The type of change we should seek in our romantic partner and in ourselves is that which develops the romantic connection, by bringing out the best in both of us. The wish to change your partner should not indicate that there is something wrong with your partner, but rather that growing together requires greater compatibility. The likelihood of a successful process of development is greater when both partners realize that such a process requires ongoing adaptation to each other, rather than changing each other. In such relationships, personal growth and flourishing are evident. Retaining each partner’s identity and autonomy is crucial in such a process, as it is in many other circumstances.
Romantic Drifting: Does Cohabitation Lead to More Divorces?
Only dead fish swim with the stream.
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
Many people’s long-term romantic behavior is similar to dead fish floating with the current, slowly drifting with the stream. Is such behavior damaging? Not always, as it turns out.
Decision-Making Mechanisms
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
JOHN GREEN, The Fault in Our Stars
Deliberative thinking and intuitive knowledge are two major decision-making mechanisms. The deliberative mechanism typically involves slow and conscious processes, which are largely under voluntary control, and it usually utilizes verbally accessible information and operates in a largely linear, serial mode. The intuitive mechanism involves spontaneous responses that rely more on tacit and elementary evaluations. Intuitive activity is often fast, automatic, and accompanied by little awareness. It is based on ready-made patterns that have been set during evolution and through both social and personal development; in this sense, history and personal development are embodied in these patterns. We may speak here of “learned spontaneity.” Since intuitive patterns are part of our psychological makeup, we do not need time to activate them; they are available to us when the appropriate circumstances show up.20
Drifting is another decision-making mechanism. More accurately, it is an avoidance mechanism involving either not deciding or deciding not to decide. Drifting involves lack of control. In some languages the word “drifting” denotes both slow and fast movement. Love at first sight is an example of fast drifting. I focus here on slow drifting.
Many of us experience slow drifting. From a subjective perspective, such drifting is convenient: it demands a minimal investment of resources, and, in the case of failure, one’s responsibility is correspondingly minimal. From an objective perspective, drifting is a gradual process that takes reality into account. There are no rushed decisions; choices are left to simmer on low heat until they are “well cooked.” Drifting can get us into trouble because it favors short-term considerations that maintain the status quo rather than long-term activities that actively advance our situation. Accordingly, drifting often inflates the eventual cost of changing the status quo and disproportionately reduces the weight of improvement. This helps to avoid immediate conflicts, but increases the likelihood of profound, long-term calamities.
Slow Romantic Drifting
Continents drift, and so do hearts.
JOHN MARK GREEN
Slow romantic drifting facilitates a gradual shift from one romantic state to another, without one’s full awareness or deliberate choice. Slow romantic drifting, during which love is eroded or developed, is a long process, though the realization that one does not love one’s spouse or that one has fallen in love with one’s friend can be abrupt and instantaneous. Although the drifting process can be long, the realization of its import often comes in an instant, taking one by surprise. Thus, Bertrand Russell claimed that he was happily married until one day, while riding his bicycle, he suddenly realized that he no longer loved his wife.21 Drifting is characterized by habituation and the lack of strong emotional intensity. Everything occurs in small incremental steps, and nothing constitutes a change that is significant enough to generate great emotional intensity, as is typically the case in acute emotions.
Romantic drifting might appear to be a reason-less, choice-less, action-less process of which we are unaware, but this is not entirely correct. Drifting is not reason-less; it is just not characterized by the more familiar method of conscious thinking. Although drifting does not involve a deliberative choice in which all options are considered, one does, in fact, make some choices without being coerced. While we are less aware of the drifting process than we are of our deliberative thinking, we are partially aware of some aspects of drifting. Thus, partners who are drifting apart can be aware of their marital difficulties but might not be fully aware that these difficulties have gradually worsened, or that they are indicative of romantic erosion. Drifting is also not entirely action-less. Although people who are drifting seem similar to dead fish floating with the stream, (unlike the fish) they always have an alternative they can take. Often, they do not take this alternative because it is regarded as having little value, or as being risky, unpleasant, or embarrassing. The individual’s responsibility in romantic drifting stems from not investing more effort in exploring the implicit, partial information they have. In some cases, such efforts could change the situation.22
Given that slow drifting takes place over a relatively long time, it reflects some stable features of reality. Thus, romantic drifting apart reveals the sad reality of the deteriorating relationship. In the slow, incremental process of drifting apart, partners lose their romantic attachment over time and become increasingly less passionate toward each other. When people feel that something inside has died and it’s too late to change, hide, or fake it, then all doubts disappear, and separating becomes the natural step to take.
