Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Unequally into "Us": Characteristics of individuals in asymmetrically committed relationships

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Unequally into "Us": Characteristics of individuals in asymmetrically committed relationships

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Our newest journal article is out. It's about the characteristics of individuals that are associated with it being more likely to be an asymmetrically committed relationship (ACR) compared to those not in such relationships. The study focuses on a sample of unmarried adults (aged 18 to mid thirties) in seriously involved relationships. Asymmetrically committed relationships are more likely to break up (especially if the woman is the less committed partner), more likely to be unhappy, more likely to include physical aggression (by either partner), and more likely to be found in cohabiting rather than dating, but not living together, relationships.

Here are a few highlights:

Those who are the less committed partner within an asymmetrically committed relationship are more likely to:

perceive themselves as having good alternatives to their present relationship
be attachment avoidant
have parents who never married (but not more likely to have parents who divorced)

Those who are the more committed partner within an asymmetrically committed relationship are more likely to:

have anxious attachment

Regarding commitment and attachment, those with attachment avoidance tend to hang back and those with anxious attachment tend to hang on. These are not surprising findings but it is important to observe them not only in regarding to mere high or low commitment, but regarding being in the higher or lower position of commitment in an asymmetrical relationship.

There are other findings covered in the paper, including about numbers of prior sexual and/or cohabiting partners, infidelity, and so forth.

The paper covers the existing literature on ACRs pretty deeply, so it provides a great way to get a solid sense of what is known on this topic. The paper also provides suggestions for working with individuals or couples in therapy or relationship education based on the existing, and growing, literature on asymmetrical commitment.

To read the abstract, click here.

To see me discussing the study in a "video abstract" for the The journal Family Process, click here.

For an earlier summary on this blog of our research on unequally committed relationships, and their numerous negative characteristics, click here.

If you have no way to access the entire article and want to read it, email me at my university email address, on this page.

Citation: Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., Kelmer, G., Scott, S. B., Markman, H. J., & Fincham, F. D. (2018). Unequally into “Us”: Characteristics of individuals in asymmetrically committed relationships. Family Process. doi: 10.1111/famp.12397. Advance online version: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/famp.12397

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this area, Galena Rhoades, and the work of other scholars on how couples go through important relationship transitions. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means, especially regarding commitment. An important paper by Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock (2005) was influential in our thinking about how couples transitioned into living together. They conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it or make any decision, but simply slid into doing so. Another paper having a large influence on this thinking was written by Jo Lindsey (2000). She found that the cohabiting couples she interviewed could not articulate how they came to be living together. In fact, as she puts it, it seemed like they had no agency in how it happened. Lindsay concluded that the fundamental characteristic of cohabitation was ambiguity, a theme we often discuss. Manning and Smock, Lindsay, and other researchers have noted that, for most couples, moving in together was nothing like a clear decision about what the couple was doing. Thus, it very often is not anything like a how people form a clear commitment. In one of our quantitative studies of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

We believe this sliding vs. deciding dynamic which is quite obvious in how couples come to live together is common in many important relationship transitions, including pregnancy, having children, work, as well as in how couples drift into regular patterns of who does what. In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."

Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Unequally into "Us": Characteristics of individuals in asymmetrically committed relationships

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