Hello, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC.

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 bad thing to do in a major talk. It is not only boring, it makes the audience 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.

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

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.

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Son of a Son of Dissonance (Cognitive Dissonance III)

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.

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Cognitive Dissonance II

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.

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Cognitive Dissonance I

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.

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DTR Part II

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.

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The DTR Dance: Avoiding the Talk

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.

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