleague Galena Rhoades, but it is, as yet, unfunded.

That brings me to the matter of cultural and dyadic aspects of commitment. There are reasons why marriage, including the ceremony, actually should matter regarding outcomes. This can be debated endlessly, of course. A conceptual rationale may be the best we can do here, since this is not an area where any of us are going to get to do an experiment and randomly assign people to marriage and not marriage.

First, marriage signals a lot about commitment. While marriages are much weaker than they used to be, at least in terms of stability, part of what I believe is protective about marriage is that it conveys a less ambiguous signal about commitment than that conveyed by cohabitation. This matter of signals was becoming a big focus in Steve Nock’s work before he passed on, and, what I am pretty sure was his last published writing was focused on exactly this (see references link below). At the same time that Steve Nock was focusing more on signals, spurred on by the ideas of economist Robert Rowthorn, I had been focusing on what I saw as a decline, in general, of emblems of commitment in changing patterns of how people mate. Nock and I, along with numerous others, all thought these changes were consequential. Andrew Cherlin has suggested that marriage has become a status symbol, economically, denoting wealth. That seems true. But, more importantly, I think, marriage remains the strongest culturally imbued signal of commitment status even in weakened forms.

In our work, we have found that when cohabiting is not preceded by mutual clarity about a commitment to the future (e.g., by engagement or marriage), there is not only evidence of lower relationship quality, there is a greater likelihood of asymmetry in dedication levels between partners. I see this as part of a scientific explanation for why books like “He’s Just Not That Into You” are bestsellers. One of protective things about publicly understood (and institutionalized) signals like engagement and marriage is that they require both partners to declare their commitment levels—and I particularly mean commitment as dedication, here. Without cultural forms that push this information out in the open, it is easier to have relationships where one partner does not fully realize that the other is substantially less committed. The emergence of new cultural forms like FaceBook’s relationship status indicator may start to fill a gap by providing a commitment clarifying tool for some couples.

I do, by the way, believe that cohabitation can signal higher levels of commitment (compared to not cohabiting) among some who are very poor. I think it likely that the potency of a signal is partially related to what other signals are available. For many complex reasons, marriage is so far off the radar screen in terms of experience for many in poverty that another signal like cohabitation can take on signal value. But, more generally, it seems that cohabitation conveys very little information about the level of commitment in romantic relationships. That’s why, for example, we find that infidelity is no less likely in cohabiting relationships than in dating relationships. This is not to say that cohabiting partners cannot have high levels of dedication to one another. Many do. Further, while marriage requires public clarity about commitment and cohabitation does not, a cohabiting couple can talk about their relationship and clarify commitment between them and to others. But most do not do these things, and, in fact, most cohabiting couples slide into cohabiting without discussing what it means (for more on this, see the note in the references link below). This is part and parcel with Steve Nock’s observation that cohabitation is not an institution with specific, common meanings.

Second, let’s think about the matter of ceremony as raised by Brad Wilcox. I am not a social psychologist, but it is easy to call upon that field’s robust literature of experimental studies that test the likelihood of people following through on commitments made under varying conditions. The cognitive dissonance literature is replete with evidence that the strongest action tendencies are set up by the awareness that one is making a clear choice among two or more alternatives. Further, based on the power of a desire for cognitive consistency, the more publicly one has declared their decision, the stronger the set up for following through. These are powerful human tendencies demonstrated in scores of studies. What aspects of cohabitation (when not accompanied by commitment to marriage) perform these functions? Marriage is a cultural phenomenon that, whatever else may be true, has historically required the very kinds of behaviors that a lot of science suggests will affect persistence to follow through.

To sum up, I believe that scholars can accept and respect the evidence for selection while also maintaining that there are strong, protective aspects to marriage.

References Centrally Related to this Post (click here)

For something more lighthearted, but meaningful, about personal decisions in one's romantic life, see my older post on black jack and roulette (click here).

*

Do Actors Act? Further Thoughts on Science, Selection, and Free Will

2011-09-02T10:23:00.015-06:00

[NOTE: This is the fourth in a series on science, free-will, and selection. So if you’ve not read the last three entries, I recommend you do because they build up to this one. It’s a lot to read, I know, and this is the longest entry I’m writing on this subject, but it’s all got to be said in one chunk.]

I last suggested that one might be able to show that teens can get sexually transmitted diseases without ever touching other humans. I do not mean that one can get a STD without some type of sexual contact. I mean that a social scientist might be able to get close to presenting a convincing case for something that is not possible. And, to be sure, I am exaggerating. But I exaggerate with a purpose, and it is not to be flip.

Recall what a social scientist means by a selection effect. There is a great deal of evidence of selection in numerous kinds of risk that people have in life, including in their love lives. Some of the most important selection effects are related to family history, poverty, and education. For example, people who cohabit with a number of different people before marriage are likely to have more trouble in marriage than those who do not, and they are also more likely to have selection factors like those I just listed. The interesting question is whether or not cohabiting with a number of people actually makes it more likely people will struggle in their marriages or if the other background risks simply lead to both the serial cohabitation and problems succeeding in marriage. Or both. You would not do too poorly in life to usually bet on “both” when dealing with questions like this.

My colleague Galena Rhoades and I talk about this a great deal because it affects what social scientists covey to others about what can and cannot change in their lives. I’ll get to that later after we have some fun with imaginary data.

AN EXAMPLE

Okay, now to sex. I know you have been waiting patiently. Assume you are a researcher studying sexually transmitted diseases in older teenagers. In fact, you have the most amazing data set in the history of your field. You have a sample where you know a stunning number of things. On the 25,000 people in your sample, you have measured these variables and more: family history, parental relationship quality, parental divorce (or, if parents ever married), the number of romantic relationship transitions each parent has had (and at what ages for the individuals in the sample), levels of parental supervision, personal insecurities, personality tendencies to seek stimulation and impulsivity, drug use history, alcohol use, school performance, the number of sexually active kids in each individuals’ school and neighborhood, physical health, typical blood levels of androgens and estrogen, oxytocin levels and reactivity to it, vasopressin levels, parents income, current household income, parents’ education levels, religious beliefs, religiousness, beliefs about sex, type and number of friends, specific genetic markers associated with sexual behavior and pair bonding (are you getting tired of this list yet?) . . . (Okay, I’ll stop). But, please assume I could have gone on for a while because I could have.

You have followed this sample from age 12 to 20. You and your assistants check in with each of the individuals, relentlessly, and you also have access to all kinds of records. And, you’ve not lost contact with too many people. It’s a dream data set (and it would be very expensive). You also know who has had sex, when, with whom, what type of sex, and under what circumstances. (Those GPS circuits in cell phones are really rather amazing.) You also know who has had, or continues to have, an STD. Let’s also assume that the data are really good with low measurement error; however, you also must assume that sexual behavior is pretty sensitive stuff to most people, and it’s a little fuzzier than most of the other measurements you have as to error. But still, you have very good information on sexual behavior.

It’s statistical time. Your first question is about selection. How much of the STD risk do all these variables, except for sexual behavior, explain? You crunch the data and find that you can explain 75% of the differences between individuals who get and do not get STDs. Pretty amazing. Now, you do another, similar analysis but you add the sexual behavior variables into the stew. Suppose the amount of variance explained goes up 80%. Wow. That’s a lot of explanation. You are happy because you will get this published and it’s actually kind of useful information.

Please keep in mind I’m making up an example, here. These are not real findings.

Why doesn’t the amount of variance explained shoot up a lot higher when you throw in the sexual behavior variables? In this case, it only goes up a bit higher because the selection variables explain so much, there is not a lot else to explain. Your big bunch of selection variables was so good at “predicting” who would get an STD that you hardly need to know whether or not, and when and how, people had sex. In fact, that whole having sex thing looks pretty inconsequential based on the analyses.

Quiz. Does the fact that you have just shown that selection explains a ton about who gets STDs mean that teens can get STDs without ever having sexual contact? Of course not. While we are here, I want to make a couple of complicated points. If you want to skip ahead, just move on to “three points to ponder” below.

COMPLEX BITS

First, as a risk behavior becomes something more and more people do, it, ironically, becomes harder to detect it as mattering in risk outcomes. Extreme examples are extremely useful. If 93% of people do some behavior that is risky, the fact that you have almost no one to compare the 93% to makes it pretty hard to show that the behavior matters. Plus, the 7% will be quite unusual, making what you can conclude from the comparison of limited value. Let that sink in a bit.

Second, I’m using terms here like “risk behavior” a lot here, but doing so is complicated because one of the core issues in this discussion is whether or not a behavior associated with risk is truly risky behavior. In the case of a hookup with a stranger at a party, it’s pretty obvious that the behavior is risky, no matter what else is true. That’s the point of my STD example above. But here is a different example. Serial cohabitation is associated with later difficulties in marriage and/or family stability, and, of course, there is some selection involved (on average, it’s more likely for those growing up in a single parent home, those with economic disadvantage, etc.). A person who has those and other background factors is definitely at higher risk no matter if they cohabit with a number of people or not. Yet, isn’t it pretty obvious that a person with such background factors improves their odds if they do not cohabit before marriage or cohabit only with one person, and only after having mutual plans to marry? I say this because by not having those extra cohabiting relationships, the person makes it less likely they will get stuck, at least for a while, in a difficult spot. That’s because constraints to remain together are greater when cohabiting, and that makes it harder to leave. If a single parent avoids extra cohabiting relationships, they also reduce the degree to which their children are exposed to significant attachments that end. Further, there is reason to believe that such a person could reduce the possibility of child maltreatment since the odds of that occurring are greater with live-in partners. Even with selection, a person making such adjustments in their life is changing here-and-now behavior that matters.

THREE POINTS TO PONDER: CAN ACTORS ACT?

Back to you and your amazing, fantasy data set and astounding evidence for selection. (Yes, researchers have fantasies about data sets. There, I’ve let the secret out. You might think you’ve heard about all the temptations on the web, but do you know there are some data sets out there on the web that anyone can access? I know, I should not tempt you.) So, now you have your findings and you present them to the world. You can very easily sound like you are saying that the actual sexual behavior of the teens didn’t matter much in producing risk. You’d be right in a way and way, way off in another way.

First, selection matters and it is everywhere. In fact, it’s closely related to what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. It has been repeatedly proven that we (all of us, really) tend to over attribute the causes of other peoples’ behavior to themselves and give far too little weight to their circumstances. (We happen to generously give ourselves credit for how circumstances affected what we did when we have done something wrong or poorly. Neat trick, that.) That’s why popular sayings like “walk a mile in their shoes” have real scientific oomph behind them. Environments matter, as does selection.

Second, social scientists have a difficult time figuring out how much of a risk effect to ascribe to selection and how much to experience. We can get close, but it’s hard to ever totally answer this question. One of the best ways to figure out if experience (versus selection) actually matters is to assess a massive amount of potential selection variables and see if experience still explains anything. This is an imperfect but credible and important approach to teasing selection and experience apart. This is one of the things we do in our research on cohabitation, particularly in one large sample we are following over time. We measure an amazing number of possible selection variables to “see” how much experience matters. There are other strategies one can pursue, as well.

Third, it’s not all that clear how can one actually measure whether or not people have the option to engage in, or not to engage in, a behavior associated with higher risk. You can measure if risky behavior happened but you cannot easily measure if someone had a choice. There are some ways to get close to measuring choice, but they involve very creative experiments, and these are not the kind of data most debates about selection and experience revolve around. So, while it’s hard to demonstrate that people actually make choices, and, thereby, show they have choices to make, it’s pretty easy to get evidence for selection.

An emphasis on selection can be motivated by good science and it can also be motivated by compassion and social justice concerns. That is because, in most things where it comes up, selection implies that individuals have disadvantages that contribute to how things turned out. But here’s the downside of so strongly emphasizing selection, as is truly, commonly done is social science. The misleading message carried in the DNA of selection is that you—the individual—can’t really do anything to control your odds of success in life. It’s out of your hands. And this is the greatest concern Galena Rhoades and I have identified in thinking deeply about this issue: while it’s important to take into account the hand someone has been dealt in life, it’s also important to look for ways to help that person play the hand they have as well as they can.

Very strong selection-based story lines tilt the whole board toward implying our behavior is determined somewhere other than in our decider circuits. Is that what most social scientists really have in mind when they emphasizing selection? I doubt it, but that is the implication of the message.

Sure, some people have selection factors that make it harder to choose, or even have access to, a lower risk pathway in life. But do we want to accept the idea that our here-and-now behaviors, in some of the most important areas of life, are out of our control? I choose not to believe this.

For the practical implications of how what someone believes in such matters can affect his or her love-life, see my post on gambling from last year. When you are up for reading more, that is.

Click here:
Black Jack Or Roulette? You Choose

*

Selection and Science: Cohabitation Research as the Example

2011-08-06T10:09:00.001-06:00

I’m going to build on the last two posts about science by focusing in on a related topic that is of great importance in my own field of study—that is, the study of romantic relationships. I want to start by giving you the definition of a selection effect in social science. I’ll start with an example. While it’s less clear than it used to be, decades of studies show that those who live together prior to marriage are less likely, not more, to do well in marriage. This finding keeps making headlines because the historical pattern has been very counterintuitive. After all, most people believe that one of the best ways to improve your odds in marriage is to live together before marriage. I used to say most “young” people believe this, but now it’s really most people of all ages, including the parents of people who are currently young. (More recently, by the way, it is the presumed absence of this finding that has been making headlines.)

There is a complicated debate going on among social scientists how as to whether or not this cohabitation effect is going away as cohabitation before marriage becomes the norm. I think the reports of its demise are premature. Nevertheless, if you are interested in the current findings, our work consistently shows that people who only cohabit after they are engaged or wait until marriage are at lower risk than those who cohabit before there are clear, mutual plans for marriage. That word “mutual” is pretty crucial, here. Sometime, I’ll come back to why that latter finding is very important and what theory it was predicted by before we started to test for it. Suffice for the moment that we have published many studies now with different data sets showing that cohabiting prior to engagement is associated with greater risks in marriage. Personally, I think it’s best to wait until marriage, but if one does not plan to do that, I think it’s wisest to at least be engaged, first.

Okay, that’s not really what I wanted to write about. It just sets the stage. I want to write about selection effects and here I go. The classic explanation for why cohabiting before marriage has been associated with poorer outcomes in marriage, not better, is selection effects. Selection means that there are characteristics associated with certain people that are both related to the risk you are interested in (in this case, doing less well in marriage) but also more associated with the likelihood of doing something like cohabiting prior to marriage that appears to cause risk. Are you still with me? Historically, one could have looked at all the research showing cohabiting before marriage may not be the panacea it’s cracked up to be and suggest that cohabiting prior to marriage actually harm relationships. The counter view is that the cohabiting itself has nothing to do with the eventual outcomes but that it’s the people who were more likely to cohabit—they were more risky to begin with, and they ‘d have been more risky whether or not they had cohabited prior to marriage.

There is a lot of evidence of selection effects in various types of analyses of risk in social sciences. In the case of cohabitation, those who are most likely to cohabit truly are less religious, less traditional, more likely to come from homes where their parents divorced (or never married), more likely to have a lack of confidence in marriage, more likely to have children from prior partners, have had more sexual partners in the past, and are less educated (just name a few things associated with selection). These factors are associated with more problems in marriage and they are associated with greater likelihood of cohabiting prior to marriage (and a much greater likelihood of cohabiting prior to engagement). The idea is that these folks are already “select” for risk in marriage, and they are also more likely to “select” cohabitation prior to marriage or prior to engagement. That’s a selection effect. When a social scientist uses the term, they mean to suggest that what you might have thought was the element causing risk is not causing the risk at all. It was already baked in and it just looks like that variable is causal.

Here’s the problem with selection and here’s where this post links to the past two posts about science and materialism (the view that everything that is, is material; and if enough of what’s around is was measured accurately and analyzed correctly, you could explain anything). I believe that selection has the same tie as much thought in other areas of science to the logical extension that people have no free will. You may think I exaggerate, but keep thinking it through. It is where the assumptions lead. In this case of cohabitation, you might think that you decide whether or not to cohabit before marriage or engagement, but in reality, selection says that such things were pretty determined long ago by the behavior of your parents and the setting of your birth and upbringing, and the opportunities these things provided or failed to provide.

My colleague Galena Rhoades and I (along with our colleague Howard Markman) have shown in numerous studies that, even if you “control” for scads of selection variables (scads is scientific speak for a large number), you still can show a clear risk for cohabiting prior to engagement. With selection massively controlled for, such findings provide some evidence suggesting that there is something about the experience of cohabiting that is causing risk on top of the selection into the risky pathway. Ah, but hold the fort (I suppose that means, don’t abandon your position too quickly). If you are a modern day scientist, and you deeply believe that better measurement ultimately causes more thing to be explainable, you would not take studies controlling for known selection variables as evidence of the behavior being risky but, instead, as evidence that you have not yet figured out all the other selection variables to measure in order to wipe any sense that there could be something causal to cohabiting prior to engagement or marriage. This idea is analogous to a scene in one of the Star Wars movies. Remember when the good guys are “flying” through the sea in a submersible, and a giant fish of a sort starts snapping after their little boat, and then a larger, even more giantish fishlike sea creature comes out of a hole to bite down on the large fish pursuing the good guys? Crunch. Qui-Gon Jinn says: “There's always a bigger fish.” A scientist often believes the same (often, rightly so, by the way): There is always another variable or set of variables that, if properly measured, explain what is not yet explained or incorrectly explained.

I will stop here for now but stay tuned. Next, I’m going to argue for how science might be able to show that a person could get a sexually transmitted disease without every touching another human being. And I don’t mean from a toilet seat. I mean to use that point to highlight a problem science has with measuring and analyzing free will. For now, I'll keep a lid on it.

*
If you are interested in some of our publications related to cohabitation, here are a few citations.

Kline (Rhoades), G. H., Stanley, S. M., Markman, H. J., Olmos-Gallo, P. A., St. Peters, M., Whitton, S. W., & Prado, L. (2004). Timing is everything: Pre-engagement cohabitation and increased risk for poor marital outcomes. Journal of Family Psychology, 18, 311-318.

Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2009). The pre-engagement cohabitation effect: A replication and extension of previous findings. Journal of Family Psychology, 23, 107-111.

Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55, 499 - 509.

Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., Amato, P. R., Markman, H. J., & Johnson, C. A. (2010). The timing of cohabitation and engagement: Impact on first and second marriages. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72, 906-918.

Are You Determined?

2011-07-14T11:30:00.004-06:00

Continuing from my last posting, I want to talk about science and where it is heading, ideologically. In many ways, this post builds on the last one, to set a foundation for the next one which will be about romantic behavior.

Before I go further, realize that I am a huge believer in the value of science as well as a scientist. I believe that science has made all our lives immensely better. Way better.

Here’s a basic fact about science. Science cannot address things that cannot be measured. Sound measurement is about knowing what to look for and when to try to capture it. Science is dependent in many areas on technology, and technology limits what can be observed. For example, if you have followed physics in the past decades (you know you love it!), smaller and smaller particles have been found. Just when scientists think they may be at rock bottom in terms of fundamental particles, someone smart comes along and proposes or demonstrates more, even smaller things, at another level lower.

Ironically, to measure the smaller particles (known or hypothesized), the machines have to be larger and larger. The largest machine on earth right now to measure the smallest particles we’ve “seen” yet is in Europe, and it’s call The Large Hadron Collider. That’s not where BMW, and Volvo, and Mercedes test the safety of their cars. But, it is an oval. Go read about it sometime. We in the US were building a HUGE collider in Texas but that got abandoned (after spending a couple billion dollars or so) because of how much more it was going to cost.

Where was I going with that? Actually, not in a circle. Science is limited by what it can measure and analyze (some things can be measured well but we have very poor abilities to analyze the mass of data thoroughly: weather patterns, brain functions, entire genomes, and how Justin Bieber got so popular).

Here’s a crucial idea that was embedded in the ideas in my last post. Suppose you are both a scientist and a believer that there is nothing else in reality or the universe except things that are material. By this I mean you are a devout materialist. Typically, this would mean to most people that you don’t believe in God or spirits or stuff like that. But it means something more than that if the belief is totally, philosophically, grounded in the idea that all there is is what is material. In other words, all there is in existence is stuff that can potentially be measured because all there is, really, is material and energy (another type of material for sake of argument here). Really important point: Not all scientists are total materialists in this sense, but many and maybe most are. And, whether particular scientists are or not, science functions as if all there is is the material universe.

I think that means that the Big Belief at the end of the Scientific Rainbow is this: If you could measure everything well (or enough of everything), and you had a super computer powerful enough to make sense of how everything that was measured related to everything else that was measured, you could theoretically explain everything that exists and everything that happens. Science rests on the assumption that meaningful things can be measured and studied. The most far out extension of that basic idea is that there is really nothing else but what could potentially, eventually, be measured and studied. If you really believe that, then you can easily believe that a butterfly flapping it’s wings in the heart of the Amazon jungle is somehow connected to everything else that has happen and will happen in the universe. You just have to have the data and the understanding of how the flapping connects to the things around it, and the things around those things, and the things around those things and . . .

The quandary in all of that is that the strongest view of this idea leads one to push personal choice further and further to the side. At least to me, it reduces ultimately to a strictly deterministic view of the universe. I do not really see how it can go anywhere else. Potentially, if I knew every variable possible and could understand how they relate, I could predict exactly who would read this blog entry and who, when starting to read it, would read this far. And if I understand all the variables well enough, I could predict that before I wrote it. (And could have predicted that I’d write it.) Okay, I’m nearing the strange edge of how material and time intersect here, so let’s move away from that chasm. I’m not Einstein.

The prediction that follows from all of this is pretty simple. While science has, and continues to be, immensely valuable to everyday life, it will also keep pushing the edge on the fundamental notion that people choose what they do, and that presents some serious challenges for thinking about personal responsibility.

