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All the shouting about positive thinking, effective time management and the importance of having attainable goals amounts to knowing what you want and having something vaguely resembling a plan to get it. As long as you are more or less on your own, this works great. If you are with someone else, and you act as if you were alone, random chance and good initial selection are going to determine whether you stay together while you each get what you want, or whether you wind up so different and interested in such different things that you part ways, amicably or otherwise (did you know that legally, amicably means without lawyers? That's all!).
A simple solution exists: have a joint agenda. You will probably have to talk a bit to accomplish this, but it may be less than you fear. Good initial selection can help out a lot here, as well, but people do change over time (and when they don't, that's worse). Planning together starts by communicating needs and desires, expectations and fears. Conflict will happen. That's a good thing. It means there's at least a chance everyone's actually communicating everything important.
Planning together generally involves a lot of mundane stuff. What city do we want to live in, or what city can we both stand to live in, or what city would be most supportive of our other goals? What kind of work do we want to be doing n days, weeks, months, years in the future? What kind of housing do we need now, in the near future, in the medium term? Thinking about the long term is also okay, but if you haven't been doing any particular planning in your life so far, stick to the six months to five year range until you get the hang of it. If you have been thinking about the long term your whole life, pulling back to the six months to five year range many decrease a debilitating sensation of always waiting and encourage you to make hard decisions in a more timely fashion. If you've always thought about the six month-to five year year range, try stretching it out a bit experimentally and see what happens. Ultimately, you should have the ability to think about your future in all of these ranges -- and to set aside thoughts about the future for a more appropriate, defined time.
You will have to talk about whatever it is you are making decisions about. The odds are good that your verbal communication styles will differ in some interesting way that will enable you to learn to communicate more effectively in general, but may bog you down in specific with your partner. A large amount has been written and said about verbal communication styles. I'm going to stick with one particular issue here, as it is directly relevant to talking about the future.
Almost all of us have some unarticulated, perhaps unconscious, expectations about how people should respond when we express an opinion ("I really like chocolate cake"), or make a statement about the future ("I'm going to learn how to tend bar"). Unfortunately, because these expectations are not articulated, and perhaps even conscious, we may perceive responses that are not what we expected as rude, wrong and indicative of poor character. If your partner has different expectations from you, this will create conflict. I'm going to lay out some of the more common expectations without any data to back them up, and rely upon you, and your memory of countless interactions with family, friends and coworkers to help you generate that data on your own.
When I express an opinion, that opinion may be ignored (no response), acknowledged ("I understand that you like chocolate cake"), validated ("You have a right to like chocolate cake, and I wholeheartedly support that right"), agreed with ("I sure like chocolate cake, too"), responded to with an opinion on the same topic, or a similar opinion on a different topic ("I am indifferent to chocolate cake myself" or "I really like carrot cake"), responded to factually ("But you never eat chocolate cake and when you do, you always make a funny face and spit it out" in the negative case and "I can tell, you look so happy whenever you eat it" in the affirmative case), responded to on a moral, aesthetic, ethical level ("It is wrong to eat chocolate cake because of the horrible living conditions of the chickens (which produce the eggs), the cows (which produce the milk) or the peasants (who harvested the cocoa beans)."), responded to with an injunction ("You should like chocolate cake") or an imperative ("Go make a cake and eat it.").
You may be able to help your partner learn your preferences in various conversational situations. Increasing your own awareness and understanding about which responses in which settings "push your buttons" will, at minimum, help you explain later why you went ballistic.
Statements about future actions are a special subset of statements of opinion. A person who is extremely tolerant of a wide array of responses to statements of opinion in general may be extremely intolerant of the same kind of response to a statement about future action, and vice versa. A lot of people try to reduce conversational conflict by sticking with acknowledgements and validation, using I-statements ("I think it is wrong to eat chocolate cake because of. . ."), and explicitly taking turns (one person expresses their opinions/hopes for the future on a given topic; when done, the other person expresses their opinions/hopes on the same topic). This doesn't work in every situation. Sooner or later, we all find ourselves making a tough decision or holding an unpopular opinion and it helps when the more important people in our lives say things like, "You did the right thing", "I agree that so-and-so is an unprintable". When the important people in our lives maintain a conscientiously neutral stance in this kind of situation,we may experience it as disapproval, dislike or even abandonment.
