Selection Effects: What's at Stake? (following up on The National Marriage Project Report "Before I Do")

See the prior post (below) for more information on the National Marriage Project Report that Galena Rhoades and I authored that was released yesterday.

I want to make you aware of a couple of pieces we've written on the important issue of "selection effects." You'll often hear social scientists talk about this subject when they discuss or critique the type of findings we present in the Before I Do report. The subject is important because it revolves around the degree to which scientists believe that some experiences in life are causally related to outcomes in life.

So, you have a couple of options, if you want to read more on this subject.

For a briefer (about 2.5 pages) take, linked directly to the NMP release, check out what we just posted at the Institute for Family Studies website:  Selection Effects and Personal Choice

For a longer (about 4 pages), more general take, with similar observations but also a deeper set of questions about the problems of free will in science, see this one:  Selection Effects: Social Science and Personal Choices

If you like going deeper on such issues, there you go.

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

[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 am 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, everything else about the neighborhood including crime, stress, social integration/disintegration, resources, sex-and-stress-hormones like daily (I mean to be extreme here) 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.

By the way, you have a huge budget.  Huge.  And a massive sample size.  Massive. 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 (though, realize it’s harder to explain as much as a prediction, using the same variables, in a new data set—technical point you can ignore if you like). 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.This is an extreme example but the point I am making is that when it comes to come common behaviors and risks, there truly are a lot of background variables and factors that seem to determine the outcome. 

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 they cohabit only with one person, and only after having mutual plans to marry or some other really clear clarification about commitment?

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 common 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, and a SUPER BIG SOCIAL SCIENCE DILEMMA: It’s not all that clear how researchers can 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. You can measure what background characteristics make it more likely that behavior will happen. 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. But how do you even keep evidence of free-will and choice in your statistical model? This means social scientists can often sound like the individual's ability to decide or choose is not part of what matters. This is a profoundly important question (unless I’m missing something really obvious to another who will eventually point it out to me.  That happens plenty often and I’m fine with it!).

An emphasis on selection can be motivated by good science and it can also be motivated by compassion and social justice concerns. This 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.It is important not to convey that they are helpless victims and cannot do anything that affects their own outcomes.

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

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Selection and Science: Cohabitation Research as the Example

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. Selection variables are actually causally linked to risks and outcomes. What I mean here is that selection effects are not the part of the risk that is causal as in related to the behavior in focus—cohabiting before marriage or before engagement.[1] 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.

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[1] I added the clarity here about selection playing a causal role but not in the way people wonder about the effects of cohabitation, in February 2016.

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?

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.

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Did You Decide To Read This?

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. 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’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.

That last comment in the quote above about the scope of blameworthy actions shrinking ever more is an important point--one 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. As more is explained, the part we now attribute to chance and/or choice will evaporate into explanation. What that means to me is an increasing sense of determinism in the minds of scientists and other scholars. 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.

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[Light edits on 7-24-2017]

Hand Held. Hand Played.

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.

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Black Jack or Roulette? You Choose.

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 goes 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.

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