Next time, I will focus on how these ideas affect scientists’ views of the romantic behavior of individuals.

*

Did You Decide To Read This?

2011-07-02T00:39:00.001-06:00

Am I responsible for writing this? Surely, you think the answer to both questions is “yes.” But don’t be hasty in your, um, decision about it. There is a strong movement in our country that challenges the general viewpoint that people choose what they do and are therefore responsible for what they do. The movement is led by a community that you may not guess to be at the heart of these ideas. It’s a non-secret society. (There is no secret handshake or hidden meetings. Actually, there ARE some hidden meetings, but there are lots of public ones, too, and their sacred texts, called journal articles, are public for all to read.) They call themselves Scientists. I am one of them.

Let me give you an example in this post and then more in future ones. Then we’ll see where that takes us over the course of some thoughts on the nature of us. (I say we’ll see where that takes us, which sounds rather passive than active, because, remember, you are not really choosing to read this and I did not really choose to write this, either.) Are you confused yet? That’s okay, it’s nothing you did. At least not consciously.

This example I’ll share in this post just happens to come from a field close to my field of psychology, and it’s recent, so it serves my purpose well. (There I go again, talking like I have a choice in what I’m writing. Dang, it’s going to be hard to adjust to the notion that I’m not a decider. And, if I’m not a decider, does that mean I’m always a slider?)

A recent column in the Wall Street Journal reviewed the core thesis of a book called “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Unconscious Brain.” Incognito was written by a cognitive neuroscientist named David Eagleman, and the column I wrote was written by Christopher Chabris. You can read the column here, if you like (well, I mean HERE). I’ve not read the book, only the column, so I cannot vouch for the book and am trusting Chabris for getting the basic points right. That’s not too hard to do since I know the main idea quite well from various things I’ve read over the years in my field of psychology. I’ll quote Chabris. He writes:

“In "Incognito," the neuroscientist and polymath David Eagleman argues that the actions of the unconscious are so powerful and pervasive that they "dethrone" the conscious mind and, when combined with the inescapable influences of genes, undermine our traditional ideas of self-control and free will. Most of "Incognito" is an attempt to replace the intuitive notion of the mind as a unitary, conscious actor with a description of how the brain really works, drawing on recent research.”

By the way, I want to be a polymath, too. That sounds so cool. I’m pretty sure I’d like this book, Incognito, a lot. I like thinking about these kinds of things. However, my current reading backlog is pretty huge, and my writing backlog, huger, so it may be awhile before I get to it. I’m going to cut to the chase now (I write with irony in this 6th paragraph). What Eagleman and many other researchers have concluded is that there is a vast amount of processing and, yes, decision making that happens outside of our conscious awareness I’ll go out on a steady, short limb here: Most of us think it’s our conscious mind that decides what we do. However, I can vouch for the fact that there is a lot of compelling evidence for the idea that quite a lot of processing does seem to happen in our minds outside the realm of our deciders. If that’s true, it raises interesting and thorny questions about what we’re really in control of or choose.

Eagleman gets the implication of this. Totally. I’m sure this part really jazzes him about his science. Again, I’ll quote Chabris because his column is so readily available.

“Mr. Eagleman wants us to revamp our criminal-justice system in light of neuroscience. He begins with a good point: We tend to excuse behavior when we can identify an "organic" cause for it, such as a brain tumor, and we tend to blame perpetrators when no such excuse can be found. But, he observes, this is just an artifact of our current state of knowledge. As we become able to measure more and more abnormalities, the scope of blameworthy actions will shrink and shrink.”

Chablis writes a nifty ending to his column, after those words, but you’ll have to go to his column to read it. BUT NOT YET, silly. After I’m done. I’m believing that you can choose to stay here and finish reading this first. I’ve got faith in your chooser choosing that, and then choosing to come back in a couple of weeks for the next installment on this.

That last comment in the quote above about the scope of blameworthy actions shrinking and shrinking is an important, common theme that most scientists will readily recognize as having an analogue in their own field. The common theme is this: as we are able to measure more and more—provided this measurement coincides with substantial growth in the capability of organizing and analyzing the mass of what is measured—the realm of mystery, serendipity, and free will shrinks. More and more will be explained and less and less of what we now attribute to chance and/or choice will evaporate into explanation. What that means to me is that more and more will land in the category of determinism. There are many implications of this, but the most profound ones are related to our notions of decisions, accountability, and responsibility. I’m going to choose to return to these themes in my next blog posting or two. I want to discuss this philosophically, but then focus on how this issue shows up in the notion of selection effects in my field of social science.

*

YouTube of my Core Sliding vs. Deciding Talk

2011-06-08T21:11:00.000-06:00

Last year, I gave one of my favorite talks to the teachers at the school where my sons attended High School. That school is Denver Academy, and they excel at working with young people for whom typical school strategies are less than optimal. My wife Nancy and I really believe in what they do and wish more children could have what our sons have had there. So, when they asked me if I would give a talk to the teachers on an inservice day, I was happy to say yes.

The talk I gave is one of my core talks. It focuses on patterns and changes in how romantic relationships form these days, and what some patterns may mean for eventual success in relationships--especially marriage.

If you are interested, you can see it at YouTube by either clicking HERE or Googling "Scott Stanley Tedx Denver Academy".

I know of people who have found this talk online and have used it with high school or college classes for discussion starters. If that's something you do (teach), I think it's a great idea (whether or not you agree with all the things I bring up!).

Have at it.

*

Does it work? Does Relationship and Marriage Education Work?

2011-05-13T10:39:00.001-06:00

I have long been a believer that solid forms of marriage and relationship education (MRE) can help individuals and couples to have stronger, happier relationships. By education, I mean strategies that teach skills, strategies, and attitudes associated with success in relationships; I do not mean therapy, though therapy can be useful if done well. I started working with my colleague, Howard Markman, in 1977 when I was a junior at Bowling Green State University and he was a young assistant professor. His passion then, now shared by me and all our colleagues, was to build prevention oriented, relationship education strategies to help couples prevent major problems in marriage before the problems could get a serious foothold. His particular vision was to make such programs as empirically based as possible. Over the years, we and our colleagues have developed one of the better known approaches, called PREP (The Prevention and Relationship Education Program). [By the way, we recently changed the word “enhancement” to “education” in the acronym, to reflect the terms favored in the field at this time.]

By “empirically based,” we mean something specific. First, we mean basing the content of such programs on sound science about how relationships work, how they fail, what is risky, and what is protective. Empirically based programs utilize the scientific knowledge that is out there to inform the strategies. Second, empirically based programs are tested in outcome studies. Empirically based curricula should be tested and found to be helpful, or, if not directly tested, at least include some of the types of strategies used in programs that have been tested. Third, empirically based programs are regularly refined. By this we mean that scientifically based programs are always changing in some aspects based on new knowledge that is being generated in the field. New studies may suggest an idea is outdated, or may suggest a great new way to get a complicated point across to people, or may show that some type of strategy is more effective than another. Like many other things that stay cutting edge these days, empirically based programs of relationship education stay up on what is going on. These points are foundational to the work we do on PREP and all the curricula we have developed over the years.

There are two primary types of educational models are designed to help achieve success in relationships—especially marriage: Services designed for existing couples and services designed for individuals whether or not they are currently in a relationship. The field has focused the most energy, for decades, on couples. Many studies and approaches focus on couples who are planning marriage or couples who are already married and want to tune up their relationship. There are many studies—outcome studies—testing the effectiveness of MRE with couples. The more recent, rapidly growing focus is on relationship education for individuals. The difference between individual focused models and couple focused ones is very important. Most couple focused approaches assume the work is with existing, committed couples, who want their relationships to work.

The stronger individually focused models tend to be designed to help individuals realize their own aspirations for success in love and marriage, not only by teaching skills but also by helping participants recognize healthy and unhealthy relationship patterns, and to consider carefully if a particular partner is a good choice for them (and their child, if they have one or more). Even when there is an existing relationship, individually oriented models do not assume that it’s healthy or that it should continue. A lot of the effort in individually oriented programs is focused on getting people to go slower, make better choices, and to be thinking clearly about what will get them closer to their own goals for happy, healthy and lasting love; in other words, to be deciding rather than sliding when it comes to key turning points. There are growing uses of this approach with individuals such as high school students, college students, single parents, adults receiving government supports (like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), military service personnel, and so forth. You might wonder why some government or private systems would care about the love lives of individuals. The answer to this is really pretty simple, and it’s summed up best by a colleague of mine named Marline Pearson. In extensive work with teens and those in young adulthood, her battle cry has been, “Your love life is not neutral.” By this, she simply means that what people do in their love lives can have a huge impact on whether or not (or when) they will achieve other important life aspirations (educational, vocational, familial, etc.). I’ll write more about this in a future post.

Do these educational approaches to helping people build lasting love work? I believe there is a lot of evidence that they do. Do they work as well as they could? No. See point three above under the notion of what an empirically based, best practices model does—it regularly gets improved as more is learned. That is essential because many of us in this field want to learn how to continually improve what we do. There is always more to learn. Back to the point about if such strategies work. Here is what I know:

• A large number of studies show that MRE for couples works. Since it’s a newer field, there are fewer studies, but promising none-the-less, showing that individual oriented relationship education works.

• There are now a number of important, meta-analytic studies showing that MRE works, particularly when it comes to helping couples communicate and manage conflict better. There is also evidence that MRE helps couples maintain overall relationship quality (such has marital happiness). Meta-analytic studies are very valuable because they are studies of the effects of many other studies all included in one large analysis. I will include some citations for such studies at the end of this post.

• Studies in this field generally show that those who need help the most are most likely to get the greatest benefit from such services. This is not always true, but, in general, when studies examine higher versus lower risk couples or individuals, those at greater risk often benefit the most. However, the benefits for higher risk couples may be shorter-lived, suggesting the need to provide occasional booster shots (to augment the original inoculation) to help couples stay on track. Higher risk can mean many things, such as being from a family wherein your parents divorced.

• There is plenty of evidence that MRE services are much more available to middle income and up couples. This has been changing in the past decade, mostly related to various government efforts, but generally, like in any other area, effective services are the least available to those who are economically disadvantaged. For a great example of recent, positive evidence that such efforts can be successful, see the link (here) that I posted in an earlier entry on this blog.

• A few studies show that MRE can reduce the odds of divorce or break-up. This has been harder to show than changes on dimensions such as communication quality largely because few studies track couples long enough for break-up and divorce to be evaluated. And tracking is crucial here. If you cannot track most of your original sample (people move, and such), you have less opportunity to meaningfully test for these possible benefits.

An ongoing study of ours provides a good example of evidence of MRE helping couples reduce the odds of divorce. We are currently conducting a pretty large study of our program, PREP, as used by chaplains in the US Army. Chaplains in all branches of the services have used PREP, as well as other approaches, to help people in their marriages for many years. PREP has been used extensively. In this particularly study, funded by NIH, we randomly assigned couples to receive either PREP for Strong Bonds (Strong Bonds if an overall initiative of relationship strengthening efforts by Army chaplains) or serve in a control group that did not receive PREP (at least not at the same time. Some couples in the control group no doubt eventually have received it if they sought to do so.) There are two parts of the sample in this project of ours. (The largest wave began a few years ago with the smaller wave following about a year behind.) The initial wave of couples was much larger than the second wave, and tended to be couples exposed to high stress related to ongoing war efforts. With the initial, larger wave, we found that those couples receiving PREP had 1/3 the divorce rate (2%) one year later compared to the control group (6%). We did not find this difference in the smaller, second wave, however. When we average the two groups together, we find that the PREP couples have an overall divorce rate at the one year point that is 50% of that in the control group. This effect may well weaken over time—many preventive effects do, which argues for providing ongoing training and supports to couples who are undergoing numerous challenges. At any rate, this was one of the most encouraging findings in the MRE field to date because it is based on a large sample that we continue to follow in a study using the most rigorous scientific procedures for evaluating program outcomes. (for more information, click here)

When it comes to examining the evidence about the effectiveness of MRE, there are both optimists and pessimists. I believe that the evidence favors the optimists; however, I think pessimists can raise legitimate concerns about how to increase effectiveness. If you want to know more about studies on the benefits of MRE, you could find any or all of the following. There are many other important studies but these ones would get you on the right track. (I am not allowed to provide the actual papers to you because of copyrights, but if you are really curious and have access to an academic library, or you search online, you would be able to find the abstracts or whole papers in one way or another.)

Blanchard, V. L., Hawkins, A. J., Baldwin, S. A., & Fawcett, E. B. (2009). Investigating the effects of marriage and relationship education on couples’ communication skills: A meta-analytic study. Journal of Family Psychology, 23, 203-214.

Carroll, J. S., & Doherty, W. J. (2003). Evaluating the effectiveness of premarital prevention programs: A meta-analytic review of outcome research. Family Relations, 52, 105-118.

Hawkins, A. J., Blanchard, V. L., Baldwin, S. A., & Fawcett, E. B. (2008). Does marriage and relationship education work? A meta-analytic study. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 76, 723 -734.

Hawkins, A. J., & Fackrell, T. A. (2010). Does relationship and marriage education for lower-income couples work? A meta-analytic study of emerging research. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 9, 181–191.

Also useful:

Halford, W. K., Markman, H. J., & Stanley, S. M. (2008). Strengthening couple relationships with education: Social policy and public health perspectives. Journal of Family Psychology, 22, 497 - 505.

If you care about this area and whether or not MRE is effective, it is up to you to read what you can and form your own conclusion. As should be obvious, as a founder and developer of a major model of education used in this field (PREP), I have a financial interest in such efforts (in the spirit of full disclosure). However, I can tell you that my interest in actually helping people trumps all other interests here. Fortunately, many of the most important studies in this field—including the meta-analytic studies—were not conducted by Howard Markman or myself or our team. Of course, other studies have been conducted by us. There. That’s a brief (but long blog entry!) overview of the evidence suggesting MRE works. You will decide for yourself if such efforts may be useful to you personally or to others.

*

Getting the Girl

2011-05-04T17:15:00.000-06:00

Picking up from my last post, I am going to tell you about one of the most interesting hypotheses that rattles around in my head over the years. At least, it’s been interesting to me. And what are blogs for but for sharing? I have not written about this hypothesis before but I’ve mentioned it in many talks over the years. Before getting into it, you should know that this is a pretty naked theory about differences between men and women (not a theory about nakedness, though it’s related). Naked theories—I mean blunt-right-out-there-saying-there-are-some-important-differences between men and women—tend to be disturbing to many social scientists. Some of that reluctance to talk bluntly about sex differences has to do with the fact that such differences are very often over-emphasized beyond all relation to the actual findings. Some of the resistance to talking about such sex differences is more ideological—coming from a desire in some to stress equivalence over differences. As I made clear in earlier posts about sacrifice and oxytocin and sex differences, it’s important to remember that we’re talking about average differences and tendencies, but any given male or female can be an exception. Okay, caveat and qualification time is over. Let the thinking begin.

First, a tiny bit of data: There is growing evidence that, in many ways, women are outpacing men when it comes to various types of achievement, including as reflected in things like the number of men and women in college, the number completing college, the number seeking and getting advanced degrees, and the number having and keeping jobs, with or without college. For example, as noted in my last post, the average college campus now has 56% to 44% females to males. The ratio of females to males has steadily gone up in the past few decades. There are more women in college than men—and more women will graduate—in most wealthy nations. Here’s an interesting little nugget: By 2001-02, the percent of women graduating with business degrees was 50% where it has been only 9.1 % in 1970-01 (see). Women have also overtaken men in graduating with honors (see). If you want to read a variety of theories about what’s going on, see one of those two links I just noted. By the way, it’s not that men are less likely than ever before to go to college; rather, it’s that women have rapidly overtaken them when it comes to things like going to college, excelling, and completing college.

A very important point before we go further here: There are very good, clear reasons why women are advancing in all kinds of ways, and that is all to the good. It’s the gains relative to the efforts of males that I’m most interested in here. The difference in motivation and outcomes has also led to a bit of crisis for achieving women: How can you find a male-mate who matches up on achievement? This is not only an issue related to college and degrees, but you can hear similar concerns raised by less educated, steadily employed women who sometimes have trouble finding men who are similarly employed and producing income. (And, lest anyone accuse me of being simple, let me just say that this last point is very complicated by massive changes in the availability of different types of jobs in our economy. But that’s not my main focus here. I’m also not touching income disparities right now. But if you want to go there in the context of these types of points, see this link and this link. But do come back, because I have an idea you won’t see in these other links.)

So, my premise, shared by a growing number of folks is that women are now outstripping men in achievement motivation. If you believe that, we’re good to go on my theory of why. If you don’t believe that, well, you shouldn’t really care why I think that may, in part, be the case.

Time for the naked sex theory (pun unintentional, but intentionally left in): Men are slowly but steadily achieving less relative to women, in part, because they no longer have to achieve like they used to in order to “get the girl.” There, I said it. And I believe it. I don’t believe this the whole story, but I believe it is part of the story. The other parts are sprinkled throughout the earlier links I gave.

Men used to have to achieve more to get a woman. They had to show drive and economic potential, and they had to step it up in terms of commitment to the relationship. It’s always made tons of sense for women to hold out until they see evidence of responsibility and achievement (like education, a steady job, a ring, marriage, etc.) because women have been more vulnerable if things go wrong (women have babies and men do not, and it seems to still be true). So, all I’m sayin is that men are, in this present day, much more able to have sexual relationships with women without putting up achievement. When he had to achieve more to “get the girl,” the average male did so.

Am I saying that males are shallow and only interested in sex without commitment? No. In fact, I don’t think of the average male that way at all. However, I believe that societal changes of all sorts are contributing to an environment where men have less motivation than in the past to achieve and commit. And, if you think about it, that would also add more pressure to women to do all the more in terms of their own achievement so that they do not have to rely on men like they used to. Again, this part is a great trend for women and their opportunities that may, in part, be related to some not so great trends for men. And, in case you already thought this far, I’m not “blaming the victim” by suggesting that women are having trouble finding similarly motivated men because they give in too much sexually. I am saying that large changes in society have conspired to put both men and women in a tight spot when it comes to both achievement, mating, and the development of commitment that benefits both. Many of the changes are good, but some changes have resulted in complex dynamics that are not good.

Alright, think that over. If you want to read more that goes this direction, try this piece by Mark Regnerus, the sociologist I mentioned in my last post. He arrived at the essence of the same hypothesis I just presented here: that men are lagging in achievement motivation because sex has become more available at low levels of effort—for men. He wrote cogently about this in a piece in the online magazine, Slate (click here).

Go ahead. Indulge the idea that there might be some differences in the sexes that matter when it comes to sexual activity and achievement.

*

Markets and Sex

2011-04-18T17:55:00.001-06:00

Got your attention? You could be thinking this will be about sex trafficking. Nope. Maybe this will be about the selling of sex, as in prostitution. Nope. I’m going to write some about how the number of men relative to women in a given geographic area affects dating and mating behavior. There is a lot of evidence that an uneven distribution of men and women affects how men and women behave toward one another. The word “market” here comes from the idea that there is a supply and demand dynamic between men and women based on this the relative numbers of men to women (or women to men, if you prefer).

I’ve read about this aspect of relationships, off and on, for many years. A few years ago, I read the book “The Logic of Life” by Tim Harford. Among many other interesting things, he discusses how having an uneven number of men and women in a society affects divorce rates and also the likelihood of settling down with a partner in poor communities (where many men are incarcerated, affecting the balance in the number of men to women). Here’s the basic idea. Whenever men or women are a relatively scarce resource, the gender with fewer numbers has more power in the “market” of mating and romance. A person in the smaller group has more options to choose from, which is the basis of greater power. And what that means is simply that they have to give up less to get more. Harford does a very nice job of talking about how great the skew in power is based on even a small difference in relative numbers.

I came across this idea recently in a USA Today article, entitled “More college 'hookups,' but more virgins, too.” It’s a fine article by Sharon Jayson, who I have talked to many times over the years. She covers a great many interesting points in her article, but none more interesting than the idea put forth by Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas-Austin. He asserts that the growing, higher ratio of women to men on college campuses has advanced the growing culture of uncommitted hook-ups. To quote from Jayson’s article (available here):

"The women wind up competing with each other for access to the men, and often, that means relationships become sexual quicker," says Regnerus, co-author of Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying, released earlier this year.

This is a pretty powerful theory with empirical evidence to support it. Let me break it down a bit. The average college campus (according to the article) now has 56 to 44 percent females to males. Suppose Barbara is a sophomore on a campus where there are 67% females and 33% males. That would make the ratio of females to males 2 to one, right? There are two girls for every boy. Regnerus is making the point that Barbara will feel more pressure to be sexual, and sooner, with boys she has attraction to than on another campus where the ratio is 1 to 1. To attract a boy, she not only has to get his attention, but she has to keep it from going to one of the many other females around.

You know, there was a song about this idea called Surf City. The authors understood the point really well. It’s a song by Jan and Dean (somehow, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was also involved) named Surf City, and it was very popular.

The refrain was “Two Girls for Evvvverrrrrryy Boy.” Unless you are a newbie on the planet, the refrain is now going through your head. Take a moment to listen to it. Jan and Dean understood very well the dynamic that Regnerus is speaking to in the USA Today piece. Here is just a small sample of the verse:

“Yeah, and there's two swingin' honeys for every guy
And all you gotta do is just wink your eye”

That’s pretty straightforward. Guys in Surf City, the land of loads of females, don’t have to do a lot to get the girl. A wink will do. It used to be a wink and a nod, but with this deflation in the market of boy-meets-girl, it’s taking less and less. Have you noticed? (I’ll leave alone the definition of what “get the girl” means at present. Suffice to say, that for my purposes here, it means everything from a little to a lot.)