There is no One True Way to avoid making the wrong response, particularly since ignoring the person is usually one of the worst choices. The sad truth is you will all screw this up, sometimes badly. Learning baselines can help you establish when someone is not giving you a straightforward yes or no, which can in turn help you detect when you screwed up. Apologize quick, state your motives and ask for assistance in figuring out what the right thing to say is, then say it and avoid nasty little addenda like, "but I think that's ridiculous that you need me to say this". Your single friends will probably interpret this as being whipped. As long as you are getting comparable treatment from your partner, console yourself by remembering that they aren't getting laid regularly. If they torment you about this, cut a deal with your partner to avoid conversations that generate this kind of interaction (I'm betting you can figure out which ones those are) while those friends are present.
If you can manage interactions about opinions and statements about the future, the rest of the decision process shouldn't be appreciably harder jointly than it was for each of you individually. The catch here is that one or both of you may have real problems associated with making decisions.
Everyone, part of the time, and some people, most of the time, and an unfortunate few, all of the time, change their mind after making a decision. Changing one's mind is frequently not just a good idea, but a life preserving decision. If there really were a person who never, ever, ever changed their mind, they probably died young. New data is one of the most acceptable reasons to change one's mind. I was going to buy that refrigerator, until I found one that was cheaper, and had all the features and reliability I wanted. You were majoring in physics, until you realized how much fun you had hacking code. He was pursuing a graduate degree in some weird medical specialty until he realized he had ethical issues with testing experimental drugs or procedures on animals or inmates and he could find no acceptable alternatives. She was married to him, until she learned he was molesting their eight year old daughter. These are all commitments, of escalating seriousness, with escalating costs associating with breaking them, in which the people involved all made the right tradeoff and broke the commitment to do something else.
A lot of people who have a great deal of difficulty committing to a decision (that is to say, they decide, but change their mind before they have a chance to follow through on the decision) already have management techniques for dealing with this particular deficiency in life skills. You may be your partner's management technique. If you have no difficulty making decisions for yourself and tend to organize social events and pick restaurants, movies, outings, etc., you've attracted a number of people over the years who find that if they just follow you around their life works out pretty well. Your partner may be one of those people, and on those occasions where what you want to do isn't acceptable to them, these people -- including your partner -- are going to drive you a little nuts. You may well be perfectly happy doing what they want to do, you just wish they could figure that out. There are a couple of ways around this problem. One is to make all of their decisions for them. This will work until it doesn't, at which point their first committed decision will be to get as far away from you as humanly possible, and at which point they will probably never have trouble making a decision again. Great for them, bad for the long term survival of the relationship, and they'll make you out to be a control freak after the breakup. Your mutual friends will mostly realize they were a total conflict avoiding wuss, but they're going to agree with the control freak theory at the same time. Don't do that.
Another way to handle this situation is to get out of the relationship as soon as you realize what happened. If you are both otherwise compatible, and you weren't very alert very early on, this probably isn't a viable option.
Why do so many adults have trouble making and acting on decisions? Very, very, very few small children have difficulty making decisions. Five years olds tend to be both decisive and insistent, not to say shrill and annoying. From this, we might conclude that we teach people to become indecisive over time. I think we do, to a degree, but I also think that many of the strategies for eliminating options (or creating new options) that work great when we are five, work poorly when we are 25, 45, 65 or 85. When we are five, we can try to do anything we can think of, anything anyone in our environment can think of doing, with no really serious long term consequences (this is an over generalization). For the most part, if we try something dangerous, people stopped us when we were five years old. There were a lot of trained adults around, they were bigger than us, and our circle of action was constrained. When we are five, we can say no to anything that doesn't strike us just the right way, relying on the adults around us to make sure our basic needs are taken care of.
As we gain a larger circle of action, increase in size, and have checking accounts, fewer people have the inclination and ability to stop us from doing something harmful to ourselves and others, and we've lost or distanced ourselves from those few people who used to take care of all our basic needs for us. Also, our needs got more complex, and it was no longer possible for our parents and teachers and so on to address them all (pity about arranged marriages and apprenticeships for the pre-teenager going away, hunh?). Everyone reading this is still alive, so everyone reading this has come up with some strategies for making sure that decisions and actions that we make on our own don't mess up our lives too badly in one direction (hurting us) or the other (neglecting our own needs).
Unfortunately, a lot of these strategies overcompensate in one area or another. Anyone who still has trouble making decisions should sit down and pay close attention to how they make decisions. In general, a good decision making strategy should satisfy the following criteria:
Troublesome decision making strategies often exhibit one or more of the following:
Before committing to one of those entrees, we can collect some additional information: ask the server, look at an entree at someone else's table, ask our table-mates if they've ever had that dish here. Based on that, we can further eliminate or order. And remember, Just because you ordered the tuna, if you really hate it, the restaurant may well bring you something else at no additional charge, and if not, you can always order something else. If it arrives with a hairball attached to it, hopefully there's another restaurant still open in driving distance. If you forget this while at a restaurant, you will find it virtually impossible to order anything. Other people will wind up ordering for you and over time, you will come to hate them.