When a couple is aware of this but continues to live within the loveless framework into which they drifted, they are romantically compromising. Not infrequently, this compromise can be traced to fears that a search for ideal love elsewhere will be unsuccessful, to heartbreaks experienced in previous searches for love, or to the sense that the risks of such a quest outweigh its advantages. Drifting out of love genuinely discloses the way people feel toward each other when the situation seems to be one of no return. However, if lovers become aware of the drifting process early enough, sometimes they can stop it and possibly even reverse it. Although in drifting we can be likened to a stagnant river, the water below the surface is not necessarily stationary, and our lack of awareness of these underlying currents poses a major risk to the romantic relationship.
Drifting into Marriage
My boyfriend and I live together, which means we don’t have sex—ever. Now that the milk is free, we’ve both become lactose intolerant.
MARGARET CHO
Premarital cohabitation has become the norm in many cultures, and more than 70 percent of US couples now cohabitate before marriage. Advocates of premarital cohabitation say that it enables partners to get to know each other better and to find out whether they get along well enough to marry. Counterintuitively, however, many studies have found that premarital cohabitation is associated with increased risk of divorce, a lower quality of marriage, poorer marital communication, and higher levels of domestic violence. Finally, there is research (although less) that refutes the negative correlation between premarital cohabitation and divorce. Why is it that this phenomenon, which has become so common and aims at increasing compatibility, has such disputable results?
Commitment theory describes three major factors underlying romantic commitment: the degree of love, the cost of separation, and the availability of an alternative. Commitment is strengthened by the amount of satisfaction and the extent of the cost, and it is weakened by possible alternatives to that relationship. Satisfaction level is significantly more predictive of commitment than is the quality of alternatives or the cost of separation. The quality of the relationship has the greatest impact upon its continuation, much more than external factors, such as the cost of switching or the available alternatives. However, when satisfaction is not high, the
extent of the cost and the attractiveness of the alternatives can carry greater weight.23
In a study conducted by Scott Stanley and colleagues, it was found that the decision to get married while cohabiting was arrived at via a sliding (or drifting) process, involving hardly any deliberative decision-making. Thus, more than half of the couples living together had not discussed it and simply slid into cohabitation. In comparison to a simple affair or a relationship that has no committed framework, cohabitation involves a relatively greater cost of separation (e.g., financial obligations, a shared lease, sharing a pet, pregnancy, embarrassment), without necessarily including a significant increase in the intensity and profundity of love. Stanley and colleagues argue that the reduced weight given to love is likely to become problematic after marriage, when the couple will have to face various obstacles together. It is interesting to note that the negative effects of cohabitation on marriage are greatly reduced when cohabitation begins after engagement; that is, when the decision to marry is made before the couple cohabits. In this case, the decision to marry occurs when the weight of cost, relative to love, is less, and meeting others is still natural.24
An additional factor limiting the ability to reach an optimal decision about marriage is that cohabiting couples tend to minimize the differences between cohabitation and marriage, particularly those differences concerning lasting commitment and challenges. Many cohabiting couples who decide to get married assume that the difference between the two lifestyles is minor. This assumption is, after all, a major justification for cohabitation before marriage: it is a kind of test of the couple’s suitability for marriage. As it turns out, this assumption is wrong. While cohabitation seems like marriage, it is a horse of a different color altogether. It lacks marital constraints (such as exclusivity and less freedom) and challenges (such as raising children). It appears that cohabitation is a kind of deluxe test, a test with less commitment and fewer challenges. Indeed, research indicates that marriage is qualitatively distinctive from cohabitation and that it involves a higher degree of commitment and stability than cohabitation.25
This does not apply, of course, to those couples who do not believe in the institution of marriage, who never intended to marry, and who cohabit on principle. Their partnership is not a trial marriage or a test to see if marriage might be a future option; rather, it is a committed relationship between couples who feel they do not need legal or religious sanctions to confirm their pledge to each other. This holds also for gay couples in places where gay marriage is not legal, and these couples cohabit without anticipating marriage in the future.
When a couple enters a marital relationship after having cohabitated, their passion is not at its peak. If people have reached their peak of passion during cohabitation, they arrive at the challenging years of marriage without the drive of passion that provides the energy to overcome the challenges in a marital framework. It is also possible that after cohabitation, people take divorce more lightly, because cohabitation made them experience and consider separation as more natural.
Commitment theory rightly considers the presence of quality relationship alternatives to decrease romantic commitment. Cohabitation indeed limits the number of quality alternatives, and in this sense strengthens the relationship. However, since cohabitation is a stage in the process of choosing a partner, this limitation can hinder finding the optimal partner. This is an additional reason why cohabitation can be valuable when the decision to marry has been taken—and the main issue is to strengthen this relation—and can be harmful when you are still searching for the best romantic partner.