As Harford and Regnerus suggest (as have many other social scientists), in such circumstances, the girls will be competing against each other; over time, they will offer more sexual involvement, more quickly, and without being able to demand much commitment in return. You could wonder where morals and beliefs about what one should or should not do come in, and I’d say this: They surely matter a lot. Beliefs affect behavior. Morals matter, but contexts also have a powerful influence on behavior.

Back to Regnerus’ point. He’s saying that the growing hook up culture on campuses is, in addition to many other influences, further propelled by the growing tendency for women to outnumber men (on campus). If this keeps up, guys may not even have to wink.

I am now reading the book by Regnerus and Uecker noted above. It’s fascinating and I highly recommend it. Next time, if I dare, I’ll share my theory of why men are becoming less likely to get college degrees relative to women. Hint: I don’t’ think it’s all about women having improved options.

*

I shall return!

2011-04-08T07:57:00.000-06:00

Hey folks, truly sorry I've not been able to post for some months. I've been extra busy with helping people in my family who are going through tough transitions. I have a lot of good ideas building up to blog about, but can't yet get back to doing so. I will, though, and I think soon.

Results of Federally Funded Study in Oklahoma

2011-02-09T11:01:00.002-07:00

As many of you know, there are a number of ongoing, important studies examining efforts to help couples strengthen their relationships. The primary goal of such efforts is to increase the number of children being raised by their own parents in stable, healthy family contexts. One of the large studies in this area is the Building Strong Families study. I recently wrote a guest blog on the results of this study from the large, Oklahoma site, which can be found at a popular policy site in Oklahoma (okpolicy.org). The blog entry I wrote can be found here.

I encourage you to check it out!

*

Sorry it's been so long since posting, folks.

2011-01-21T17:19:00.002-07:00

I am eager to get back into the groove on this. I've been taking care of some things for my parents and have not had the extra time for a bit. I will be back! Scott

Cohabidating

2010-11-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Things are changing quickly. If you consider history, the past 30 years would be just a blink, but it’s hard to fathom a period in which more changes have happened that affect how families form. The really big changes include the growing disconnection between marriage and childbirth and the growing acceptance of cohabitation as something before or instead of marriage.

I recently read a paper by one of a group of sociologists on one of the trends in cohabitation. Those researchers are Daniel Lichter, Richard Turner, and Sharon Sassler of Cornell University. That paper is entitled “National Estimates of the Rise in Serial Cohabitation” and it’s in the journal Social Science Research. These sociologists were looking at changes that are occurring in cohabitation in a very large, national data set here in the U. S. Their key focus is on the growing rise in serial cohabitation. Serial cohabitation is living with more than one partner prior to marriage (or, ever, even if one does not marry). Let me summarize the points they make that stood out to me (some points from other research they review and some from their new findings).

• More cohabiting unions now break up than end in marriage. It used to be that most cohabiting unions would end up as marriages. As the authors noted, “Cohabitation is much less tied to marriage than it was in the past – even the recent past.”

• Serial cohabitation is rapidly increasing.

• Serial cohabitation has been, and still is, more common among those at lower income levels, but it is taking off for all groups.

• Serial cohabitation is a form of “intense dating” that will lead to marriage, eventually, for many, but only after living together with a number of partners.

• Serial cohabitation is associated with a much greater risk of divorce than single instance cohabitation.

They summarize what they see in the data this way: “Cohabitation is often viewed as a stepping stone to marriage, but this view is rapidly becoming out of date.”

This is new and it is different. Things are changing again. So much so, that Lichter , Turner and Sassler think that current estimates on these types of changes lag how fast the changes really are occurring. Serial cohabitation is hot. Unfortunately, it’s also associated with things not turning out too well for people. I have to use one more quote from their paper because, to me, the statement is stunningly succinct about the implications.

On page 755, they note: “Changing patterns of mate selection – serial cohabitation, in this case – raise the specter of a growing population at risk of unintended childbearing (including multiple-partner fertility), heightened family instability, increasingly complex kin relationships, and potentially deleterious short- and long-term economic and develop- mental consequences for growing children.”

Now to be clear, good scientists (and this team of sociologists is very good) do not believe that things like serial cohabitation are causing all of what is downstream. In many ways, there are disadvantages that are there early on, such as poverty or not having parents who remain together, that cascade through life, making risks down the line greater. As just one example, if your parents never married or divorced, you are more likely to cohabit before marriage or engagement (maybe more than one time), and you are also somewhat more likely to struggle in marriage. Think of it as a series of risks that cascade through the lives of some people rather than the result of just one thing that leads to problems down the line.

Oh, did you notice the title of this post? You might have read right by it, thinking you read “cohabitating.” What I wrote is cohabiDATING. That’s my word for what these researchers are describing. Cohabitation is moving toward becoming something that’s part of the dating scene—intense dating, to be sure—and away from something that leads to marriage. Put another way, it’s becoming more part of the dating part of life than the marrying part of life.

The tricky part to me in this is always this question. What about children? I’m going to share a secret with you. Couples who are cohabiting are around each other more. Couples who are around each other more, and who do not otherwise have some beliefs that lead them to do otherwise, have more sex. And, you know what? Wait for it. I’ll say it in the most scientifically jargony way I can come up with at the moment: Net of all other variables, including selection effects, sex has a causal relationship with having babies. Put simply, sex and babies are still pretty linked even if marriage and babies are increasingly not. That makes this all matter.

Cohabitation always has been a relationship form that is more fragile than marriage. While this is true, there is a growing number of cohabiting couples having children who are functionally like married couples—they have commitment to the future and they intend and desire to raise their children together. Yet, the larger trend in things like cohabidating suggests to me that ever greater numbers of children are going to be born to couples who have not clarified a commitment (marriage or not) to a future and raising a family. Children are amazingly resilient, and many children not raised by both their parents do fine and many raised by their two parents don’t. But, on balance, it’s not a good trend when changes in family development keep trending in the direction of children being disconnected from the chance to be raised by their two parents, because that is associated with the greatest chance of the best outcomes.

*

Decoding Commitment: When Sally met Harry

2010-10-18T13:07:00.006-06:00

Commitment can be thought of in many ways. As I’ve mentioned before, a basic breakdown can be made between commitment that means dedication to something and commitment that means constraints to follow through with something. They are linked. Today’s dedication becomes tomorrow’s constraint. You decide something today—as in really decide to commit yourself to it—and things you do today (and tomorrow) because of that decision-based dedication will increase your constraint to continue on that path. This does not mean that commitments cannot be broken. They are broken everyday. Where would the news industry be without broken promises and commitments? Next time, when you watch the news or television talk shows, think about how many of the stories you are watching involve some type of failed commitment or broken trust. Onward.

Without a decision being forced by someone or something, it’s hard to say a commitment has happened. Even when a commitment has happened within an individual, it may not be as obvious to others. Sometimes that does not matter much and sometimes it matters a lot because you want to know how committed another person is—to you, for example. This is especially true in romance where there can be a desire for a future in one person that is not reciprocated; and even if the desire is there, when it’s unclear that it’s there, it can be pretty unpleasant for the more clearly committed partner. As I noted in my earlier postings about men and women, and my theory of average differences in how commitment develops, I think it’s pretty critical for people in developing romantic relationships to accurately assess or decode the commitment level of their partners. Not super early on, but certainly as things develop. If you agree that it’s important to be able to correctly read the commitment level in another, what signals commitment these days? I mean, what signals commitment in a romantic relationship that might have long-term potential (like in marriage)? Does cohabitation? Does having a baby? (Note, that 40 years ago, I’d not have had much reason to list having a baby as a potential signal about commitment before a couple is married. Things have been changing, as you no doubt know.)

Check back to my last post for a moment. I wrote about all sorts of things that are associated with a dating or cohabiting couples remaining together a year after we asked them to answer questions about their relationships. In that study that will come out in print soon, by Galena Rhoades, myself, and Howard, Markman, things like having a cell phone plan or a gym membership or a shared lease were more associated with staying together than having a baby together. I speculated that the reason for this is that some of these things that seem so small compared to having a baby seem to have a defining feature that having a baby does not require: they are decisions you have to make, on some level, together. Since decisions are fundamental to commitments, there is some type of commitment reflected in those small investments. Hence, the irony. These relatively minor decisions seem to reflect more about commitment than the major transition of having a child together. One of my favorite lines is coming up just about now: You can have transitions without decisions and those transitions won’t necessarily reflect commitment. I said “won’t necessarily” because they might reflect commitment and they might not. My point is that transitions without decisions don’t tell you much about commitment.

So, you cannot slide into a shared cell phone contract but you can slide into having a baby. We live in a crazy world. Does that mean you could trust that a person is growing in commitment to you if they will join you in a cell phone plan? It may be. Of course, the child would benefit from having two parents who decided to build a family together as a matter of commitment. The cell phone plan is made to expire, parenthood is not.

Think with me about a common romantic scenario. Let’s suppose Harry met Sally; I’m not sure when they met, but they met. Sally loves Harry and Harry loves Sally. That part is easy enough. They are young and in love. However, as things continue, Sally is clear in her mind that she wants a future with Harry; Harry isn’t so sure. Sally wants the commitment nailed down. Harry is not actively looking around, but he’s not sure he’s found what he’s looking for—his soul mate. Sally has a pretty critical job to do. If she doesn’t do it well, she’s at risk of becoming a character in the second edition of the book “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Sally needs to decode, over time, how committed Harry can be to her. Her job would have been easier 40 years ago but it’s not 40 years ago. I’ll write about that another time.

What things can Sally look for in Harry to figure out how committed, or potentially committed, he is to her? I’d argue that many things could inform Sally about Harry’s commitment potential. I’d also argue (and will) that there are two very common transitions that are experienced by couples that are not informative about commitment. Of course, I already mentioned them. One is cohabitation. Two is having a baby before marriage. Yes, these are huge relationship transitions. However, in the context of our current culture, I don’t think either contains much information about commitment. (There is a possible exception here when you are talking about people in disadvantaged communities. Some things do work differently in some segments of our society for a wide range of complex reasons having to do with both economics and perceptions of marriage—especially the perceived probability of success in marriage.)

Chew on two things between now and next time. Do you think cohabitation contains information about commitment (at least, in American culture at this point?). Why or why not? What provides information about commitment? What can Sally look for in order to decode Harry’s commitment potential? What made it easier to clarify or decode commitment in growing relationships in the past?

I’ll get back to you on these things.

*

First Comes Love, Then Comes . . . What?

2010-09-15T10:44:00.005-06:00

There has been a growing awareness among social scientists that marriage and childbearing have become increasingly disconnected in U. S. society. In fact, from all the things I read, the old nursery rhyme that implies a sequence from love to marriage to a baby carriage is increasingly true mostly for those with college degrees and less and less true for great numbers of women and couples in the U. S. This is a huge change. It could easily be the largest change in family demography over the past 40 years. Social scientists and policy analysts endlessly debate if this trend portends something ominous or if it is just some kind of normal societal evolution. Whatever you think on that matter, it’s certainly true that fewer children than ever before will be raised throughout their childhood by their own two parents. Further, many studies suggest that a child has some advantages (on average) in life when raised by his or her own two parents. There are many complex (and likely less complex) reasons why that would be so. (And, it’s always worth pointing out—seriously—that there are many couples raising their own children together where it’s not exactly a wonderful thing for those children to have their parents together and there are vast numbers of single parents doing an amazing job of raising their children.)

The delinking of marriage and child bearing/rearing is not as simple as it sounds. Marriage has become unlinked to childbearing but that does not exactly translate directly into unmarried parents not raising their own children. Increasingly, cohabiting couples are giving birth and remaining together as they raise their children, at least for some period of time. But, while we all know married couples have a hefty risk of divorce, this does not mean that the math looks identical for cohabiting couples. Most social scientists understand cohabitation as something that represents a much wider range of variability than marriage. By this I mean something quite simple. If a couple tells you they are cohabiting, you don’t know a lot about that couple from only that little bit of information. They could be more like a dating couple than anything else or they could be quite a bit like a married couple—and anything in between. Cohabitation as a form of relationship is far less informative about a relationship than marriage. If a couple tells you they are married, you’d have higher confidence in thinking you knew certain things about them as a couple. Broadly speaking, marriage often but not always reflects greater levels and clarity about commitment. That is why the average married couple who gives birth is far more likely to still be together when that child is two (or pick any other age) than the average cohabiting couple who gives birth. On average, cohabitation is a more tenuous context for children because there is greater vulnerability about commitment. So, the great increase in the number of children born out of wedlock, even when born to cohabiting couples, does translate into ever fewer children being raised by their own two parents.

My colleagues Galena Rhoades, Howard Markman have been studying what types of factors make it more likely a non-married couple will be together one year later. (We’re actually very interested in who is together many years later, but what we’ve analyzed so far is the one year point.) Obviously, the level of dedication one has to their partner is a factor in who will still be together in a year; those who want a future with their partner are more likely to stick to the path of having that future.

But there are other things that make it likely that a couple will remain together. In two separate studies in our lab that Galena Rhoades headed up, we find other interesting factors that predict who will remain together. For example, having a lease together, a joint gym membership, a pet, making payments on each other’s credit cards, making home improvements together—and many other such behaviors—are all associated with it being more likely a couple will be together in the future. That makes tons of sense, right? Those things reflect an increasingly intertwined life together. These types of things are part of a broader view that I and other has suggested: that there are a lot of reasons couples remain together, and some of those things are about how intertwined two partner’s lives become, and how that can make it harder to leave no matter what your level of interest is in staying. I call all such things that make it harder to leave—should you want to leave—constraints. Couples stay together because of both dedication to remain together and constraints that make it harder to part. Constraints are things that make it costly or more challenging to leave. In those two studies we have coming out, we show that all sorts of simple things—various other constraints we measure and simple behaviors like those listed above—make it more likely that non-married couples will remain together regardless of their level of dedication to remain together. (This is all true for married couples, too.)

Back to babies and couples. In one of these studies we have in the pipeline (accepted for publication) we found that all sorts of things make it more likely that a non-married couple will remain together. Things as serious as signing a lease together or sharing finance as well as less serious things like having vacation plans or a gym membership. But do you know what didn’t predict which couples would remain together? (Um, I just gave you a pretty huge clue, right?) Yes, having a baby together didn’t affect the odds of the relationships continuing. By the way, were talking about a very large national data set here of non-married people in serious romantic relationships who are generally in their 20s and early 30s. Yes, having a baby together is not one of the things that is associated with being together a year later (and we’ll be checking in the future out to two and three and four years later).

What’s that mean? It seems to me that it means things are tilting toward the place where not only is childbearing and rearing increasingly disconnected from marriage, they are becoming increasingly disconnected from remaining together as a couple who has any kind of future together, except maybe as co-parents. That makes it seems like (a whole lot like) some of these things we are measuring (like sharing finances or a pet) are decisions that reflect more about the future of the relationship than conceiving and bearing a child together. Think about that one a bit and I’ll pick up more about these issues next time.

*

Whoosh

2010-08-04T12:29:00.002-06:00

In my last post (read it first), I noted new research that suggests that oxytocin does induce trust in another (as my other posts here have made clear) but that it does not make one gullible as long as there are cues about if another person is trustworthy.

If you’ve read other posts I’ve written, you have likely figured out that I think there are good reasons to be concerned about how fast people hook up and become sexually involved with others. (In addressing these things, I’m not really focusing on big questions of how long one waits for sex—including all the way to marriage. I have views on that, but I’m working on the other end of the whole deal about just how fast things happen for so many these days.)

To recap other posts, oxytocin gets rolling with all sorts of things happening in a relationship, including touching, hugging, kissing, touching, sexual contact, etc. Hence, if oxytocin induces trust, one will be chemically nudged toward trusting a new partner one is physically intimate with as soon as things get touchy. I’ve expressed concerns that all the chemistry going on can make some people misread the situation, seeing something more meaningful than what is real or misreading cues about a partner who is not such a great choice.

Quick Illustration (otherwise known as a short bunny trail): Have you ever been in a serious chemistry area, such as a chem classroom in high school or college, or a real chem lab in some work or health setting? I’m thinking of chem labs in college. Have you noticed the overhead showers with the chain to pull and the eye washing stations? You may never have seen such in action, but you’ve likely seen what I’m talking about. Those devices are for emergencies; they are for unfortunate chemists who have gotten the wrong chemicals all over their bodies or into their eyes. In such cases, the key is rapidly flushing away the chemical before too much damage is done. Back to love. It’s blind, you know, or can be—chemically blind, that is. I don’t really mean love, of course. I mean lust and desire. (I’m not down on desire, btw; it’s a “handle with care thing,” though.) Ever known someone who needs to run to the eyewash station and flush away the chemical blindness they have going in some relationship before it’s too late? Perhaps that’s been you. Some wouldn’t do too badly to quickly use the eyewash station and then also pull the chain for the giant cold shower that’s right next door to it. Whoosh. Reset. Handle chemistry more carefully next time.

The research I wrote about last post suggests that all is not hopeless in terms of chemical blindness. Oxytocin (and, doubtless, other chemicals of coursing love—of course) are not all powerful. They can be countered with a little information that helps a person go more slowly on the path ahead. They key thing about this experiment I described last time is that the trust-relevant information was clearly received by the participants who were, thereafter, less blindly affected by the extra jolt of oxytocin.

What does that mean in the real world, the one not being carefully controlled by an experimenter? It means going slow, having boundaries, and getting useful information that can inform decisions about what one will do rather than sliding into situations that are risky and unwise. It used to be that people got information or cautions from family and friends. I’m sure some of the former and a lot of the latter still give useful advice and caution to people. But I also bet that there is a lot less of both than years ago. And it’s an easy bet that these things go sooo must faster now than in the past. Speed is an enemy of seeing warning signs. A driver going so fast down a mountain has little chance of staying in the lines or reacting to warning signs, even if she wants to do so.

*

Gullible or Just Extra Nice?

2010-07-27T08:56:00.002-06:00

A study just came out today that adds some potential insights to my earlier posts about oxytocin. (See my earlier posts where I describe what oxytocin seems to be related to and how that may affect relationships.) Moïra Mikolajczak, James J. Gross, Anthony Lane,
Olivier Corneille, Philippe de Timary, and Olivier Luminet just published a paper in the journal Psychological Science where they tested if oxytocin beefs up both trust AND gullibility or just trust. This is another of those ingenious experiments where experimenters use a game theory, exchange scenario called “The Trust” game. (Sounds like a fun game for Saturday night at a party, right?). Two participants at a time (who could not see each other) would play the game, presumably online, meaning they would not see the other participant.

The experimenters manipulated two variables: people’s exposure to oxytocin (given nasally) and cues about reliability of trustworthiness of the person they were playing the game with. Imagine you are playing this Trust game. You are going to try to maximize what you can earn which will be based on how much you decide to trust the other person. (I’ll spare you further details on that part.) You might wonder how they manipulated trustworthiness. They described, for participants, the person they were playing with in terms that implied trustworthiness or not. These descriptions of high trustworthiness or low trustworthiness given randomly, meaning, the descriptions would affect the participant’s sense of who they were playing with, but the descriptions were not really true of who they were playing with. By the way, in such experiments where any kind deception is used, participants are told immediately afterwards about it as the experiment is explained to them.

You might wonder what they told people to make the person they were playing with seem to be trustworthy or not. Here is where I might quibble a bit with their strategy, but to be trustworthy, you were described as having a major like philosophy; but you’d be tipped in the direction of thinking the other person was untrustworthy by being told he or she was in marketing. (If I were a marketing major, I would take offense. Then I’d think carefully about how to give people a better impression.) Or, you might be told the other person was active in practicing to give first aid (trusty) or loved to play violent sports (not as trusty). Note: It’s not that the less trustworthy folks were described as scum or something vile. The experimenters were simply going for less versus more trustworthy in the seeds that were planted.

What did they find? Oxytocin produced increases in trust UNLESS participants were given cues that who they were playing with was not so trustworthy. That’s pretty cool. They showed that oxytocin is not a blanket producer of blind trust. If one gets cues that another person could be someone to be leery of, oxytocin will not completely override that.

Okay, think about that some. I’ll write more in the next post about implications for love and romance. Before I do, think about what you might tell someone you know who is looking for love based on this study and other things I’ve written about oxytocin and commitment.

*

Coasting: Drive by Opportunities

2010-05-25T10:34:00.001-06:00

As you can tell, there is something about Sliding vs. Deciding that I think a lot about. In the briefest version of the concept, our team refers to sliding as situations where a person could be thinking about what is going on and making a decision, but instead, things are just happening to that person. The idea of all here is that there are important times in relationships (or work, or projects, or whatever you are into) where we might not notice that a pretty big transition is happening that we probably should be making a decision about; instead, we are is sliding into wherever we will end up. There is a lot of sliding in romantic relationships, these days, when it comes to sex or living together or having a child—times when something pretty big and life altering is happening but many times people are not making a decision about it. I’ll say a lot more about this in the future.

Here, I want to introduce a concept that is subtly different from Sliding but that has some overlap—Coasting. Coasting is what I call it when one is moving along through life, and not really sliding into anything risky but just not noticing important choice points are whizzing by. Coasting is not noticing when were at a place where a decision could make all the difference between drifting away from one’s life goals and reaching those goals.

Metaphor time:

The risk of Sliding is somewhat like turning accidentally down a dead-end alley that has no turn offs, and as you get all the way in, you find out your reverse gear does not work. You end up in a riskier place because you slid into a place that is hard to get out of and now there are more limits on your future options.

The risk of Coasting is more like rolling on down a big highway, just cruising along, and missing a crucial turn off that was a more direct path to what you really wanted to have happen in your life. It’s sort of like being on auto-pilot. If the direction you are headed is already where you meant to go, there’s no problem with coasting along because you are already on the right road. But if you need to turn off to reach your goals, Coasting won’t do.