Some people can get right to the last bit, and have trouble deciding which of two or three options to select. This is great, when it enables you to be happy around finicky people, who are only happy with one of three things that you would be just fine doing. When a number of extremely easy-going people try to decide what movie to see, or what restaurant to eat at, or which art gallery to visit next, introduce the idea of a coin flip early on in the process. If you catch someone saying, "Best two of three", do whatever it is that person wants to do. They know what they want; they were just shy about expressing a desire, or their ability to communicate a desire could use a little work.
Identifying the need to make a decision catches more people than one might think. After an hour, a group of five people who cannot decide on a movie to view together have probably spent at least fifteen minutes not realizing they should be deciding what to do -- not what movie to see, because they've probably already determined there is no movie in an appropriate distance and time frame that they all want to attend. This problem overlaps substantially with failing to assess the results of taking an action in order to determine whether to stick with the current choice, switch to one of the good alternates, or start the whole process over. If you decide to see a particular movie, and you arrive at the theater to learn that seats are only available in the first five rows, you should be thinking about one of those other theaters, show times, movies or maybe a walk in a park, since the second or third best options are probably better than the now modified first option.
I've had a lot of problems with this part of the decision making process, and have recently been overjoyed to come close to solving some of them. Because of a job I used to have that kept me working late hours, and an innate tendency to get up late and stay up later, I often eat dinner after 9 p.m. In Seattle, particularly on week nights, this can be a problem, as many restaurants (and bar or pub kitchens) close between 9:30 and 10. Combined with food allergies (I am allergic to dairy products, lactose intolerant, and shrimp and prawns give me migraines), and the emotional consequences of difficult negotiations while hungry, with other hungry people, I can get into a lot of trouble sailing from one restaurant to another, as they close, sequentially, five or ten minutes before I arrive. Left to my own devices, I am usually fine; I head off to a known, safe place to eat (New American Grill or Charlie's on Capitol Hill, unless it's after 1, in which case I trek on over to Thirteen Coins). However, when trying to combine my requirements with another set of dietary restrictions (vegetarians; a friend who is allergic to the entire onion family), things can get a little ugly. Toss in someone who doesn't believe me when I say how early restaurants close, and I've lost friends.
Recently, with the assistance of very supportive friends, I have acquired enough spine to decline spontaneous group outings for dinner that are suggested after 9:30 p.m., without a specific venue already agreed upon. I have also learned to supply more data to people earlier on in the process, as another component of this particular, familiar disaster was the consideration of non-options.
Earlier attempts to solve this problem had largely revolved around keeping a list of restaurants with their phone numbers and how late they were open. This only worked erratically, as restaurants change their hours at will, and cell phone batteries frequently die. Sometimes, additional information only helps so much; the early realization that a different decision is called for is the only solution.
Gender stereotypes about who pushes to make decisions like marriage, purchasing a home and when to have children abound. Some people avoid planning the future to avoid being pressed to agree to these kinds of decisions. If you've been pressing your partner for a decision in one of these areas, switch to pressing for a time frame in which your partner will feel comfortable with making the decision in. If you've never tried this before, be as generous as you possibly can be. Most joint decisions can be put off for a full year before they become dire. If you have tried this before, and your partner has consistently required more time than they specified in order to make a given decision, and the time they initially ask for was relatively short ("I need to sleep on that" or even "Can we talk about that this weekend?"), give it another shot with a generous time frame. But make adherence to the time frame a deal breaker. If you try this with a generous time frame, and they still can't make a decision, you have a shorter list of options. At this point, it's fair to characterize them as either not communicating their actual wishes to you, or they really can't make a decision on this subject even after given several months to think about it. Failure to communicate (including the inability to say no when fearing the consequences) or unbounded internal conflict may well be a dynamic of this relationship, but it is highly unlikely that any unilateral action on your part will change this dynamic. Failure to communicate or unbounded internal conflict may well be characteristics of your partner in any relationship; in this case, I can almost guarantee that anything you do or so will have no appreciable impact on your partner. You can walk now, or you can walk later. If you don't want to walk now, I strongly advise you to make a condition of the continuation of the relationship that your partner get individual assistance from a professional in learning how to communicate or resolve internal conflict or both, whichever turns out to be appropriate. Give them a bounded amount of time (less than one year) to take action on this, and one more shot at demonstrating that they have effectively changed.