In contrast to the above considerations, there are scholars who emphasize the value of premarital cohabitation as a kind of “trial marriage,” which enables the couple to become better acquainted before committing themselves to marriage. Advocates of this theory claim that those who cohabit prior to marriage tend to have a greater risk of marital dissolution, not because they cohabited, but for other intrinsic reasons, such as their personality and previous history, which led them to cohabit in the first place. Thus, it has been found that cohabitation, relative to marriage, is selected by less committed individuals.26
A study by Michael Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler suggests that premarital cohabitation affects marital stability differently in the short and long terms. In the first year of a marriage, couples who have cohabited before have a lower breakup rate than couples who have never cohabited, which may be due to the initial experiential advantage of couples who have already lived together when they enter into marriage. This advantage, however, lasts only for the first year. The marital stability disadvantage of premarital cohabitation emerges most strongly after five years of marital duration, and has remained roughly constant over time.27
Without getting into the details of the empirical dispute, it seems that the nature of premarital cohabitation can have significant effect on marital duration in both the short and long term. This impact, however, is multifaceted and should take into account personal and contextual factors.
Inequality and Envy
The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Equality in friendship is an old, well-discussed topic. Thus, for Aristotle and many others in ancient Greek society, friendship was ideally a relationship between equals. Aristotle also considers friendship between people of unequal status but maintains that in this kind of asymmetrical friendship, there must be some proportional exchange of benefits, which bestows a “distributive equality” upon the relationship.
A lack of equality often generates envy and decreases martial satisfaction. I have argued that envy is mainly concerned with our undeserved inferiority. Envy does not involve a general moral concern for justice, but rather a particular, personal concern for what we consider to be our undeserved inferiority.28 The central place of inferiority and deservingness in generating envy demonstrates the role of inequality in envy; when such inequality is perceived to be undeserved, envy is likely to emerge. Inequality is often perceived to be negative, as equality is typically associated with a positive norm. Thus, we speak negatively about the growing inequality between the rich and the poor. Inequality is defined as “an unfair situation in which some people have more rights or better opportunities than other people.” It is often expressed in socioeconomic terms as the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Various egalitarian societies have tried to eliminate such gaps by allocating similar resources for fulfilling their members’ basic needs, such as food, health, education, and living accommodations. The kibbutz movement in Israel is a prime example. Yet this has not reduced, and has even increased, the level of envy in the kibbutzim.29
The utter failure to eliminate or even to reduce envy in egalitarian societies has to do with our inability to reduce the inequality associated with natural differences, such as being handsome and wise, or with those arising from other impersonal causes, such as one’s background. Since such inequalities do not entail anyone’s unjust behavior or attitudes, we cannot blame anyone for this situation. Nevertheless, the situation can be considered undeserved or unfair: it represents some kind of injustice, since it places us in an undeserved situation. We often envy beautiful people or those born with natural gifts. In feeling envious toward these people, we do not accuse them of behaving immorally; rather, we consider ourselves to occupy an undeserved inferior position. The situations perceived as unfair by envious people are often not perceived as unfair by others. The urge to find some kind of unfairness in our inferior position could also be explained by referring to the saying “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts.”
The most suitable partner will often not be the person with the best “objective” traits, but someone who is ready to invest in improving your joint flourishing. We can love a person who is “objectively” not the most handsome or the wisest person in the world, but with whom our connection is nevertheless profound and f
ulfilling.
The value of equality in intimate relationships is clear, but determining equality can be hard. In some cases, the gap is obvious, and both partners are aware of it. In other cases, where love is absent, each partner thinks that she (or he) is the superior person and therefore the one who is making the compromise. In many cases of profound love, each person adores the partner and considers the partner to be (almost) perfect. Self-deception might be common in all these situations.
One’s comparative value is of less importance when the differences are insignificant and refer to different domains. They are disturbing only when they fill your mind and heart to the extent that you believe you are making a profound compromise. However, since there are various domains of comparison, such as kindness, attractiveness, wisdom, social status, and achievements, and since it is, to a certain extent, up to the lover to decide on the relative weight of each domain, not considering your partner to be inferior or superior to you depends somewhat on you.
The combination of being in an inferior situation and being in what is perceived to be undeserved circumstances is exemplified in a study indicating that being in an undeserved position in your marriage could encourage extramarital affairs.30 Equity theory states that those involved in an inequitable romantic relationship consider themselves to be in an undeserving situation. This is the case for both the “superior” person, who feels that she could do better, and for the “inferior” one, who feels indignant at being unappreciated by the partner. Involvement in extramarital relationships is more likely for these “superior” and “inferior” people than for those who are considered by their partners to be equal. The superior person might perceive extramarital relationships as something she deserves because she is getting “less” than she merits. The inferior person tends to be involved in extramarital relationships to escape the unpleasant state of inequity and to prove to herself and to her partner that she is equal to the partner and is regarded as attractive and desirable by others.
The Arc of Love Page 14