Think of all the places we can coast in life: Career goals. Education goals. Marriage or parenting (family) are big areas where there are opportunities you may, in the future, wish you took in terms of time and attention with those you love, but life is Coasting by.

Why it is so easy to Coast? Because it takes energy and concentration to notice when you need to make a decision or do something other than what is just happening to you. It is harder work, anytime in life, when we are making decisions. It’s especially easy to coast by important moments or opportunities when we are tired and busy. There’s just not a lot of energy left to do anything different. Doing something different requires a decision and energy to pursue it.

I hope I’m not sounding, in any way, preachy here. If I am, I’m preaching to myself as much as anyone else. I can’t imagine the person in this day and age who cannot relate to the problem of coasting. The antidote, of course, is to think about where you really want your life to be or head, and make the right turn-offs to get there. And even if one makes the right turns pretty frequently, there will still be coasting. I think the reasonable goal is to just try to make as many of the right turns (or left) as we can while accepting that we will miss some of them. Life seems to me to be more like a compass than a GPS device.

In his wonderful book, Stumbling on Happiness, researcher Daniel Gilbert makes the point that later in life, people tend to have more regrets about good things not done than bad things done. Coasting is the engine of future regrets.

*

Oxytocin: I Feel Your Pain

2010-05-04T11:39:00.001-06:00

It’s hard for me to get tired of Oxytocin stories. I’m quite attached to them. Here’s the latest, which you can read about in a story by the BBC (here). Professor Keith Kendrick, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, conducted a pretty straightforward laboratory study of people’s reactions to different, emotionally evocative pictures (child crying, grieving older man, etc.). He found that the emotional response of men to these types of pictures was as strong as the reactions women typically have when the men had a dose of oxytocin (nasally). Usually, women have stronger “empathic” responses to such pictures than men, which could be for scads of reasons of the sort I’ve written about recently. But men closed the gap if they had the spray of oxytocin and didn’t if they has a placebo. I find this next part extra interesting and conscientious on the part of the researchers. While the men behaved differently based on oxytocin, they could not accurately guess whether they had gotten the oxytocin spray or something inert. That’s compelling.

In a second laboratory experiment, the researchers showed that those who got a little jolt of oxytocin were more reactive to, or responsive to, smiling faces that reward learning. That’s just that much more evidence of the role oxytocin might play in sociability, bonding, and caring for others.

I remember when I first read about oxytocin spray; it was in a report of a study by economist Paul Zak. He was showing that people made more trusting bargains in classic game theory scenarios in the lab if they had a bit of oxytocin (again, nasally). When I first read of that work, I thought, “How soon before this shows up in bars.” After all, all the evidence suggests that oxytocin moves people in the direction of trusting others. Zak has even speculated that the stress of poverty depresses oxytocin levels to such a degree across a community that this is just one factor among many that makes it hard to turn around deeply entrenched poverty—people cannot gain on trusting others, and without some basic trust, you can’t really have an economy that works well (or a community). Might car dealerships want oxytocin spray wafting through their waiting rooms? Obviously, car manufacturers need people to trust them or else they are not going to buy their product. Maybe that new car scent should be laced with oxytocin? Especially in test drives! (That could make that deception so like the effect of un-careful dating as to not really be funny but sobering.)

But, back to bars. Since there are really date rape drugs that seem to have some effect, would people misuse oxytocin in a similar way to influence others? I know at one point Paul Zak didn’t think this type of thing would happen, but you never know. Something that turns out to have a clear effect that can be used for good might also be used in less good ways. There’s something in the air.

*

Movin and Groovin: Do you want to be a rotator or a sitter?

2010-04-12T16:52:00.005-06:00

Some time ago, I blogged on a cool study by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel. In this post, I want to highlight another study by these two social psychologists. Here is the journal reference, but you might have trouble finding it if you want to read the whole thing.

Finkel, E. J., & Eastwick, P. W. (2009) Arbitrary social norms influence sex differences in romantic selectivity. Psychological Science, 20, 1290 – 1295.

Finkel and Eastwick have done a number of fascinating studies using speed-dating methods. (If you don’t know what speed-dating is, Google it. It’s not a date where you drive to the end of the block, kiss, and then return your date within 10 minutes.) In the study referenced above, they tested if the mere fact of being the one approaching others impacts how attracted you are to others. In speed-dating, there are rotators and sitters. The sitters sit still while the rotators move every minute or two to the next person they get to meet for a minute or two. Historically, men are almost always chosen to rotate and women are chosen to be the sitters. Men get to move and women get to wait for men to come to them. One more detail. Women are typically more choosey at these events than men (men indicate they would like to follow-up with more women than women do with men).

Finkel and Eastwick tested three really interesting ideas:

1. Are rotators more attracted to the people they meet in a speed-dating event than sitters?

2. Do women become more attracted more men when they are the rotators versus sitters?

3. Is there self-confidence boost from being a rotator?

Yes. Yes. Yes. (No, Harry didn’t meet Sally.) Let’s start with number 1. Part of what Finkel and Eastwick tested is if rotators are more attracted to more people simply because they are the ones on the move. In other words, does moving toward a partner give you some boost in attraction toward that potential partner merely because you are moving toward them rather than vice versa? They found solid evidence that being the one on the move—being the rotator in speed-dating—boosted attraction to others. This is similar to the effect of becoming a bit happier if you smile—after you smile. Feelings can follow behaviors.

Here’s the really smart part. Finkel and Eastwick had women be the rotators in one half of the groups and men in the other half. That way, they could test if it was really rotators who were more attracted because they were rotating and not that men were less choosey than women. Voila! It did matter. When women were rotators, they were attracted to more men than when women were sitters. The differences between men and women disappeared when women were the rotators. Pretty cool. Movin is grooving. (Of course, as Bill Coffin at the Administration for Children and Families Observed, once married, the rotating should stop. Right?)

Lastly, Finkel and Eastwick showed that this effect of being the one moving was related to self-confidence. Being the rotator was associated with more self-confidence which was associated with attraction to more people. I’m going to leave that there until the next post. Think about this and whether you think it’s uniformly better to be one or the other, and why. I’ll throw out some ideas about that next time. I may even tie these effects back to some points about sacrifice, but we’ll see about that.

*

Relationship Development and Oxytocin: A Theory of Men and Women

2010-03-17T13:39:00.004-06:00

Theory alert!

I’m going to lay out a little theory here that is one I would love to be able to test fully in the future. It has to do with some average differences in how men and women behave during earlier periods of relationship development. This builds on themes from the prior three posts. Let’s recap a few crucial points of foundation for the theory I will lay out here:

- Oxytocin levels are stimulated by many things, including affectionate and sexual touch.
- Oxytocin is a chemical that is centrally related to attachment and trust.
- There is at least some evidence (in two studies from our lab) that the sacrificial behavior of men is more related to long-term commitment than is sacrificial behavior of women.

The last point begs the question about what sacrificial behavior is linked to in women. I mentioned in the last post that Sarah Whitton and I have suggested that this is partly and simply about the fact that women are more socialized to sacrifice in romantic relationships than men—at least about daily things.

Here’s my theory to add to this mix. Maybe long-term commitment is a more important driver of sacrificial behavior in men while having a strong attachment-bond is a more important driver of sacrificial behavior in women. Further, maybe the fact that women have more robust oxytocin systems is part of a biological basis for this difference.

The implications of this possible difference are not very great in solid marriages. Both partners have an attachment-bond and both have developed clear, long-term commitment. Things will balance out in terms of the partners giving to each other.

What about early on in relationship development? What are the implications of such a difference? If my theory is correct—or even somewhat correct—it means that women will sacrifice more for their male partners than vice versa early on, and continue to do so for some time up until the point where the male catches up once a clear commitment to the future has developed. I’ve depicted it as follows.

Note that the line for sacrificial behavior of the female ramps up fast and the line for sacrificial behavior of the male catches up some time later. Please note that what I depict here is the best case, not the worst. In just one form of the worst case (or a not so great case), a female sacrifices a great deal for the male and that particular male never catches up because he never really commits deeply to the future.

If I am correct in this theory, the average female is at a disadvantage once the attachment is strong and the oxytocin is flowing up until the point that the male catches up with commitment. Further, since oxytocin levels affect trust, it could be harder for the average woman to see this imbalance for some time, because the biology has primed her to see things from a trusting perspective.

PLEASE NOTE: This theory is not saying that women are superior to men or that this is a particular problem with men. In fact, in our work, find that men are just as committed, on average, as women, in marriage. What this theory suggests is that patterns of rapid relationship development (especially when things get really physical) is something people who attach strongly and rapidly need to be aware of and be cautious about—male or female. This person may give too much and not realize it for some time.

The risk I am identifying exists in any relationship where one partner feels the need to give a lot more than they are getting back. Since relationships develop so rapidly these days, I think some form of these dynamics are happening to many couples.

*

Well, It’s Men: Does He Flip for Her?

2010-02-24T13:42:00.002-07:00

[I’m sorry that took awhile to get back to this theme. I’ve been over-busy working on a grant.]

In my last post, I left you with a question about whether attitudes about sacrificing for one’s partner are more related to commitment to the future of the relationship for men or women. Well, it’s men. This doesn’t mean that we found that men were more willing to sacrifice. We found no difference between men and women on overall level of willingness to sacrifice. What I’m focusing on here is that sacrifice was more related to being committed to the future for men than women. And I decided not to bring this back to oxytocin until the next post, but that’s coming.

So, what does this mean that sacrificing may be more tied to long term commitment in men than women? Sarah Whitton and I suggested that one of the reasons this could be the case is that women are simply more socialized to “give” of themselves to others, and that this would make women more likely to sacrifice (or have positive attitudes about sacrificing) no matter how clear the future is in a relationship. Men, on the other hand, may be more likely to need to decide that a particular woman is “the one” for the future in order to really give their all to that woman. Ironically, it’s men not women that most strongly fit what we predicted beforehand in this work. After all, it only makes sense that one would be most willing to sacrifice for someone with whom they see a future. It’s just in those two studies from our lab listed in my last posting, it seems that this is most true for men and only weakly true for women (on average).

My next point go somewhat further from the data than the interpretation above. I think the point is valid and practically important, but it really is more theoretical. I’d like to test everything in this line of reason more fully in future studies. Here goes.

I think commitment for the average man is a bit more like a light switch that gets flipped on (or not) at some point with a particular women when it comes to commitment. It’s flipped or switched on once he becomes clear that she’s who he wants to be with in the future. Until it’s flipped, he may be in love and he may be great to be around, but he’s not crossed over to where he’ll give regularly for that partner without resenting it. I think the average women crosses over to giving more fully sooner in how the average relationship develops. So, if we have the average women and the average man in a relationship together, early on, I’m betting she’s going to move more quickly to fully to sacrificing than him.

Think about that. There’s no great problem if this is true except where the guy never catches up. And that’s why books like “He’s Just Not That Into You” are bestsellers, because it too often never does catch up. If commitment is more like a switch being flipped for the average male, women are at greater risk for over-giving in romantic relationships until he flips—for her. Based on this theory, I’ve often suggested to women that they be careful not to give too much until they can find the switch and see if it is working. This advice is just as good for men, by the way, in relationships where they are the ones to give too much until the commitment is becoming clear.

Next time I’ll get back to biology and oxytocin and talk about an expansion of this theory that takes oxytocin into account. I bet you can see where that’s going. And go we will, next time.

*

What Drives Sacrificing for A Partner? And Does Oxytocin Play a Role?

2010-02-03T11:53:00.001-07:00

There is a growing body of research on the role of sacrifice in romantic relationships and marriage. It’s really interesting stuff, too—at least for a relationship geek. I’m talking (mostly) about healthy giving from one partner to another, not martyrdom or responding to one’s inner doormat. (If you keep getting rug burns from giving in your relationships, you might not be giving in healthy ways. Hey, maybe that’s another not so hot form of sliding.)

When defined in healthy ways, there are a number of studies that show that sacrifice for one’s partner and relationship is associated with all sorts of good things in a relationship—especially in marriage. But I don’t want to focus on marriage in this post. I want to focus on how relationships develop early on.

Many studies show the positive effects of sacrifice. If you want to look some up, here you go. The article by van Lange is particularly wonderful. All the articles noted here also discuss or study the downside of sacrificing (especially Impett et al.). So, for the really geeky, here are some fine citations for you (otherwise, move on):

Impett, E. A., Gable, K. P., & Peplau, L. A. (2005). Giving up and giving in: The costs and benefits of daily sacrifice in intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 327-344.

van Lange, P. A. M., Rusbult, C. E., Drigotas, S. M., Arriaga, X. B., Witcher, B. S. & Cox, C. L. (1997). Willingness to sacrifice in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 72, 1373-1395.

Wieselquist, J., Rusbult, C. E., Foster, C. A., & Agnew, C. R. (1999). Commitment, pro-relationship behavior, and trust in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 942-966.

In our lab, we’ve published two studies on sacrifice in intimate relationships (which flowed out of the steady focus we have on many issues related to commitment in our lab):

Whitton, S.W., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2007). If I help my partner, will it hurt me? Perceptions of sacrifice in romantic relationships. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26, 64-92.

Stanley, S. M., Whitton, S. W., Low, S. M., Clements, M. L., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sacrifice as a predictor of marital outcomes. Family Process, 45, 289-303.

We predicted that long-term commitment to the future would be associated with willingness to sacrifice, since one should be more inclined to sacrifice for their relationship if they see a future for it. Sacrifices can be seen as a type of investment, which is something people tend to do more of when they see a future. If one’s view is all short-term, you won’t see a lot of investment in anything except “me.” We and other scholars think sacrifices perform a really crucial role in addition to the obvious benefit of generating positive behavior. It’s this. Sacrifices demonstrate commitment. They send signals that reaffirm commitment between partners. This simple theory is why you can also see many groups—gangs for example—requiring some type of overt sacrifice by a newbie to become a member. The sacrifice, like knocking over a 7-11 or something a lot worse, demonstrates seriousness about commitment in a way that just saying “I’m with you on this” can’t. Note, if you are in a new relationship that is growing toward something, and your partner desires you to engage in criminal acts to demonstrate your commitment, that’s not too good a sign. Just take note of that.

Back to our studies. We expected that long-term commitment (wanting a future together) would be strongly related to attitudes about sacrifice. We expected this to be true regardless of the sex of the respondent. What we found, though, is a substantial difference between men and women in how things work. For one of those two groups, the association between sacrifice and long-term commitment was far stronger than for the other.

Which do you think it was? Was commitment to the future more crucial for understanding sacrifice for men or for women? What do you think and why? Mull that over and in the next post I’ll tell you what I suspect. And then I’ll come back to some points (a theory) about oxytocin.

*

Trust in the Fast Lane with Oxytonated Fuels

2010-01-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

No, that’s not a suggestion for the shortest way to get to work. In the last post, I started writing about oxytocin. Let’s recap. Oxytocin is the chemical of trust, bonding, and social connection. There are other chemicals involved, but the big O is shaping up as the chief one. I’m not saying that you only trust someone because you get a jolt of oxytocin; I’m not saying that what you think, do, or decide has no part in who you end up trusting and what you do in your relationships. I’m just sayin that in addition to psychological and spiritual beings, we’re biologicals. You are a carbon-based life form, and for everything that happens that matters in your mind and social life, there is something happening chemically and neurologically in your body and brain. Oxytocin is the go-to chemical coursing in your body when you are getting attached to someone.

As I noted in my last post, lots of things can give you a jolt of oxytocin. Let me recap that list and add to it: touching, hugging, sex, kissing, a warm bath, vibration, massage, sex, tactile stimulation, genital stimulation, giving birth, sex, and/or sex. There are probably all sorts of other things, too, that cause oxytocin to get rolling but let’s focus on one in this post.

Did I mention that oxytocin released or increased during and following sex? I meant to mention that because it might matter to you or someone that you know.

It also seems pretty well understood by researchers that females (on average, research is always on average) have more robust and active oxytocin systems than males. That would make a lot of sense if you consider that it’s purpose beyond all purposes is to rapidly and massively bond a new mother to a helpless baby. Bam—big time attachment. I’m sure a lot of that must begin in the womb, but there is a big ramp up at birth. It’s, of course, really important for men to bond to their children as well, but through history, survival is at stake when it comes to the baby and the mother to bonding.

Is there any downside to this cool system? Theory alert. What I’m about to suggest is somewhat theoretical but it’s also kind of simple and obvious. By the way, that’s the best kind of theory to build—simple ideas that explain common things.

Things move fast in relationships these days. I get to talk with lots of groups of people, and when talking about some topics, I like to ask people how long it is before the average couple who meets and gets attracted has sex. Not all couples have sex. Not all couples have sex before marriage. Shocking, I know, but true. Not all couples have have sex soon after the relationships begins. Of course, if you read the hooking up literature (it’s pretty interesting), there are also lots of people who have sex before there is any type of relationship at all. If the sex is good, maybe there will be a date. But in general, when talking with groups of folks, especially those in their 20s or 30s, I rarely hear an answer longer than a few weeks when asking how long before the average couple has sex.

Back to the big O (I mean Oxytocin, not Oprah’s magazine or anything else). Oh, you thought I might have meant that! Well, I’m coming to that now. Here’s the problem with this very cool chemical. Putting it simply:

Oxytocin accelerates attachment and trust.
Oxytocin gets rolling with sex.
Sexual contact happens pretty rapidly for lots of couples—most, really.

Sooooooo . . . . .

In the absence of protective mechanisms or cultural rituals that promote going slower in developing relationships, trust and attachment are going to form strongly between partners well before those partners can possibly have evaluated whether the relationship is wise, viable, safe, and good. I don’t want to go too far out on a limb (I may do that next time), but if women have more robust oxytocin systems than men, who’s more at risk by not going slower? It does not have to be the woman, by the way, who has the stronger oxytocin reaction. I’m sure plenty of men are gifted with strong, biologically enhanced, trust circuits. No matter if someone is male or female, the cruel irony is that people who are biologically prone to be particularly gracious and giving may also be more at risk by not making careful decisions on the highway of love.

*

Waiting to Inhale: Oxytocin and Trust

2009-12-25T20:05:00.001-07:00

This will be the first of a few posts on the chemical I spend more time thinking about than any other: Oxytocin. I would love to be able to measure oxytocin in the studies my colleagues and I do on couples but I think that ability is, technologically, some years off—at least in the way I’d want to measure it. But let me tell you why I’d love to measure it. The chemical oxytocin (a neuropeptide, to be exact) is widely assumed to be THE chemical of trust and bonding in humans. It is the chemical that floods women’s bodies at the birth of a child to enhance bonding with the newborn. It is also released in you (yes, you) by hugging, touching—and, importantly, people also get a jolt of it from sex. I’ll focus on some interesting thoughts about sex in a later post. For the moment, we’ll warm up to that by talking about talking.

There are a variety of small experiments that have tested the power of oxytocin. Apparently, you can inhale oxytocin and it will affect you—or most people, anyway. Perhaps inhale is not exactly the right term for what researchers do, but it can be put in your nose, introduced into your body in some way like that, it would likely have some short-term effect on your trust of others.

Enter a recent study that I find totally fascinating. A team of Swedish researchers (Beate Ditzen, Marcel Schaer, Barbara Gabriel, Guy Bodenmann, Ulrike Ehlert, and Markus Heinrichs) attempted to see if this trust-inducing chemical could affect how couples communicate about problem areas. Psychologically trained marital researchers in the U. S. and Europe have been videotaping couples while they communicate about issues for decades. (Perhaps you’ve noticed the small cameras around your home? Just kidding.) Hundreds of studies have come from this type of work. Couples come into a lab such as the one my colleague Howard Markman set up in our research center, and talk while being filmed. Howard, along with people such as John Gottman, Robert Weiss, and Cliff Notarius, are pioneers of this methodology. Videotaping couples while they talk allows researchers to watch the tapes over and over again in order to observe aspects of how couples communicate.

This method of studying communication allows us to study how “objectively” coded communication patterns (versus people’s personal reports of what they do, which are less reliable) relate to many other aspects of couples’ lives. For example, from such studies, we have learned a great deal about types of communication patterns that are associated with marriages running into difficulties in the future. Our books, such as Fighting for Your Marriage, focus a great deal on such things—and what to do about it.

Back to the Swedish researchers. (It just sounds sexy to be a Swedish researcher, doesn’t it?) What they found in their ingenious study fits all that we know about oxytocin. They gave couples either a snort of oxytocin or a placebo prior to talking about an area of conflict. The couples did not know which chemical they got. After studying the tapes, what they found is that those who got the oxytocin communicated more positively and less negatively during their discussions. Amazing. It’s exactly what you’d predict.

Does this mean that you should run out and get some oxytocin spray? (Oxytocin spray is available on the web. I bought some, and I’m not sure I trust that it’s really got oxytocin in it. Of course, maybe I’d trust it more to spay it up my nose before deciding if I trusted it. There’s some problem with that plan. I need a chemist.)

So, should you run out and buy some spray? Not yet, and maybe not ever (though, who knows). But here is an idea that could work for you. Suppose you and your love know you have to talk about something tricky or hard. My idea here assumes you are not already upset. In addition to the types of techniques we teach in our books and materials for couples (PREP), you could give each other a solid hug for a few minutes before talking. Heck, give it a try afterwards, too. Mutual hugs do not, currently, come with any government warning labels. And, studies suggest you’ll get some oxytocin released from a good hug. It also relieves stress. With this plan, it possible that the hug will boost oxytocin and, along with some basic communication ability or skills, you may just have a better talk than you’d otherwise expect. Are you waiting to inhale? Don’t. Try a hug.

