YouTube of my Core Sliding vs. Deciding Talk

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.

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Does it work? Does Relationship and Marriage Education Work?

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 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.

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Getting the Girl

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.

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Markets and Sex

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.

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Results of Federally Funded Study in Oklahoma

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!

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Cohabidating

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.

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Decoding Commitment: When Sally met Harry

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.

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