*

Sleeping Better Part Three

2009-11-25T11:53:00.002-07:00

This is the last in a series of three postings I’ve written on sleep and sleeping better together as a couple. Sleep is in the news in big ways, lately, with a large study being released by the CDC here in the U. S., that researcher in England (I wrote about two posts ago) recommending that mates NOT sleep together most of the time in order to get better sleep, and various new studies coming out all the time intensifying the focus on how the sleep styles and issues of one partner affect the other. There is lot’s of good attention on what is really a fundamental health issue. My research colleagues and I (Howard Markman, Elizabeth Allen, Galena Rhoades) have been adding questions about sleep to all of our ongoing studies, because we are convinced that is much more to be learned and that it really does matter.

I wanted to mention two more issues before letting this topic go for the time being. The first topic here is snoring. Read the last two posts if you have not already done so, before I go on. Many people snore. Men snore more than women, and women are affected more negatively in their sleep by their husbands’ snoring. If the snoring is regular and seems pretty intense, it would be wise to get a medical evaluation before doing anything else. Snoring can be a sign of serious medical problems, especially sleep apnea. If you or your mate sounds anything like a freight train at night (or even the Little Engine that Could not-stop-snoring), get it checked out with your doctor. There are treatments for sleep apnea and some are very effective (and some are more effective than others). Many people go a long time, if ever, before getting it checked, and many other things about the quality of life will suffer for years if you let it go.

Now, for some simple advice to couples with snoring issues. Make it okay for the one who does not snore to wake up, poke, prod, roll, WHATEVER, the other in order to get that snoring partner to shift positions and stop snoring. I forget which of the various sleep studies I was reading that made this point, but apparently many women (and some men) lay awake being polite and not waking their snoring partner to get them to move, and thereby routinely suffer from poor sleep. That’s not good. Talk together, and work as a team, to make it okay to use whatever verbal or non-verbal signal you both agree on to allow the one to get the other to move it.

The second topic I want to address in this post is simply this: Sleep researchers believe another problem for many couples is the motion of one partner affecting the other’s ability to remain asleep. There are a couple of ways to think about this. Does one toss and turn and roll around a lot more than the other, and does that movement wake the other up? Or, perhaps one partner has a different type of work (or sleep) schedule that means one is coming to bed after the other is asleep, or waking up while the other is still planning to sleep, and the movement in and out of the bed wakes up the other.

Here are some simple ideas for dealing with this problem. First, work as a team to agree on how to handle some of this, especially the different schedules thing. Talk about it and what each can do not to disturb the sleep of the other. Second, consider getting a type of mattress that isolates motion. Some mattresses do this a lot more effectively than others. As I noted two posts ago, I’ve been working with Tempur-Pedic this year, and it’s been really fun. Note: there’s your official notice that I have this association. Now I can go on to tell you that this is one of their big selling points. They are the ones with the commercials (and funny videos on You-Tube; seriously, a lot of them, and some of them are hilarious) showing one person jumping up and down and it not bothering a glass of wine or the partner. (If you are married to a glass of wine, this could be especially important advice. Of course, you have other issues we could talk about.) Motion can really be dampened down a great deal with certain types of mattresses. By the way, Consumer Reports has great information on mattresses and what people buy and are happiest with, and it’s worth a look if you end up thinking that a new mattress is part of strategies to gain blissful sleep.

Sleep is a serious issue. It’s probably just as important for how marriages will do over time as how couples handle money. We just know more about the money stuff, but that’s only because most researchers in my field have not been paying a lot of attention to sleep. It can really pay off if two people work as a team to get the best night’s sleep possible. Sleep comes up every single day of your life. If you snooze, you lose. No, that’s not right. If you snooze, you win.

*

Sleeping Better Together

2009-11-13T22:08:00.002-07:00

As I said in my last post, some sleep experts believe that most people would sleep better if they didn’t sleep regularly with their mate. Sleeping alone may produce the best night sleep for many people. Of course, even if true, most people are not going for this. Further, research by Wendy Troxel at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that happily married women sleep best of all women.

What’s a couple to do? I have a few ideas, but first, how many couples don’t regularly sleep together? Turns out, it’s a pretty big number. The National Sleep Foundation did a national survey in 2001 and again in 2005, and found that the number of married folks who reported not regularly sleeping in the same bed as their mate jumped from 12% to 23%. If that finding is totally solid, it’s an amazing change in such a basic pattern in life. It suggests that people truly are having more sleep problems than before, and some are resorting to sleeping alone to deal with it.

Of course, some couples who are not sleeping together are probably doing so because of not getting along well together. That would be nothing new, though, and couldn’t account for the increase. Still, it’s worth pointing out that some couples sleep apart because they just want to be apart. When I was little, growing up in Kettering Ohio, there was a time when this cranky couple lived next to us. I knew that this couple had separate bedrooms. I don’t remember how I know this, because I can’t recall ever being in their home, but I did know this and I remember thinking that it was odd. But I also remember how regularly this woman yelled at one of my brothers, who, I would add, was gifted at getting her riled up. She also sneered a great deal at all of us. She was not a happy person but she was gifted at sneering. I’m not sure what was up with her, but I don’t think she was happy, nor do I think they were happy as a couple. Having separate bedrooms might have been part of the only way that their marriage could work. (One day, they were gone. We were on vacation when they moved out, and all of a sudden, a perfectly lovely and delightful, non-sneering family had moved in. Happy days.)

Back to couples and problems with sleep. What are the problems that couples who are otherwise doing fine have with sleep? There are three I’ve been thinking a lot about: tension, motion, and snoring. The way I’m using the term here, “tension” is the one that’s most related to the research my colleagues (especially Howard Markman) and I have done over the years on how couples communicate and handle conflict. What I’m talking about here is tension between partners. Sleep is something that happens best when you are relaxed and not being stimulated (well, not stimulated in a stimulating way; a great massage might help you sleep and it’s obviously a kind of stimulation). When two partners are upset with each other, they are less likely to fall asleep as quickly and sleep as soundly.

Vicious cycle time: Research shows that when people don’t sleep well on a given night, they are more irritable and negative with their partner the next day. So poor sleep leads to more negatives between partners. The bummer is that those increased negatives also make it harder to sleep the next night.

To summarize: Tension bad. Sleep good. Tension makes sleep bad. Bad sleep means more tension. Bad spiral to get into and hard spiral to get out of.

It’s very clear that sleep is related to everything about personal health and wellbeing. If you are not sleeping well, everything else in life will suffer. Everything else in life includes your marriage. There is a lot at stake with sleep problems.

Here’s some simple advice. It’s like everything else that we (my colleagues and I) recommend in our books. Take control of your conflicts and don’t let them control you. How do you take control of how conflict and tension affects your sleep? You need to decide on a plan that can help both of you to sleep better, and then stick to it. Take charge and don’t let things slide if your sleep is suffering.

Agree not to talk about issues, conflicts, or problems within two hours of the time you should be falling asleep. Just don’t let stuff come up then, and when it does, get it back on the shelf quickly. Get good at not sliding into that mode near bedtime. That also means you need to find other times to have these talks, when you are at your best, and can work together as well as possible. Otherwise, you’re just asking for these issues to come up when you happen to be together, as you near time to sleep. Sometimes sleeping well together isn’t something you can accomplish lying down.

*

Sleeping Together

2009-10-31T19:24:00.002-06:00

Okay, sorry to mislead you—not! I bet you thought this posting would be about sex, also, like the last one. It’s not. It’s actually about sleeping. You know, like being asleep through the night and all. I’m going to look at the issue of sleeping together, but not in THAT way. This is the first of several entries I make on the subject of sleep. Over the past couple of years, my colleagues and I (especially Howard Markman) have become very interested in the subject of sleep and how it affects individuals and couples. Speaking for myself, that could be because I’ve had a harder time sleeping well in the past few years.

Apparently, problems sleeping are nearly a national epidemic. In fact, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) just released the results of a huge study (based on surveying 400,000 people in the U.S.) on sleep. Overall, they estimate that about 1 in 10 people have a serious sleep problem. One of the headlines from their report is that people on the East coast (especially West Virginia) have the highest number of sleep problems and people on the West Coast have the lowest number. Remember, with research, it’s always on average. Some people in New York City, no doubt, sleep like babies and some people in California have not slept well for years and years (certainly, you’d think people in charge of the state budget there are not sleeping too well).

I have a theory. I think people on the East coast don’t sleep as well because they have to get up so much earlier than everyone else, and especially those of us out West. You know, the sun gets there a whole lot earlier than it gets to us here in Colorado; and it gets later still to the West coast. I’d hate to have the sun coming up so early every day!

Now, back to the idea of sleeping together. (Hold it a second. I hope you figured out a moment ago that there is a flaw in my reasoning about the East coast. Egads. Did some of you think I was that stupid? Or worse, did my logic about the East coast make sense to you? If so, you really ought to work on not trusting everything you read.)

Now, for some really interesting research. A sleep researcher named Dr. Neil Stanley (no relation), in England, recently caused quite a stir by recommending that people would sleep a lot better if they slept alone—as in, not sleeping with their mate. You can read more about what he said, here, courtesy of the BBC. His main point is that all kinds of sleep problems are compounded by sleeping together. Since I’ve been studying sleep issues with couples, I have come to believe that he is correct, and he is backed up by numerous solid studies on sleep. A number of studies show that behaviors of one partner will negatively affect the other’s sleep, especially things like snoring and tossing and turning.

While I believe this other Dr. Stanley is correct in the basics, I’m not buying into the idea that most partners should sleep apart. Most people aren’t going to follow his advice. It is true that sleep problems are compounded between partners, and women are particularly affected by this. A lot of the sleep problems women have are related to snoring or restless husbands (actually, it’s more often the wife who is “restless”). Men snore more and that makes it harder for women to sleep well.

Here’s a really interesting fact. People think they sleep better when sleeping with their partner, but it’s not true based on some pretty strong studies. If you go to the BBC link earlier, note the comment by Dr. Robert Meadows near the end of the article. I’ve looked at the studies that back this point up, and they are impressive.

Where does that leave sleeping together? It’s complicated. People think they sleep better sleeping together, but many don’t. Sleep problems like snoring, or having one partner toss and turn a lot, makes these dynamics much more of a concern. Women, especially, value sleeping with their man in terms of emotional comfort, but studies also show that women pay the greater price in terms of their own sleep quality. (Remember, “on average” okay?)

I’ve been doing something particularly fun this year. I’ve been consulting for the mattress company, Tempur-Pedic, about sleep issues with couples. I’ve enjoyed this immensely. Their interest in having me give them input was perfectly timed with my own growing interest in the topic of sleep and how it affects couples. Given my growing interests, and my consulting role for Tempu-Pedic (paid, by the way), I’ve been thinking a lot about simple things couples can do to improve their quality of sleep. I’ll share some of those things in the next post or two.

Sweet dreams. (I better expand that a tad: May you have wonderful dreams that you are perfectly unaware of. Research (at least as of some years ago) shows that we only remember dreams if we wake up during them. If you regularly have vivid, clearly remembered dreams, it probably means you are waking up a lot, not that you are dreaming more than anyone else.)

*

What’s My Line?

2009-10-17T10:36:00.002-06:00

Ever think about sex? I have and I bet you have. In fact, while I don’t fathom how researchers can accurately study such a thing, it seems widely believed that people think about sex a lot. Add a sex-charged culture, and I don’t see how anyone avoids thinking about something related to the subject fairly often. In this post, I’m writing about sex and pre-commitments. The last two posts have been about the concept of pre-commitments and their effects on behavior. Recall that pre-commitment means this: Deciding ahead of time—before a situation or circumstance—what you intend to do. Research shows that pre-commitments make it more likely that we will do what we intended to do when the time comes.

Two posts ago, I mentioned a book that I think is pretty fascinating, called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon page for that book.) Ariely covers many interesting topics. His specialty is analyzing how people behave under various conditions. I highly recommend the book with a word of caution. Since I know that some portion of my readers of this blog tend to have more traditionally religious values, it’s worth noting that some of his experiments are, shall we say, something you likely would not yourself conduct or participate in, such as the one I’m going to focus on today. The results, however, are important, and I am going to talk about his study on sexual arousal.

He conducted this study with male college students. He advertised for volunteers on the campus in this way: “Wanted: Male research participants, heterosexual, 18 years-plus, for a study on decision making and arousal.”

He first got the young men’s opinions on questions like this (and many more):

Q: Could having sex with someone he hated be enjoyable?

Q: Would he tell a woman that he loved her to increase the chance that she would have sex with him?

Q: Would he encourage a date to drink to increase the chance that she would have sex with him?

Q: Would he keep trying to have sex after a date had said “no”?

Q: Would he use a condom even if he was afraid that a woman might change her mind while he went to get it?

These are just a sampling. Some of the questions were about what is arousing. Some questions were about how far the men would go to have sex with a woman. Some were about the subject of “safe sex.”

I’m going to skip over the methodology. Let’s just say that what Ariely did was get the opinions of the young men while there were not aroused, and then asked the questions again while they were in a state of high sexual arousal.

What did Ariely find? I will quote him:

“The results showed that when Roy and the other participants were in a cold, rational, superego-driven state, they respected women; they were not particularly attracted to the odd sexual activities we asked them about; they always took the moral high ground; and they expected that they would always use a condom.”

“In every case, the participants in our experiment got it wrong. Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was.”

Essentially, the values and predictions about what the young men would do or where they would draw lines sexually changed dramatically from non-aroused “cold state” when in an aroused, “hot state.”

By the way, while this study is on college males, it’s undoubtedly just as valid a result for college females—in fact, for people, period. It’s just that this particular study was more likely to be something you could get college males to do.

In this study, Ariely shows how much—and it’s a lot—a person’s beliefs and values can change when sexually aroused. Beliefs and values do not perfectly predict behavior, partly exactly because of phenomena like what Ariely was studying. The context one is in greatly affects behavior, and apparently, beliefs and values as well. That’s why part of being who you want to be in life is related to choosing who you hang around and where you put yourself. If that sounds a lot like situational ethics, it is because it is related. While many people do not like this notion, the fact is this: A gazillion (a really big number) of well designed experiments show that context greatly affects what people will actually do. Maybe I’ll do a whole blog on that. I should, and depending on circumstances, I will.

Does all this mean that one’s values and ethics do not matter? Not at all. Your values and beliefs are the starting point of what you bring into a situation. Let’s use that nifty notion of “sliding vs. deciding” again. Unless you are different from almost everyone else (this is not likely, I hope you realize), your values are like a set point from which you may slide given the circumstances you are in. I am suggesting—and I hope this does not offend any of you—that people do slide at times, and so do you.

Taking the idea of pre-commitment full circle, the question is this: where do you want to plant flags about how you will behave in certain circumstances? I think it’s fair to say that without planting any flags at all, one’s behavior will be much more determined by circumstance alone than anything else. There is nothing else if there are no flags planted. Planting flags is like deciding what territory you want to defend so that, if pressures do push you to slide, you know where you are at and where you might start to slide from. With flags, you know what you are trying to work toward when circumstances are bearing down on you—including your own emotional or sexual arousal.

This is all another way of asking the question, “What’s my line?” Especially for those in the dating mate-searching scene, where do you want your line to be about things such as sex? You’ll be tempted to slide from your line, but deciding ahead of time that you have a line that you are making a commitment to makes it a lot more likely that you’ll be able to hang around where you planted your flag.

*

WHATEVER is annoying

2009-10-08T14:11:00.001-06:00

Just a quick little fun note. I read this article today. Apparently, "whatever" is the most annoying phrase in America. See the article here in USA Today: 'Whatever' is, you know, annoying, but 'it is what it is'

Looks like letting WHATEVER happen to you is not only unwise to do, it's unwise to even say!

*

WHATEVER

2009-10-05T20:43:00.001-06:00

In my last post, I described the idea of pre-commitment. Now let’s apply it to relationships. Quick recap: A pre-commitment is deciding ahead of time—before a situation or circumstance—what you intend to do. Research shows that pre-commitments make it more likely that we will do what we intended to do when the time comes. Of course, pre-commitments don’t protect us completely from temptation to stray from the plan, and not all plans should be kept.

How effective are pre-commitments? It probably depends on scads of things, including the area of pre-commitment. Some things are harder to stick to than others. What kinds of things are hard for you to stick with in day-to-day life?

While not any panacea, it should be kind of obvious that deciding what you intend to do makes it more likely that you will do what you intend and not slide into whatever.

The opposite of pre-committing is letting WHATEVER happen. WHATEVER can be all kinds of things. WHATEVER can be good, but at important times in life, WHATEVER can be bad. A lot depends on if a lot is at stake. There is nothing wrong with sliding into WHATEVER if nothing WHATSOEVER is at stake.

Okay, time to work. You, I mean, not me. I’m going to be done working after I finish this. I’m going to assume that you, the reader, are in one of two categories:

Category One: You are a single or a sort-of-single. Either way, you are not done looking around for the person you might want to be with for the rest of your life.

Category Two: You in a committed relationship, and that means are not looking around because you have committed to someone (most likely, in marriage). Of course, you could be looking around, but that’s another story.

You category two types can get something out of pondering these questions in your relationship. However, I’m going to focus in on category one folks today.

Here are some steps you can take to up your pre-commitment game.

1. Think about the WHATEVERS that can happen in your love life that you might like to avoid.

2. Think about what you would like to have happen instead of various WHATEVERS. In other words, what is the anti-WHATEVER?

3. What pre-commitments could you make that would make it more likely that the best things would happen?

Here is one example. Sarah wants love in her life. She’s not been in a relationship for some time and she is feeling lonely. She has had serious relationships that, ultimately, didn’t go where she wanted them to go. Sarah happens to have a strong faith tradition and belief; however, she has not thought much about the beliefs that she wants or needs her future mate to hold, when she gets to the “to have and to hold” part she seeks. (I’m just picking one particularly important area of compatibility for Sarah, but you could apply this point to any number of things, including hobbies, looks, values, life motivation, beliefs about being green, etc.) Since she has no pre-commitment to herself about what she should hold out for, she’s looking for love in WHATEVER places she happens to be. She’s not guided by a pre-commitment to what she should see in a person before falling in love.

You could think about what pre-commitment means to someone like Sarah in terms of setting boundaries. These boundaries could be her minimum standards for a mate in areas like values, drive, or intentions about having children (or not). In her dating life, she could set boundaries about things like her romantic and sexual behavior. Where will she draw the line? Does she want there to be a line? Anywhere? I know it may sound quaint but people can decide who they are and what they will do, and not just let WHATEVER happen.

Yes, I’m talking about mate selection, again. I talk about that subject a lot because people have a lot of options—or at least some options—about where they will end up in their love lives. And people have the greatest number of options before they get settled on one path with a specific partner.

If you are seriously seeking someone, at sometime, what are some of the pre-commitments that you could make that would help you find lasting love? If you decide on some pre-commitments, are you willing to write them down? Do you have a good friend that you could tell them to—someone who’s willing to encourage you to stick to what you think is important?

Without deciding otherwise, WHATEVER will be will be.

Que sera sera, Sarah.

*

Eat and Drink What You Want: The Pre-Commitment Diet

2009-09-26T21:01:00.003-06:00

I have an idea for a new diet. I won’t sell any books about it, though, because it’s not really about cutting calories or losing weight. And it’s bad marketing to announce that your diet does not help you lose weight. This diet is most relevant to times when you are eating out with friends or business acquaintances. The pre-commitment diet is about increasing your odds of eating what you want most and drinking what you want, when you are out with others. Of course, I’m not really interested in meals out, beer, or diets, in this blog. It’s about relationships. Here, I’m laying down some principles for upcoming posts.

I like to mention books that I have enjoyed or found interesting. Another of the books I’ve liked a lot in the past year is one by a behavioral economist named Dan Ariely. The book is called Predictably Irrational (the title is a link if you are interested). Ariely’s specialty is examining the ways in which people do not behave quite rationally in all kinds of situations. One of the very interesting things about Ariely’s work is that he devises inventive ways to test various ideas and theories. His book is really a series of descriptions of these interesting experiments, followed by discussion of the principles they highlight and what it may mean to the reader. I will cover one of his studies here that happens to be based on beer. I’ll expand the application for relationships of this study on beer in the next post. After that, I’ll write about one of his studies that is focused on sex.

(By the way, I am not unaware of the probability that blogs that contain the words “diet,” “beer,” and “sex” are likely to draw some attention. In fact, maybe someone reading will have gotten here by Googling those three words at the same time. As you’ll see, beer is not really my focus, but I do want to describe his experiment and it is about beer.)

Ariely’s beer experiment was focused on the orders people made in a pub near MIT (Ariely worked at MIT at the time, not the pub). He and his colleague were allowed to run this experiment in this pub. The idea was pretty simple. He was testing the idea that, when in a group, the beer orders the first people to order make affect the beer orders others, who follow, will make. I don’t mean people across the bar, but people in the same group. So, imagine a setting where persons A, B, C, D, & E are out relaxing, and they are all going to order a beer. To make things simple, let’s assume they are going to order their beers in alphabetical order, so person A is up first.

What did Ariely find? The first person in the group who orders a beer is the one most likely to get the beer she wanted and to like the beer she got. How can this be? We’ll, it turns out that in social settings, like this pub setting with college students, that people like to be unique and special. If person D wanted beer X, but persons A & C already ordered beer X, person D will feel some pressure to be unique and cool, and get a different beer even though he wanted beer X. Being unique and cool is not always groovy. Person A, having no one going before her, gets the beer she really wanted all along because she’s not affected by anyone else’s order.

(By the way, again: It’s studies like this that make me completely mistrust focus groups as ways of gathering information. Unless the setting is just right and the interviewer super skilled, how can what the first people say not affect the validity of what others who follow will say? Are you getting the real opinion of those who speak after several others have spoken? I bet not. This is also pretty good confirmation of the importance of secret ballots.)

Okay, application time: Ariely found that if you had persons A, B, C, D, & E each write down their order on paper, privately, everyone would get the beer they wanted most and would report being more satisfied. This is where the term “pre-commitment” comes in. By pre-commitment, I’m not talking about what builds up to commitment. I’m talking about pre-committing yourself to what you want—or what you think you should do—BEFORE you are in a situation where the circumstances and people might sway you to do, or choose, something other than what you really want or really think you should do.

The pre-commitment diet I have in mind is about deciding ahead of the time that others place their orders what you want and then sticking to it. So, my pre-commitment diet is mostly about getting what you want when you order, not about losing weight. But, if could lead to weight loss if your pre-commitment was about what you were going to order because it had fewer calories.

There is great power in deciding ahead of time what you are about and what you mean to do. Otherwise, the situation or social pressure might lead you to slide into something other than what you wanted to have happen in the first place.

Next time, I’ll focus on that principle when it comes to relationships. And after that, we’ll get to sex. I’m pre-committing to write about that.

*

Interest in Everyone is Interesting to No One

2009-09-19T21:20:00.000-06:00

Here’s a research nugget that rings true. Using speed dating methods, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel of Northwestern University found that people who convey romantic interest in nearly anyone who is attractive to them end up with fewer people finding them attractive. The lesson? Potential objects of your affection will be less interested when they detect that you are not too choosey.

Put simply, people are able to detect when a person is non-discriminating. And this happens fast, since the phenomena can be measured in speed-dating.

If you are looking for love, hopefully you are looking for someone special, not just any person who will do. Being choosey is not only going to make it more likely you find a partner who fits you in important ways, it will also make you more attractive to this person when you find him or her.

Here’s a very practical tip if you are trying out speed dating in your search for lasting love. Leave your Crosby, Stills and Nash t-shirt that says “love the one you’re with” at home.

*

Churning

2009-09-11T09:18:00.000-06:00

I’m returning, briefly, to the subject of the endowment effect. If you want more background before I get to a new point, see the two blog entries below by just searching “endowment” and you’ll get right to them. Then, come back here for the latest thought.

I’m re-reading Tim Harford’s book, The Logic of Life. As I mentioned in an earlier blog (Stuck on You), I really like this book a lot. In the earlier sections of the book, he covers issues directly related to the theme of this blog about relationships and commitment. He covers things like reasons for the greatly increased practice of oral sex among teens. And it, depressingly, makes a lot of sense. He also covers phenomena such as the way the partnering options are affected by how many people exist in your community who you’d be interested in versus how many other people like you are interested in those same people: for example, how it skews things when you live in a city where there are many more single females versus males. Numbers affect things.

Early on in the book, Harford covers some research on the endowment effect that I had missed before. While there is tons of evidence that the endowment effect operates on all of us, it affects people the least who have the most experience buying/selling/trading in that market. He cites a study where a researcher named List did a study at a Pin swap meet. Apparently, there are enough people around who are very interested in all manner of pins (you know, like what you might pick up when you travel to Niagra Falls to commemorate your experience) that there are who swap meets among collectors. In this study Harford cites, the researcher did the classic type of endowment effect study—he gave people something they did not already have and then examined how much it would take to get them to part with it. Here is the bottom line. People who were very experienced pin traders were much more willing to part with the pin they just received in exchange for another. They had become less rapidly attached to the pin they just received than others who had less experience. In essence, the experienced people did not overvalue a new pin just because one was just given to them.

Relationship application time. I’ve seen this illustration used before where someone will liken the way people attach to romantic partners to duct tape. Crude, yes; relative, also yes. Imagine someone taking two pieces of duct tape and sticking them together (sticky sides together) and pulling them apart, over and over and over again. You’d not be surprised that the tape becomes less sticky overtime. The stickiness wears out. Now, think romantic relationships. There are a number of scholars (and others) who believe that having a great many romantic relationships might wear down one’s ability to attach. If I apply this point about the endowment effect above, I get this theory. People who have had a lot of romantic (and sexual) partners may be at greater risk of coming to a point where they do not overvalue the person they are with now. That makes sense and may not be as big of a deal if one is still searching for a solid match of a partner.

Imagine how this might affect someone once they have found “the one,” the person they want to spend the rest of their time with. I’m all for thinking realistically in relationships, but only to a point. There might be something pretty valuable in being able to consistently overvalue your mate: to think they are the best thing since sliced bread and you’d not trade them for anyone. It could be that churning through too many romantic partners earlier in life might make it harder to have that way of seeing one’s mate that may help keep commitment strong.

Maybe staying sticky is a pretty good reason to go slower and more carefully in how one approaches the dating and mating part of life.

*

Hand Held. Hand Played.

2009-08-25T12:24:00.003-06:00

I am continuing on with some thoughts about gaming and doing well in life, especially in love life. Please see the last post before this one, if you have not already. This one will make a lot more sense if you do.

Everyone is dealt a hand in life. Here, I’m focusing on the hand you were dealt when it comes to succeeding in romantic relationships. A person’s hand is made up of many things that affect success and risk in romance. This is a very short list (there are many other things I could list):

- Family history (parents divorced, for example = more risk)
- Education and income (less = more risk)
- Looks (see blog entry below “what women want (and men too)”
- Disposition and personality tendencies (are you smooth or easily upset?)
- Past relationship history
- What city you live in terms of available partners
- Mental health history and issues
- Attachment security and insecurity (more insecure = more risk)
- Age (it’s complicated)
- Genetics (yes, the risk for divorce is partly genetic)

To some extent, you have little control about the hand that life dealt you. You have some control, however. For example, there are increased risks in marriage when a person has a lot of sexual partners prior to marriage. Presumably, one could decide not to do that and affect the hand they have to play later in life.

My point here is that whatever your hand, you will do better in life to play it and play it well. As I said in the last post, “give yourself a hand and don’t drop the ball.” Hope you got the play on words. Think like you have a hand to play in life and not like someone who’s just dropping a roulette ball and hoping that it lands on his or her number.

I’ve been reading a very interesting book called “The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life,” by Ben Sherwood. (The title is a link to it if you want to read more about it. It’s a bestseller.) Ben Sherwood covers a whole range of interesting stories about people who survived various things that most people do not, or would not, survive. He uses those stories to talk about the characteristics of survivors. He notes that, in some situations, you will not survive and there is nothing to do about it—nothing in your hand that it would matter to play. If you are on a plane falling from the sky, you have few or no cards to play. That’s in comparison, though, to a plane crashing while taking off, where many people do survive. As Sherwood describes, in that type of situation, what people do in a critical window of 90 seconds after the crash determines everything.

As Sherwood goes though the book, one of the things he attacks over and over again is passivity. He challenges the idea that there is nothing you can do to affect your chances in various situations because he believes (and research backs him up) that such a fatalistic view can get you killed when you don’t need to be dead. And I’m not talking about merely being undead, like many characters in my sons’ video games, but really alive.

In romantic relationships, playing your hand means taking an active role in what you do and why. It means deciding and not sliding so that you can do what you are able to do to improve your odds in life and love. That may also mean learning some things you don’t know already, like about what things make it more likely that relationships will succeed. Or, learning how to choose a partner wisely (see earlier post, “Looking for Love that Lasts,” as well). Or, if you are a couple trying to figure out if you got what it takes, taking a relationship education class together to see what you can learn and how well you cope together with learning. (For more information on relationship education, see websites such as www.PREPinc.com, www.loveyourrelationship.com, and www.smartmarriages.com.)

The key is realizing that what you do truly matters in how your life will turn out. That can make all the difference.

*

Black Jack or Roulette? You Choose.

2009-08-10T15:28:00.001-06:00

I’m not a gambler. I don’t really enjoy it much and I’m not all that good at it, especially in games that involve bluffing (just ask my wife how good I am at hiding what I am really feeling). Part of my aversion to gambling is that I lost 20 bucks once playing poker with friends in 8th grade. Twenty bucks was a whole lot of money when I was in 8th grade. That’s a lot of pizzas or burgers. I was traumatized and decided not to play poker anymore with the guys. I didn’t give up my friends, I just gave up doing that with my friends.

Why am I writing about gambling? Simple. It’s a great metaphor for how people approach dating and mating.

I know people who like gambling from time-to-time. (I don’t know anyone who has anything like a gambling addiction—at least in so far as I am aware.) I am told by people who study these things that that the games you can play at a casino vary a great deal in terms of chance and skill. At the two ends of the spectrum are the roulette wheel and black jack. People who are skilled gamblers prefer a game like black jack to roulette because there is some skill involved with black jack. In fact, black jack is a game where your odds relative to the house’s odds are best. It’s not that they are ever as good as the house, mind you, which is why casinos make a great deal of money. Perhaps I should say “take” a great deal of money rather than make it. Roulette is pure chance. You put down a bet (of various kinds, like betting on black or red or a specific number). You drop the ball (or someone does) and round and round it goes, finally dropping down into a slot. You bet on red, and it drops in a red slot, and you win. It drops into black or green and you lose. (By the way, while most slots are red or black, there are a number of green slots which just does to demonstrate to you that your odds don’t even get to the level of 50-50, which is what the red and black bets lull you into believing. The house is not stupid.)

With roulette, you drop the ball and the ball is out of your hands. There is nothing you can adjust once you have placed your bet. You can’t up it, lower it, or get it back. You win or you lose. That’s what you can do. In contrast, black jack takes some skill. There are fairly well understood relative odds that change based on what cards you already have and what cards the dealer is showing. Disciplined black jack players know when the odds have moved against them (and do not bet more) and when the cards they can see suggest they should up their bet and either hold with the cards they have or take more. Good black jack players don’t go by feel, they understand the relative odds and where they have become most favorable, and they act on this.

How is this like relationships? People who are in the relationship market tend to be either playing black jack or roulette. People would be smarter to be playing black jack than roulette. Roulette people are letting things happen to them; they are sliding into relationships or situations and not making decisions. They are letting life happen to them rather than making the best decisions they can with the cards they have been dealt.

What’s the deal? Well, the deal is important. There is no illusion here (or in a casino) that everyone has equal odds of doing well. Some people have been dealt a worse hand than others. We can wish this were not true but, as they say, wishing does not make anything so. I would not go so far in calling this the luck of the draw, but that’s because I believe there is more meaning and purpose and order in our lives than it sometimes looks. But there are good hands and bad hands and in between hands. It’s worth thinking about what is in your hand. I’ll write more about this next time.

While some people do not have ideal options, I believe that everyone has choices. It may be most important of all for those with tougher hands to play as well as they can. Everyone can make decisions within the range of things that they control, and, within that range, the odds of doing well in life and love go up. That beats dumb luck. Dumb luck tends to be hard luck.

It’s your life. Give yourself a hand and don’t drop the ball.

*

How Endowed?

2009-07-20T11:06:00.000-06:00

I’m back now and ready to write a bit more about the endowment effect. To recap, this is a well-known, potent mechanism wherein people come to value things they already have more than they would value them if they did not have them. It applies to anything but I’m applying it to romantic relationships.

Let’s focus on the downside of this. As I noted in the prior post, the upside of this is that, in good marriages, this effect adds to the total forces of commitment that help you keep on doing what you promised to do—in ways that benefit you, your family, and your children. On the other hand, let’s think about all the relationships, like dating relationships, where some people get stuck with a not very good thing.

What the endowment effect means, in part, is that it’s easy to be biased in thinking that what you have is better than it is. Don’t get me wrong. If what you have is really good and maybe has a wonderful future, nothing I or anyone else is going to write or say will change your mind about it. In fact, don’t give it another thought. But think about a person who’s hanging around and dating someone who’s really not very good for them. It could be that the partner is just not the right type of person or even that they are dangerous in some way. Sometimes people overlook things that really do matter in terms of how their future could turn out as a couple. What might one overlook?

• Drug addiction or abuse
• A lack of a desire to have children when you know that you really want to have children sometime
• Differences in religious beliefs that you think don’t matter but you kind of know it might in the future
• Problems being responsible with money
• Completely different desires for how to spend free time

These are just a few of the types of things that relate to long-term happiness together that some people try very hard to believe just won’t matter. By the way, it’s possible that you are reading this and you realize that you are the one who brings more problems to your relationship and that maybe it’s your partner who should be thinking carefully about you. If that sounds like you, problems in your own life are things that you can work on. It’s possible to change. There are a lot of ways to get help, including religious organizations, community agencies, community mental health centers, jobs services, so forth.

Back to my main point: The endowment effect works on most everyone, and when you are in a relationship that has little chance of a solid future, it can be just one of the factors that makes it hard to get an accurate picture of what your future really would be if you married this person. Does the relationship have real value or is it just a mirage?

Safety note: It’s possible that someone who reads this is in a relationship that is dangerous. If you are in a relationship with someone who can be dangerous or who is highly controlling, you should know that the time one leaves such a relationship can be a particularly dangerous time. If that’s you and you are thinking through your options, find a way to make contact with local or national domestic violence workers who know how to help people increase their chances of staying safe. The national hotline number is: 1-800-799-SAFE(7233)

*

Well Endowed: The Endowment Effect

2009-07-03T11:55:00.002-06:00

Okay, that’s a bit of a misleading title for this post, but I am going to say some things today about the Endowment Effect.

First off, a definition: The Endowment Effect is psychological effect discovered by research psychologists and behavioral economists. It reflects the now well-proven fact that people place a greater value on a thing they already own than they would if they did not own that thing and had to buy it.

Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler studied this effect in this way. What they did is give some participants in a study a mug—yes, like a coffee mug. They did not give other participants a mug. Then, they simply examined how much the people with the mugs would be willing to sell them for (around $7) and compared that to how much the people without mugs were willing to pay for one (around $3). The interesting thing here is that these participants only differed in whether or not they happened to be given a free coffee cup. But once owned, they want more to part with it then they’d have been willing to pay for it in the first place. Quite a bit more, in fact. There are now many studies that show this same phenomena in all sorts of ways.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman would relate this to his brilliant work with Amos Tversky that showed, in many ways, that people are more motivated to avoid loss than to attain gain. (I say “brilliant” because, after all, they do reflect my own chosen discipline of psychology. Other than that, I’m sure I have no biases, endowment or otherwise.)

Economist Richard Thaler also named this effect the “status quo bias,” because it reflects the fact that it favors keeping what you already have. By the way, this goes a long, long way toward describing why some people do so poorly when they have a garage sale. They are just too attached to their junk. Those who come by are judging from a different standpoint, one that is closer to the real market value of the stuff. (I personally believe that the main purpose of a garage sale is not to make money but to get other nice people to come to your house and carry away all your junk.)

There are some tricky implications for romantic relationships here. For example, for the average pretty good to great marriage, the Endowment Effect helps you stick to their commitment when times are a bit tougher because you so highly value what you already have. And you should, because you’ve invested a lot and what you invested would result in a lot of loss if you don’t stick. If you are married, have built a life together, have children, and all sorts of other things, you are, so to speak, very well endowed.

On the other hand, what if you are dating and trying to find the right person to spend your life with? This Endowment Effect also means that you can easily get too settled with a current partner who’s not really a good long-term fit, and not move on when maybe you should.

I’ll go a bit deeper on some of the implications in my next post. I have a very busy week coming up, so it may be a bit more than a week before I get back to you. But I will be back!

*

Hello, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC.

2009-06-21T10:43:00.006-06:00

I give a lot of talks. Sometimes, my talks are to large audiences. One day a few years ago, I was giving a talk on the differences between men and women when it comes to the development of commitment. There were around 600 people in the audience. This is one of my favorite things to talk about, so I was in a good mood and ready to have a groovy time. (Yeah, I said “groovy.” I’m bringing the word back.)

So, picture this. I’m standing at the podium, the audience is all ready, and I’m maybe 4 minutes into my talk. Just getting going. It will not shock you to know I was using PowerPoint. While PowerPoint can be over done, I think it’s exceptionally useful for talks like this where I want to make a number of points very clearly and not be misread. I also had some nice visuals to depict concepts I wanted to put forth.

Back to 4 minutes into the talk: Freeze. I don’t mean the room grew cold, though it was Summer and I’ve always hated over-refrigerated hotel rooms on those hot muggy days. But, no, the room temperature didn’t change; it was just fine. What got cold feet and froze wasn’t me and it wasn’t the room; it was my PC. I’m a PC. My name is Scott and I’ve always been a PC. (Up until now.) There are many reasons for this, but they do not matter to our story. Generally, I’m quite a geek and have had great success over the years with PCs and keeping them running smoothly.

So, what would you do in my shoes? You are in front of 600 people, you have just begun your talk, and your computer crashes. Of course, there’s nothing for it but to restart the PC. This was a total blue screen of death crash. Ctrl, Alt, Delete was not happenin.

Side tip on giving talks: If you live by technology don’t die by technology. I remember once watching someone else’s keynote address at a conference when their computer froze and they spent 20 minutes—really, 20 minutes—in front of the audience painfully working through fixes to get started again. That’s a very bad thing to do in a major talk. It is not only very boring, it makes the audience really anxious as your anxiety and frustration flow into them. If your equipment fails, just keep going with your talk. If you are multi-tasker like me, restart the equipment but proceed with your talk—even if you’ll be needing to buy a new laptop later that day. The show must go on and talks like this are partly a show. (Related tip: Always bring a printed copy of your notes with you.)

As a speaker, I’ve always used just about whatever happens in the room that’s interesting as part of my talk. I mean, why not? Life is short and stuff like this is an opportunity. There was an interesting dialogue going on now in my head, standing there, audience waiting, while my computer was restarting: “Hmmm. PCs. PCs. What is it about PCs? Maybe I should really be using a MAC, at least for stuff like this. MAC people don’t ever seem to be fiddling with their computers just to get their tasks done. Heck, with a PC, something that worked perfectly well yesterday can’t be counted on to work today. PCs give you that exciting edge of life, feeling, where you just don’t know. How boring would it be to have a MAC and just have things work all the time? How realistic is that? Hm. . . . I got it.”

Okay, back to the audience. This turned into one of my favorite moments in my history of giving talks.

How is marriage like the difference between MACs and PCs? Or rather, how are differences in marriages like MACs and PCs?

Most marriages, and I mean perfectly good, worth working on, solid marriages, are like PCs, not MACs. Just as there are many more PCs in the world than MACs, and there are many more PC marriages than MAC marriages. (BTW, if you think I’m talking about what type of computer you have at home or in your briefcase, you haven’t shifted yet to the more abstract level. I’m not talking computer equipment now.)

Here’s the deal. While the people I know with MACs are not always perfectly happy with their MACs, they are mostly a seriously happy lot when it comes to computing. They turn on their computers (which look gorgeous, of course), they do what they meant to do in getting on their computers, they don’t think as much about the computer as they do about just doing their tasks or following their interests, and then they move on. How simple. It starts up, you click on some things, you happily compute, and when you are done, you do something else. And none of your time involves searching for some error message on Google. Now seriously, that’s not my experience with PCs. PCs are something else.

PCs add a sense of deep mystery to life that is more in tune with the way life really is. PC people are living closer to reality in some cosmic sense.

Some people have MAC marriages but most people have PC marriages. You know you have a MAC marriage if it just works most all the time and you don’t’ think about why it works or how to make it keep working. You know you have a PC marriage if you have to frequently reboot, install a patch, update something, scan for problems, or simply endure the fact that something is not working today that worked perfectly well yesterday. PCs are exciting. MACs? Oh, they are so boring.

I think some people end up in MAC marriages—again, which are much more rare than PC marriages—simply because of luck. Others do so because they are very careful in the right ways about how they partnered up. For some couples, they simply had compatibility, attraction and a big ole helping of easy-going-ness. (Those with MAC marriages should not be arrogant; being thankful would be more the thing or else you may find your MAC starting to slow down.)

Most marriages, and this includes very good marriage, are PCs. They take effort in order to keep doing the work of life. The truth is, in healthy marriages that have enough of the right stuff and that are not dangerous, the work is worth it. Sadly that message is regularly undermined in our culture. But it’s true, and much research supports the point. There’s no getting around the work. It’s just part of life in a PC marriage. And remember this, those of you in PC marriages: You have the opportunity of getting that deep sense of satisfaction that comes from overcoming things together. MAC marriage people can only dream of that joy.

*

Daughter of Son of a Son of Dissonance (Cognitive Dissonance IV)

2009-06-10T12:14:00.001-06:00

Maybe it’s just a bad movie that keeps coming back, but I’m not having any dissonance over writing so much about cognitive dissonance. (If you are tired of the topic, I really do think this is the last post on this for the time being.)

Some of you have been thinking about where I left off (and some have not). If you want the full background, you really need to read some or all of the prior three posts. In the prior post, I left off with a question about what cognitive dissonance might have to do with the trend for ever more expensive weddings. Caveat: I would guess, but do not know, that there is some reigning in on wedding expenses by those who historically could or would spend a lot, given our current economic downturn. Nevertheless, here’s a theory of why some people are spending amazing amounts of money on weddings.

My Theory

We live in a time when people largely are still interested in marriage. The image of marriage has been tarnished and confidence in marriage has suffered, but people want it. Why, you might ask? Because marriage remains the preeminent symbol of commitment for two people interested in life-long love. Sure, not everyone is into it or can be into it (a matter way too complex for me to touch here), but it remains what most people want and what most people will seek.

My theoretical assumptions look like this:

Assume people are more anxious than ever before maintaining life-long love.
Assume people are as likely as ever to fall in love.
Assume that most people will seek to address commitment in love by marrying.
Assume that the security of marriage, as a vehicle for commitment, has suffered.
Assume that cognitive dissonance is a fact of the human experience.

Some people who can afford it (and many who cannot) will spend an amazing amount of money on their wedding because doing so creates a particularly strong cognitive dissonance dynamic that serves to reinforce the commitment. I’m NOT saying that these folks are more committed than those spending a lot less (you can’t believe how little my wife and I spent on our wedding). What I am saying is that some folks will feel acutely a need to create a binding commitment that lasts, and dissonance theory predicts that making a bigger deal, spending more, and having more guests, etc., will all add to the power of the dissonance force that is created.

Suppose you have the Smiths and the Jones. They are identical—virtual clones, of each other in all ways that matter, including desire to marry for life and anxiety about marriage for life working. And let’s assume that the anxiety is pretty strong for all four people involved because they all came from homes where they saw commitment not work out very well, up close and personal. (Refer back to research by Paul Amato and colleagues, and Sarah Whitton and I and colleagues, some posts back. )

The only difference: The Smiths pay $ 30,000.00 for their wedding and the Jones pay $ 3000.00 for theirs. What researchers like Rosenblatt predicted long ago (1977 is pretty long ago, right?) is that when times get a little tough, like they usually do, the Smiths will feel a stronger force of dissonance to keep to their committed path than will the Jones. The reason is simply that the Smiths more strongly built a dissonance that will add extra discomfort when tempted not to follow through. In their heads it sounds like this (if you could put it into words so easily): “I really made a big deal and a big investment out of committing to my partner, and in front of scads of people; I simply have to follow through. I must have really meant it!”

I’m suggesting that the escalation in what people are willing to spend on weddings may be a form of buying insurance for their marriages. (For some, obviously, it’s simply about a big, showy, expression of wealth, which is another matter altogether.)

Am I recommending this? Nope. I’d rather see people have reasonable wedding costs and better savings—or less debt—at the start of their marriages. I’d also much rather see people invest in things like learning about how to communicate, manage conflict, clarify expectations, and build and preserve friendship and commitment in marriage by doing things like attending a marriage/relationship education class. There’s more than money when it comes to ways to invest in your relationship.

As a poignant side point: Researchers who study couples in poverty note an especially strong desire to have a formal wedding rather than merely go to the justice of the peace. The stated reasons are often about respecting marriage by respecting the wedding process. In this, I think there is a recognition of the positive role of ceremony in forming strong commitments. This makes particular sense for couples who tend to have very high respect for marriage but a lot of odds stacked against their marriages when it comes to making it in life. Here, the goal isn’t a lavish wedding but a solid, good enough, serious ceremony. That’s a nice goal.

*

Son of a Son of Dissonance (Cognitive Dissonance III)

2009-06-03T22:14:00.003-06:00

Silly me, I used to think dissonance was more about wanting to behave in ways that were consistent with what you decided or committed to do. While that’s in the mix, research suggests that dissonance’s force is even more strongly related to wanting the bad feeling of not being consistent to go away rather than to have the good feeling of being consistent to stay. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, you’ll have to fight your point with ultra geeky social psychologists who tend to be really excellent researchers. Good luck with that.

To sum up, the more you have grappled with a decision—really examining the pros and cons and what you intend to do—the more you will build a strong intention to follow through on that decision, partly based on a dissonance mechanism. Further, as suggested by Rosenblatt in 1977, you’ll feel a lot more internal dissonance to follow through on a commitment in a relationship when you’ve made that commitment very publically.

Think about that, unless you’re in a big hurry to keep surfing the web. It’s an interesting idea that Rosenblatt had. Ever wondered why some type of serious, solemn, and public ceremony exists for weddings in most all cultures on the planet? The more public the ceremony, the more witnesses, the more serious, the stronger the resulting intention to follow through. The decision making up the commitment becomes a big deal. A BIG deal. That may help quite a bit when what is intended is a life-long commitment. What’s that say about a culture that is steadily dismantling ceremonial aspects of entering into commitments? I’m thinking it’s not too good.

With a clear decision made before others, the decision becomes part of you, and the rest of you will be pulled to behave in ways consistent with that decision. When you are tempted to stray from the path, a stronger and clearer original decision will produce more dissonance; dissonance is your friend because it helps you keep to what you said you’d do.

Coming full circle, decisions are important because decisions support follow-through. People are less likely to continue down a path that they have not decided on. That’s why sliding through important relationship transitions can be a pretty bad deal.

Here’s my final point for now. Decisions are most important when there is something at stake—something that requires follow-through. If there is nothing at stake or that needs sustained effort, decisions are less important and sliding into whatever happens may be just fine. Could even be fun. Since decisions take a lot more mental energy than sliding, you don’t want to be making everything into a decision. But the big things in life—especially in your love life—call out for decisions so that a sustainable commitment can be built.

What kinds of things do you want to be making decisions about in your life?

I feel Cognitive Dissonance IV coming on, and I really thought this would be the end of my dissonance. In my next post, I think I’ll make some points about the current craze for super costly weddings. I wonder if you can guess where that point will go and why.

*

Cognitive Dissonance II

2009-05-29T00:10:00.001-06:00

I’m sure those of you who read the last post could hardly wait to read more about cognitive dissonance. Those of you who have not read that post might want to do so now. I’ll wait.

Okay, onward with more thoughts about cognitive dissonance. Here’s the basic idea of the concept and decades of research on it. One of the key applications of the concept is to situations where you have to make a choice. I’m going to mix it up some today and, instead of option A or option B, I’m going with option X and option Y. (Don’t worry, I’ll bring A and B back in another post, in case you really liked them. But we need some balance here, right?)

Let’s say you have a situation where your options look like this:

Option X
Option Y

The option you don’t have here is to have both X and Y. Sometimes you can have it all, but not today. Sorry. In the real world, it looks like this. You have 75 cents and you can get the Hershey bar or the M&Ms. You cannot get both because you don’t have the resources at the moment to get both. Bummer, I know, but this is real life and you cannot have every type of chocolate. Let’s up the stakes, and since chocolate is often linked to love, let’s go after love.

Suppose you want to choose a partner and you hope it’s for life. You’ve narrowed your options to Jesse and Lee. Now, even if you have a buck fifty, it should be exceptionally obvious that you cannot have both, at least if life-long love is your goal. Jesse’s not likely to accept the idea of you still hanging around Lee if Jesse is your choice. Likewise, Lee thinks three’s a crowd. Lee and Jesse could be friends in another life, but not in YOUR life.

Back to dissonance. Let’s say you’ve done everything right, or nearly enough. You took your time, thought about what was most important to you, explored your options enough to have a good idea what they were, and then chose Lee. Call it a leaning that became pretty strong that ended up in a real commitment.

Here is where cognitive dissonance theory gets pretty important. What decades of studies show is that if you’ve made a clear choice—a real decision, not a slide—and chosen one option, dissonance will help you follow through. Dissonance helps you maintain your motivation on the pathway you chose. You chose Lee and not Jesse; dissonance supports that commitment in a powerful way.

Here’s what dissonance is in this context. Dissonance is that bad feeling you get when your behavior isn’t consistent with your decision. If you’re attracted (really, seriously attracted) to Jesse after you decided on Lee, and your character is fully intact, you will feel bad. This is similar to guilt but the idea of cognitive dissonance is broader than guilt. It’s feeling bad when things are not lining up right between important parts of yourself; dissonance feels uncomfortable and you’ll try to reduce it. The stronger and more forceful and conscious the original decision, the more dissonance supports following through on that commitment.

This has some really interesting implications for the ways that couples build commitment—keeping in mind that anything that can be built can be built poorly or built well. The clearer the decision, the stronger the follow-through on the commitment that was made. I’ll write more on this in my next post, surely to be labeled, Cognitive Dissonance III. Someday, these will be great movies, starring Lee, Jesse, A, B, X, and Y. I’m sure of it.

*

Cognitive Dissonance I

2009-05-23T00:31:00.000-06:00

The concept of cognitive dissonance has been around for decades. There is a lot of research supporting the fact that it is a powerful force in our lives.

Let’s lay some foundational points for the thoughts I’ll share regarding cognitive dissonance.

Deciding (or choosing) between two or more paths is the essence of commitment. My favorite one liner about commitment is this: “Commitment is making the choice to give up other choices.” That says a lot about why commitment can be so hard in today’s world. We’re encouraged to hang onto everything while commitment feels like we are giving something up. That’s because we do give something up when we make a commitment. If we are not giving anything up we are not making a commitment. Commitment is deciding to go down path A or B, in a situation where one cannot do both—at least until cloning is widely available. (There’s some time left before commitment is irrelevant.)

Cognitive dissonance is a concept originally developed in the 1950s by social psychologist, Leon Festinger. The essence of Festinger’s idea was that we often feel internal conflict about who we are, how we see ourselves, and what we do. That is what cognitive dissonance is. Something is unsettled or not in sync in how we see ourselves and what we’re doing. In essence, when have cognitive dissonance, you feel at odds with your self,

It does not feel good to have dissonance and our minds are pretty good at finding ways to reduce it. In fact, study after study after study (a large number of them) document that cognitive dissonance happens and we’ll do what we can to reduce it.

Suppose, for example, you see yourself as very environmentally conscious. However, you also happen to drive a gigantic SUV that gets 12 miles to the gallon with a fair wind at its back. Your behavior of driving the big SUV and your beliefs about the environment are in conflict, and you’ll do something to reduce that internal conflict. You might get a Prius or you might become less environmentally concerned. You might rationalize that it would waste a lot of energy for Detroit to build you another car (but they would dearly love to build you one), so you decide it’s best for the environment to keep the SUV even if it burns through gas like my sons go through Oreos. (We’re talking about fuel, after all, right?)

Next time, I’m going to talk about how cognitive dissonance research helps explain some things about decisions and commitment. Soon.

*

DTR Part II

2009-05-15T16:50:00.002-06:00

In my last post, I left off with the question of why people might avoid the DTR Talk. If you have not read that post yet, I encourage you to read it before going on with this one.

To reset the scene, I’m assuming some things about a relationship with person A and person B. I’m assuming that partner A is either more committed to the future than B or is, at least, thinking a lot more about the issue. Hence, person A is the one who wants to know now or soon where person B is at on the whole matter of a future. This is not something that usually (or should) happen early in the relationship. It’s something that becomes more and more of an issue over time. That’s because most people want to marry eventually. Most adults who are “in the market” for life-long love (the aspiration) are going to be less inclined to spend a lot of time with someone if they know that this someone does not see a future together.

So person A wants to know what person B is thinking and intending. While it’s easy to think of person A as a female and person B as a male, there are doubtless many situations that go any which way. The key is that one person, A, is more ready than the other, B.

Questions and Ideas of Answers

Why might person A avoid having The Talk? Person A might avoid having The Talk because person A has a hunch that person B either sees no future or that person B would run from the relationship if person A pushes it.

By the way, this relates to a painful reality about commitment: The person who is most committed has the least power. This is true, at least at this stage of a relationship, where the future is not nailed down.

Since person A loves person B, and knows he/she wants a future with person B, pushing the matter is scary. People tend to avoid scary things until they can’t put them off any longer.

The reasons why person B might avoid the talk seem more complex, in my view, but they all boil down to a sense of potential loss. Essentially, what I’m defining is a situation where person B likes the status quo. Whatever the relationship is right now, person B is happy not to rock the boat. It’s working, at least for now, so why mess with anything?

The Talk can bring person B the loss of something in one of at least three ways.

1. If person B is quite a bit less committed than person A, The TALK can lead to a break up. Person B’s answers can lead to person A to realize that what she or he wants is never going to happen. B avoids The Talk because of a desire to hang onto the present arrangement.

2. If person B is somewhat less committed than A but a future is at least possible, the talk leads to ongoing negotiation. One Talk will lead to other Talks because A sees the possibility of getting somewhere and will keep pressing it. B might not want to be in what starts to seem like a series of Talks because B does not like negotiating about change B really does not want, yet. The status quo is groovy for B and it’s not fun for either A or B to keep talking about something so difficult, tricky, and important.

3. Person B might avoid The Talk because the end result will be that B has to up the commitment. It’s sort of like playing poker. Both have their cards (their commitment cards and their attractiveness cards). Person A is throwing all in, and person B is being called to pony up or fold. Person B has to match the bet of person A and lay em down.

To put it briefly (something you may have figured out I don’t do easily!), person B avoids The Talk because it can lead to one of several types of loss:

Loss of the relationship due to break up.
Loss of peace in the relationship due to ongoing negotiation.
Loss of freedom due to having to match the bet of A or leave the game.

If you are counting, that’s three “dues” and it’s time to pay them.

*

The DTR Dance: Avoiding the Talk

2009-05-09T09:45:00.002-06:00

I wrote in prior posts about ambiguity and how that is one of the defining features of romantic relationships in this day and age. The motive for keeping things not quite clear about what a relationship is and where it is heading is simple: ambiguity gives couples a way to avoid breaking up in a relationship that is desirable for now, but where one or both senses the future is unclear.

Ambiguity can protect fragile relationships. There’s some good and a lot of not good in that.

The acronym, DTR, stands for Define The Relationship. It means having The Talk. DTR is a modern day antidote to ambiguity.

I have some thoughts about why people avoid DTR. There are a number of possibilities.

1. It’s just too soon to have the talk, and bringing it up too soon makes one look desperate.

2. It’s hard for one or both partners to talk about things that are emotional or sensitive because the most important conversations often don’t go well. In this case, the issue is communication not commitment. In the work I have done with colleagues such as Howard Markman, Natalie Jenkins, and Susan Blumberg, we focus a lot on helping couples to learn how to talk openly, clearly, and with emotional safety. Stuff for another day, but if you need help there, now, try one of our books listed on the left of this site (except the commitment one).

3. The big reasons why people avoid DTRing is that there are issues with commitment.

When it comes to commitment, I merely mean important dynamics such as the willingness to commit to the future, interest in marriage, etc.

When it comes to commitment, let’s assume two possibilities about hypothetical couple AB, which is made up of person A and person B.

One possibility: A and B are nearly equally committed.

or

Second possibility: A and B are not equally committed.

In this second case, either A is more committed to B or B is more committed to A. Let’s just focus on A being more committed to B. It happens all the time. It’s pretty much a normal part of couple development, except that if it goes on and on and on, it’s a serious problem. In fact, the problem version of this now happens so commonly that bestselling books have been written about this painful dynamic: He’s Just Not That Into You, comes to mind. (The title is a link if you want to read more about it.) It’s an excellent book—humorous, brutal, a bit coarse (that’s a warning if such things bother you)—describing these dynamics of differences in commitment.

I think situations where there are serious differences in commitment levels between two people are the situations where DTR talks are most likely to be avoided, and for some pretty logical reasons.

I’ll give you my sense of those reasons in my next post. For the time being, think about the possibilities in the reasons people avoid doing the DTR talk. I suppose the DTR talk is then a DTR dance.

*

We, We, We, all the way home!

2009-05-02T12:30:00.004-06:00

I’ve thought and written a lot about commitment. Once of the hallmarks of a strong commitment between two individuals is that they have “WE-ness.” In other words, there is a strong identity of “us” and it’s not all about just me or you. In fact, one of the many ways I’ve summarized commitment in marriage is that it reflects “us with a future.” (My book on commitment is linked on the side of this blog. Okay, that was shameless, but someone might be interested!)

Having a strong couple identity doesn’t mean merging the identities of the two individuals into some Vulcan-mind-meld-blob-of-undifferentiated-goo. A lot of people fear the merging thing, some to the point of over doing their avoidance of joining with another; and some people desire exactly this type of merging because of insecurity or other issues. Healthy couple identity means there is me, you, and us. There are three identities. All three matter and all are honored in how we go through life together.

So, WE is good, but it also gets hard to build and hang onto in a culture that is focused on individuality. There is growing trend that reflects the WE thing but undermines it as well. Paul Amato is a sociologist I know and admire, who published a book with colleagues two years ago that I thought was fantastic. (Keep in mind, I mean fantastic in the somewhat geeky manner.) It’s not a self-help book but it is a fabulous, very readable discussion of how marriage has changed in the past 20 years. Amato and colleagues have one of the best research samples in the country for addressing questions about changes in marriage. The book is entitled, “Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing.” If you are interested in marriage as a subject of interest, not just your own marriage, I highly recommend this book.

Today, I’m focusing on one major finding among many from their work. They found that couples, as couples, are increasingly isolated. There is a WE but the WE has, on average, been growing thinner. Think of this as the isolation WE diet. Couples have grown less engaged in shared activities and outside commitments, such as involvement in community groups. Amato and colleagues note: “Couples in 2000 were substantially less likely than couples in 1980 to eat together, visit friends together, go out for leisure activities together, or work on projects around the house together.” They were less likely to do things like be in clubs or groups together, as well. Home alone meets alone together.

Couples do best when engaged in some significant shared commitments outside their relationship, such as to groups, clubs, church/synagogue, etc., and efforts to help others. This trend toward growing isolation is concerning. Amato and colleagues note one exception to this trend, which is involvement in religious organizations, particularly churches. There is a movement toward increased church involvement among married couples since 1980.

My short hand for what they find is the title of this blog entry: We, We, We, all the way home. It’s sort of like couples—at least some couples—have figured out a version of the WE thing, but it’s very much a WE at home and alone thing.

Does this matter? I think it does. Doing some things together, where you are engaged and connected to others in the community, is usually a good thing. Good for you, good for your relationship, and good for the community. Isolation has never been shown to be good for people. While there are some couples who are involved in too many things, the trend for the average couple is toward reclusiveness. If you and your partner have gotten pretty isolated, it’s worth taking a bit of time to reflect on your options for doing at least one thing together where you can be involved, together, with others. That would take a decision.

You’re not always safe when you are sliding into home.

*

Doing That Thing You Do

2009-04-27T11:40:00.003-06:00

Last post, I said I’d say a bit more about healthy sacrifices in relationships and how a person can step it up in a positive way. My idea for today is really simple. I think most all of us know of things we could do, that are easy to do, that when we do do, it make a positive difference in our relationships. My emphasis is on “little things,” and that is very important. There are too many things that can get in the way of doing big things on any given day. Of course, big things are great to do from time to time, but many big sacrifices require big opportunities that you cannot (or should not) try to make happen. Small sacrifices do not require big opportunities. They are thoroughly and routinely doable.

If you want to apply this idea to your own relationship today (and in the coming weeks), 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 that fit these characteristics.

1. It’s something under your control.

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

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

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

It’s the last one of these four things that puts this into the realm of a small but meaningful sacrifice. You have to do something other than what you’d naturally do to get it done. You have to decide and follow through.

Go ahead and write a few ideas down that fit what I’m describing.

Challenge time. Commit to yourself to do one or two of those 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 like this that you do, but he or she will notice some of these things and your relationship will be stronger for it.

You mission, should you choose to accept it? Do Do.

Got Love? Give Love

2009-04-23T14:28:00.001-06:00

Healthy sacrifice is good for relationships. According to a new study out last year, it also is attractive.

Colleagues like Sarah Whitton and I have conducted some studies looking at sacrifice in romantic relationships—particularly marriage. We’ve published a couple of papers on this subject and I’ve given talks on it as well. While there have not been a lot of studies on sacrifice, there have been a number of good ones by different researchers. (click here for abstracts of related studies)

For purposes of this discussion, sacrifice simply means giving up what you want, at times, for what is best for your partner and your relationship. It also means not resenting giving up something for the good of your relationship. In fact, resentment and score keeping (“you owe me because I did this”) are associated with bad things. Of course, that does not mean being a doormat or putting yourself in danger. Done in healthy relationships in reasonable ways, sacrifice can be seen as a core element of true and committed love.

Sacrifice has been measured in many different ways by different researchers, and in all the studies I know about, it is associated with greater happiness and commitment in marriage. In an age when cultural messages surround us extolling the virtues of taking care of number one (ourselves), the findings of such studies are delightfully counter-culture.

Here’s a fun little nugget that is a new addition to the studies I’ve known about. Being a giver is attractive. It seems that women and men find altruism attractive in a partner. (Altruism is a close cousin to sacrifice.) This is especially true of women. Women dig giving men. A study published in the British Journal of Psychology showed that women place great importance on altruistic traits when searching for mate. (here’s a link to a summary of this study) Things like giving blood or volunteering to help others made men much more attractive to women.

Putting these two streams of findings together is not very hard. It’s smart for people to be attracted to others who give. Giving is a good sign in a potential partner because it is connected to things that build a strong foundation in relationships. Our take on some of the findings in our research and that of others is that sacrifice is one of the ways that partners send signals to each other about the nature of the commitment between the partners.

For those of you looking for a mate, this is one of those things that you can look for before you get too involved with someone—if it’s truly important to you. In fact, meeting someone in the context of helping others (say, while volunteering to help in a local animal shelter) is probably an especially good way to be sure that you are meeting someone who really is a giver versus someone posing as a giver. It’s not very likely that a person does that type of service just to find people to date.

If you are not much of a giver now, there is a paradox here; starting to give to others in order to look cool to potential partners is probably not going to work. That is just another form of giving to get, and that type of giving just doesn’t cut it. Worse still would be trying to draw all kinds of attention to just how great a giver you are. Can you imagine the pick up line? “Hi there. I gave blood today and I helped a frail, elderly person to cross the street. I’m going to teach someone how to read tomorrow. Want to hang out and appreciate me tonight?”

Next time, I’ll write some thoughts about how to boost genuine sacrifice in a relationship.

Cleanup on Aisle 9 (at 35,000 Feet)

2009-04-17T11:13:00.003-06:00

Warning: “Parental Discretion Advised”
Second warning: Long post. Settle in.

I flew the other day from Denver to Washington DC for a research meeting. The flight I was on took off 2 hours later than scheduled. Given my flight experiences of late, that’s not all that unusual. What is unusual is the reason why the flight was 2 hours late. Was the previous flight late into Denver? Nope. Was there 24 inches of snow on the ground in Denver? Not this time.

Like all flights there was a flight prior to mine for this plane. On the prior flight, there was an unfortunate incident. Apparently, a certain emetic experience (in “plane” language, means baby ejected the contents of his/her little tummy in flight) occurred to such a degree that it took the airline 2 hours clean it up. I didn’t witness this. If you are a visual learner and wish to come close to seeing this, here is a video link sent to me by Nancy Gonzalez of the National Council on Family Relations: click here

Like I said, I didn’t see the baby and I was not on that flight. I just waited the 2 hours for the airline to recover from that flight. Why 2 hours? The little rascal was so thorough in his projecting that the airline techs could not merely replace the seat cushions. They had to dismantle the whole row of seats, disassembling them so that they could remove every speck of fabric. This apparently takes a good while because of things like needing to take apart the electronic panel, etc. That’s serious work to accomplish the clean up on aisle 9. By the way, I think the people doing this work deserve and extra helping of stimulus funds.

If your flight is going to be late, this reason sure beats the heck out of something like the flight crew not showing up or the toilets being broken or a passenger seeing the pilot having a drink preflight (I can imagine the flight crew needing a drink post flight, here). An odd thing: While everyone was duly frustrated and didn’t like waiting, there was a kind of resigned acceptance by most of the people who were waiting for the flight. In fact, the passengers were so good natured that the pilot thanked us all, several times, as we got on the plane for the fact that so many of us were not only patient but were smiling as we boarded. (Besides, how quickly, exactly, do you want to get on this plane? You want them to take their time and do a good job. There was also this odd dynamic of playing a group form of Russian roulette. Who knew which row? Was it mine? I am only using aisle 9 as an example but maybe it really was aisle 9!)

My initial, personal, reaction was one of total empathy for the unfortunate parent(s) in charge of said baby. It took me a few minutes longer to shift to empathy for the passengers around the baby on the plane. Sorry, but parental empathy trumped frequent flyer empathy.

There’s a point here somewhere and I’m getting to it now. In the week prior to all this, a colleague published a journal article on the effects of the first child on married couples. This colleague and the lead author on the paper is Brian Doss at Texas A & M, who, using one of our lab’s data sets, did an impeccable job of analyzing and writing up these findings. This is an area of specialty in his research and it’s a particularly fine work that he did. The paper was co-authored by my colleagues Galena Rhoades, Howard Markman, and me. The paper got A LOT of media attention. Google around a bit and you’ll find some of that.

The major finding of the study is that that there was a rather sudden drop in marital quality (happiness, communication, management of conflict, etc.) around the time of the first birth for the couples having children. That may not be too shocking to those of you who are parents. Interestingly, in the analyses that Brian conducted, we also saw that those couples who did not have children also showed similar declines in marriage quality, but much more gradually over time and not on quite as many variables. But in essence, both groups of couples were taking a journey to a similar place but the couples having a child took a shortcut.

By the way, in case you are wondering, studies do show that most married couples experience some declines in happiness over their years together. The bad news is that this is normal. The good news is that this is normal. Realistic expectations can do a lot to improve one’s life.

Not surprisingly, the headlines around the study that came out varied from things like “Want to Have a Happy Marriage, Don’t Have Kids” to “Study Shows Transition to Parenthood Puts Strain on Marriages.” I’ll give it to journalists that the first type of headline sounds cool and sells more hits on the web but the second headline is a lot more accurate and does not editorialize.

Back to that little baby. Babies do things like this and it’s most inconvenient. In fact, having children means an endless stream of challenges and surprises and projectile experiences. Many parents wonder if the plane will ever land. If you have children, and you are typical, you may have had some declines in marital happiness that were concentrated around the time of the birth of the first child. But is that all that happened to you?

Maybe there is something more going on. While I like research and data, and really like thinking about how things work, it’s important to realize that researchers are pretty much limited to analyzing things that they measure. As a field, I think social science has missed something when it comes to measuring things that are important about families. Marital happiness is, to be sure, important. It’s measured a lot and in many different ways. But I think there is something else that’s different from marital happiness that could be called family happiness. David Brooks, the New York Times editorialist, wrote about this a few years ago in an a piece featuring some comments about a Leo Tolstoy novella on family happiness. Here is one of the lines from his work, commenting on Tolstoy’s story.

“Tolstoy's story captures the difference between romantic happiness, which is filled with exhilaration and self-fulfillment, and family happiness, built on self-abnegation and sacrifice.” (Brooks, 3-1-2005)

Brooks nailed something that researchers have not really gone after. There is a different, maybe deeper, kind of happiness that some people experience in life; deeper than romantic or marital happiness. Certainly different. It’s something like a contentment that a couple can experience (but might not experience) from building a family together. I know marriage does not work out well for many couples and I also know that marriage or a life together does not even happen now for many people who have a child together. So, not everyone gets in this line or experiences what I’m trying to describe. Yet, I know a lot of couples can relate to this: there can be some loss in one type of happiness that is readily replaced by another.

One can argue that a couple can and should be able to have it all, and should give up nothing in life for any reason। That does not seem too realistic to me. I do not know any of the people on the plane flight prior to mine. However, I like to imagine that both parents were on that flight with their little bundle of expressive joy. Once they complete their treatment for PTSD, I suspect that they will not ever recall that flight as one of the romantic highlights of their life together. On the other hand, even many years from now, I bet you they will smile and feel some weird kind of joy as they remember getting through it.

Posted from seat 9C, at 35,000 feet

We’re Just Not That Into Us

2009-04-11T20:41:00.001-06:00

I suggest reading my last post before this one, if you have not already done so.

In my last post, I wrote about the trend toward ambiguity in romantic relationships. I left off with a question about why ambiguity might be preferred, even when it seems to have so many disadvantages. Here’s one of the ideas we bat around in our research lab.

We have come through a time of immense upheaval for marriage. As the divorce rate rose (for complex reasons), people began to lose confidence in the security of marriage. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the most secure romantic relationship existing, but it’s not as secure as it was many years ago. We also know that the childhood experience of divorce in one’s parent’s marriage can have effects that are lasting (another complex issue). First, children of divorce are somewhat more likely to experience difficulties and divorce in their own marriages as adults. Second, children of divorce tend to have less confidence in the institution of marriage. Third, children of divorce, in their own marriages as adults, tend to feel less confident and less committed. In the case of confidence and commitment, it’s a fairly small difference, but it does tend that direction. [I’ll cite a couple of articles at the end of the post for those who are more inclined to dig deeper. Also, keep in mind that differences in research are always “on average,” and reflect the way things tend to run not the way things must turn out.]

Back to ambiguity. I believe that more people than ever before feel insecurity about their prospects for life-long love. I believe there is a culture wide trend toward insecurity about attachments lasting. So why would ambiguity be valued? One answer is that some people may feel less anxious about relationships ending if ambiguity keeps it less clear that a strong attachment exists in the first place. A mental trick, that. If put into one’s own thoughts, it might sound like this: “If we don’t make it all that clear to ourselves and others that we’re a couple, it won’t hurt so much if ever we’re not.” Unfortunately, most tricks are based in illusion, not reality; if you’re in love, you’re in love, and it will hurt a lot to break up. Ambiguity can’t really stop that.

I’ll save some more thoughts about ambiguity for another time. (That’s an ambiguous commitment to you.)

If you want to chase research on those points about divorce I mentioned above, here are a couple of places to start.

* * *

Amato, P. R. & DeBoer, D. (2001). The transmission of divorce across generations:
Relationship skills or commitment to marriage?” Journal of Marriage and Family, 63, 1038-1051.

Abstract: Assessed national, longitudinal data from 2 generations to identify explanations for the intergenerational transmission of marital instability, one based on relationship skills and the other based on marital commitment. Ss were 2,033 married persons contacted in 1980, 1983, 1992, and 1997 and a sample of 335 offspring (aged 19 yrs and older). Parental divorce approximately doubled the odds that offspring would see their own marriages end in divorce. Offspring with maritally distressed parents who remained continuously married did not have an elevated risk of divorce. Divorce was most likely to be transmitted across generations if parents reported a low, rather than a high, level of discord prior to marital dissolution. These results, combined with other findings from the study, suggest that offspring with divorced parents have an elevated risk of seeing their own marriages end in divorce because they hold a comparatively weak commitment to the norm of lifelong marriage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Whitton, S. W., Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2008). Effects of parental divorce on marital commitment and confidence. Journal of Family Psychology, 22, 789-793.

Abstract: Research on the intergenerational transmission of divorce has demonstrated that, compared to offspring of non-divorced parents, those of divorced parents generally have more negative attitudes towards marriage as an institution and are less optimistic about the feasibility of a long-lasting, healthy marriage. It is also possible that, when entering marriage themselves, adults whose parents divorced have less personal relationship commitment to their own marriages and less confidence in their own ability to maintain a happy marriage with their spouse. However, this prediction has not been tested. In the current study, we assessed relationship commitment and relationship confidence, as well as parental divorce and retrospectively-reported interparental conflict, in a sample of 265 engaged couples prior to their first marriage. Results demonstrated that women’s but not men’s parental divorce was associated with lower relationship commitment and lower relationship confidence. These effects persisted when controlling for the influence of recalled interparental conflict and premarital relationship adjustment. The current findings suggest that women whose parents divorced are more likely to enter marriage with relatively lower commitment to, and confidence in, the future of those marriages, potentially raising their risk for divorce.

Unfathomable Love

2009-04-08T10:52:00.002-06:00

Things change. How two people come together to become a couple has changed a lot. One of the defining changes in how couples form can be expressed in a single word: ambiguity. Ambiguity, of course, is the quality of being ambiguous. Ambiguous, as Merriam-Webster.com says, means “doubtful or uncertain especially from obscurity or indistinctness.”

I like this last word, indistinctness. It’s just not clear what something is or means when it’s ambiguous. There are several ways one can tell that romantic relationships (non-marital) are more ambiguous than they used to be. For example, when I was in high school (awhile ago), people used to go steady. What’s the comparable term for teens these days? (There has recently emerged something that is closer than anything I’ve seen in many years: being listed on each other’s Facebook page. That can be an important source of information.)

Many people who study teens have remarked about these changes. Years ago, there were more clearly defined stages people went through in moving toward marriage. One typical sequence would be dating, then going steady, then being pinned (a somewhat older tradition that faded away long before other things did), engagement, and marriage. Engagement is still a step that is largely still with us, but it’s probably waning somewhat, too. If you study many cultures on the planet, I believe you will find that, in most, some form of courtship stages served (or still serves) the function of defining where a couple was at on the pathway to having a future together.

One of the greatest changes in relationships in the past few decades is the rise of cohabitation (living together). Australian researcher Jo Lindsay nailed this point when she noted that a defining characteristic of cohabitation is ambiguity. It’s indistinct. Here’s a way you know this is true. If someone tells you he or she is cohabiting with a partner (romantic), what do you know about that couple? I would argue that you know almost nothing. They could be engaged and moving toward marriage. They could be living together for convenience, and more like a dating couple than anything else. They could be testing their relationship—or one may be testing while the other is assuming they are moving toward marriage. Both partners may be simply viewing their relationship as good for the time being, with no one thinking or talking about if there is a future.

I’ll write a lot more about things related to cohabitation in the future, since it’s a major focus of the research that I and colleagues like Galena Rhoades are doing at the University of Denver. I want to come back to ambiguity and ask a question. My points so far here are merely to argue the point that ambiguity now reigns in how couples develop.

By the way, this is why the whole concept of DTR has risen. Define The Relationship. It means having the talk. You know, the dreaded talk. THE TALK. The whole reason why DTR is now so well understood as a concept is that ambiguity needs clarity to break through at some point if a relationship is to have a future. I’ll also write more about DTRing in the future.

My question to you:

If you buy my premise that romantic relationships are more ambiguous than they use to be, why do you think that is? I mean, assuming there is some benefit or perceived benefit, what is it?

I’ll give you a few of my ideas in a future post.

Making Love

2009-04-02T03:58:00.002-06:00

Some years back, I wrote an essay on the power of healthy sacrifice in romantic relationships. It appeared in a wonderful book that is now out of print, entitled “Why Do Fools Fall In Love,” edited by Jan Levine and my colleague Howard Markman. Compared to more scientifically focused pieces I have written or presented on sacrifice, this was a purely conceptual argument about the power of positive types of sacrifice. What I present in this post are excerpts from that essay, called Afterglow.

* * *
We live in a culture saturated with constructions of love defined as passion. Passion is dominant because passion is powerful. What person does not either desire it, bask in the glory of it realized, or grieve over the loss of it in life? Passion’s potency arises from the promise, whether obtained or not, of the deep acceptance of one’s soul. Passion hints at the possibility of a soul mate. But there is something more powerful than passion—something that passion is incomplete without.

For most people, passion at its height resembles something like the birth of a fire on dry wood: great fury and heat, crackling flames leaping high. The start of such a fire is magnificent. My focus here is not on the great fire, but on the coals that are begun from it. It is the long burning coals and embers that sustain the promise of heat and fire to come.

* * *
However, what sustains the pile of coals with their promise and warmth? What is the force of the more complete love? There are many answers one could give, but I want to I focus on sacrifice.

* * *
What does passion lack that sacrifice makes up for? Passion lacks the ability to be directed by your will. That’s probably why we are all so deeply affected by passion—it is captivating. Sacrifice comes from the active, choosing part of love based in your will. You can choose to love in this way because you can choose to do loving acts. In an important way, sacrifice balances passion in the hearth of love.

Looking for Love (that lasts)

2009-03-31T14:57:00.002-06:00

A lot of people are looking for love. Not only are most people looking for love (unless they’ve found it), most people want that love to be lifelong, with one person, in marriage. Of course, just wanting something to happen doesn’t make it happen. While it’s easy these days to slide into any old relationship, finding that one that will last takes some work.

Increasingly, I and others who focus on marriage and relationships have turned attention to who people pick in the first place, not just how well things go after they pick. So, how do you pick well? How can a person up their chances of finding lasting love? In my book on commitment, The Power of Commitment, I wrote a little section called “Mate Selection 101.” It’s short and basic but the ideas are powerful. If you are looking for love—love that lasts—here are some ideas for you to consider from my book.

[The Excerpt]

Mate Selection 101

Surprisingly, marriage scholars and researchers have not devoted a great deal of attention over the past decades to good mate selection. Sociologist Norval Glenn at the University of Texas has noted that this is a serious gap in the field, and I think he is right. There are surely useful studies in this area, but people have not been given enough guidance about how to make a good choice.

I will close this chapter by presenting a very simple list based on many years of research, many years of counseling couples, and reading and thinking about this issue. The more of these things you are able to do when you are searching for a mate and thinking about marriage, the better your odds will be of making a wise choice.

* Get to know the person very well before deciding to marry. One thing you can do is take the time to work together through a detailed list of core expectations to see just how compatible you are. (For guidelines on how to do this, you might check out one of the books I've co-authored.)

* Do not make this crucial decision in a period of emotional infatuation.

* Date the person for a long time.

* Observe how the person treats not only you but his or her friends. Learn as much as you can about the person's priorities and values.

* Give more weight than your heart may want to how closely the person shares your most essential beliefs (including religious) and values in life.

* Wait until you are 22 or older to make such an important decision. What you think you are looking for can change a lot.

* Get the opinion of friends and family who are not likely to tell you only what you want to hear.

* Wait until you are married to live together. It may not increase your risk to do otherwise, but there is no evidence that it will increase your risk to wait.

I offer no guarantees but these ideas just might help.

What Women Want (and men, too)

2009-03-25T22:56:00.001-06:00

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.

Short Selling

2009-03-23T07:41:00.001-06:00

I was thinking today about some follow-ups to my last post. One of the most interesting things about the “arbitrary coherence” concept is the arbitrary part. Not only can prices stick in the mind and affect what one is willing to pay or do, they stick nearly as well (maybe just as well) even when they are arbitrary. That’s a big part the point. Our minds are so oriented toward having anchor points to connect things to that we’ll anchor away even if the anchor is put down in a poor spot. The first price I see in the store for a new flat screen TV may set me in motion to evaluate all other TVs according to that first price. Of course, those prices could seem arbitrary to the shopper but they are very purposeful for the store. Smart stores are careful about what prices you see, and when, so they can herd you toward what they most want you to buy. That’s no dig on stores, they are just being smart. But choosers can be smart, also.

A practical point about relationships: People can have an artificially low sense of themselves because of how they have been treated or what they have experienced. How they were treated, by family growing up or by past loves, can have little to do with their own worth but it still may stick, at least for a time. The danger for anyone who has had difficult relationships in the past is selling themselves short in the future.

Stuck On You: Arbitrary Coherence

2009-03-19T16:50:00.002-06:00

I see psychology as one of the cheerier social sciences. Of course, I’m biased. What many see as the dismal (social) science is the field of economics. Both fields study human behavior, often at different levels, but sometimes on the same level—that of the individual.

At the individual level, economists have found a very intriguing and reliable pattern that they call “arbitrary coherence.” (Like any good scientists, they come up with fancy names for what they study and talk about. Bravo fellow geekoids.) Arbitrary coherence occurs when we are exposed to a price for something and that price sort of sticks (coheres) in our minds. The price can be (and often is) arbitrary, hence the term, but once the price is out there and gets stuck into our heads, we come to expect that price to be THE price, and we value things based on this original, somewhat arbitrary set point.

This principle has been confirmed in many ingenious studies. It’s also why marketers will try to get you hooked on a higher price than the one they are planning to get you to pay for something. That higher price is an important part of the strategy because it becomes your comparison so that the price they hope to get you to pay starts looking good to you. The one becomes your reference point, and then you use that reference point to evaluate the other.

How could this principle apply to relationships? While it may seem crass, it’s very easy to apply market thinking to relationship dynamics—especially in the mating game but also in ongoing relationships like marriage. This has been done a lot in the field of economics, with a preeminent example being the work of Gary Becker who has applied economic thinking to family relationships. (For a particularly fascinating, recent treatment of such issues, I recommend one of my favorite, popular books written by an economist: Steve Harford’s, The Logic of Life. It contains some brutally honest discussions of things like changes in sexual relationships of teens or what happens to dating/mating dynamics in cities where there are more people of one sex than the other.)

I think about how experiences in relationships and cultural messages “set the price” or worth of people in the relationship market. In other words, who can attract and hang onto who, and for how long. Starting with family experiences and then accelerating into dating and longer-term relationships, a person’s experiences with others must play a major role in determining their own sense of their worth to others. If one experiences a series of painful rejections (is there any other kind?) or ends up having to give up a lot of what they value (or what their values are) to attract others, those things will impact how one sees the self.

All of this creates another commercial for the value of making decisions in relationships rather than just letting things happen. The whole idea of arbitrary coherence implies that our set points about worth and value become automatic and unexamined but, nevertheless, effect what happens to us—what we’re going after, what we’re willing to accept, what we accept and should not, and so forth. Deciding gives us a better shot at setting our own price on what we value and who we will be.

Fear and Humiliation

2009-03-16T10:26:00.009-06:00

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.

Making the Cut

2009-03-12T20:17:00.003-06:00

What do commitment and deciding have in common? They are both related to the need to choose among options in life. Commitment means making a choice to give up other choices.

Think of any type of commitment in life. Commitments involve deciding what is chosen and what is being left behind.

Here’s where it gets interesting, at least to me, because I like words. The word “decide” comes from a French word dating to the 1300s that literally means “to cut” or “to cut off.” Deciding is about coming to a point where something is cut off from something else. A part is chosen—hopefully the best part—and the illusion of hanging on to the whole, to everything, is given up.

In this way of thinking, commitment is counter cultural. The cultural messages we are inundated with encourage us to hang onto everything—to cut off no options, to have it all. Having a lot of options in life is great, but maybe not so great if one never decides what matters most.

[If you want to see the root of the word decide, check out a website such as www.etymonline.com]

Marshmallow Time

2009-03-11T16:22:00.002-06:00

A big part of being a decider when it comes to important things in life is sticking to what you have decided. That’s part of what commitment is all about. Unless you’ve only been alive for, say, 15 minutes or so, you know it’s not always easy to stick to what you decided you wanted to do.

I recently came across a recent report that summarizes some amazing research on willpower and the ability to resist temptation. The link to the article is at the bottom of this post.

The author, Eric Wargo, first mentions pretty cool studies that were done long ago where they tested children to see how many would choose to wait a little while to get two marshmallows instead of getting one marshmallow RIGHT NOW! Kind of like a lot of life, right? You could ask yourself, “am I a one or two marshmallow kind of person?” Quite an existential question, isn’t it? For some reason, I’m hearing a variation of this question with Clint Eastwood’s voice from the movie “Dirty Harry.” Sort of goes like this: “You must be asking yourself if you really have a shot at two marshmallows or just one. Do you feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?” Perhaps I have some marshmallow trauma to work through.

Back to the point. Wargo goes on to describe some pretty amazing research on self-control. Studies show that a person’s ability to resist temptation gets worn down. When you have to keep it together for awhile, doing whatever you wanted or thought you should do can get harder for a bit. Your willpower gets tired and it’s easier to just let go after a period of being more disciplined. As Wargo puts it, self-control is a limited resource. Partly what this means is that even if you do a great job on waiting for two marshmallows, you might then have trouble with the M & Ms. (Excuse me. I’ll be back in a few minutes.)

Think about that a moment. How many times have you found it harder to stick with what you thought you should do after you had to do things that required either self-control or some difficult decisions? Here’s what I think this means. When your decider has been working pretty hard, your slider is going to really want you to cut it some slack. If nothing much is at stake, that’s just fine. Slide away. In fact, when you’ve been working hard on something or really pushing your self-control, letting go in some creative or healthy ways is a good thing. But the warning in these findings is more about how it can be hard to stick to something we’ve decided is important when we’re worn down by something else.

As Wargo points out, if we want to stick to things we planned to do (or stick to being who we want to be), we have to watch out for the times when our decider is tired out. Imagine all the ways this plays out in life! Diets, exercise, work, or your commitment to your partner . . .

If you want to go deeper, here’s the link.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2452