If you can't stand to wait another six months to find out whether your partner is willing to live with you, own real estate with you, get engaged, get married, have children, move to another city, or whatever, consider this an indicator that perhaps you don't want to be with your partner. Respect clues like this. Reread Chapter 16.
If you can stand to wait another few months to find out what your partner wants to do, giving your partner those months (or even, in some cases, years), may well change your relationship dramatically, particularly if you've been going around on a particular issue week in and week out for so long it almost seems normal to be having this particular argument/heated discussion/debate. One of you doesn't have to nag any more. The other one doesn't have to be nagged. Everyone gets to expend all that time and energy doing something more fun (like having sex), and will probably start to actually figure out why they want this so bad (or if they really do) or why the thought of this freaks the living shit out of them.
That is, you may have an a-ha, eureka, I've figured out what's really going on experience during your time out period. If your usual habit when you have one of these is to immediately contact your partner and start babbling about it, resist. Sit. Think about it long enough to have a 100 word description of what you just realized. Run it by a close friend. Get help honing it and if they say you're full of it, respect that. Mull it over a bit more. If your usual habit is to sit on insights like this, or to run them by every single other person you know and hone the heck out of it before finally giving a telegraphic version to your partner (or, worse, just figuring they must know now since you've said it so many times to so many other people, or, duh, everyone knows especially you since you're so much smarter than me), call your partner up immediately after you've figured it out and go through the process of honing it with them. Do it differently than you usually do. If you have never had insights to communicate, and this is your first, pick whichever approach appeals to you. In general, if you are the person with the internal conflict, and you had a critical insight that relieved a lot of that conflict, you should speak up. If you are the person who needs your partner to make a decision, you should be very, very, very cautious about bringing anything remotely associated with decision up because your partner is probably going to hear you as nagging.
If, as a result of discussing this insight, everyone immediately knows exactly what they want to do, great. I'd still recommend giving everyone until the end of the time frame to change their mind. If the insight helped a lot, but someone still doesn't know for sure what they want to do, the time frame to make the decision should stand as is. Even if you're a little disappointed that this great realization didn't fix everything, keep hold of the fact that it helped some, maybe even a lot. Verbalize your appreciation of this. Reward the additional communication. Then go back to leaving discussion about the decision off-limits.
At the end of the stated time frame, if the person you are waiting for needs more time, see above. You are now in deal breaker territory, whether anyone chooses to admit that to themselves or each other. If the person you are waiting for has made their decision, and you don't like it, resist the temptation to offer them more time in hopes they will change their mind. The whole point of giving them a lot of time and space to decide is to get the real answer. If the answer they supply is a deal breaker, go directly to Chapter 11.
If the answer they supply isn't what you were hoping for, but isn't a deal breaker (and remember, it is your responsibility to know the difference), your success in applying this particular technique to get an accurate answer from your partner is going to rely on how you behave when you get this answer. Thank them for coming to a decision. Thank them for adhering to the time line. Do not argue further about the decision. All future planning should assume that decision is written in stone unless the person who made the decision reopens the discussion.
The above was intended to help you cope with a person you care about a lot while they go through a time consuming decision process. Some decisions, particularly ones to which people attach a huge, or infinite cost to getting wrong, require a lengthy decision period in order for a person to feel able to take steps towards implementing what they decide. Marriage is one of these kinds of decisions. If a nagging fear that one might be picking the wrong person prevents one from ever marrying, the fear is clearly overblown. However, it is difficult to argue with the proposition that waiting a few months to be sure one is making the right decision indicates a greater degree of commitment to the marriage once it occurs.
But I'm going to anyway. Waiting for someone who is in the process of making a difficult, life-changing, long-term decision makes sense as long as that person is collecting additional data on costs, benefits and consequences, and as long as the option which you are hoping they select has not already been discarded. There's no point in waiting for someone to decide to marry you if they're still researching new possibilities, or if they're only living with you until they meet The Right One. Only part of the difficulty lies in knowing where in the process they currently are. The unfortunate truth may be that their decision making strategy is out of order in more ways than one. They may continually return to researching new ideas after narrowing the existing lists. They may not realize that a decision is needed. They may not realize they can narrow the list before making the final decision. And their behavior may lie at odds with their internal mental and emotional state.
Waiting may be necessary. Getting to know a person well enough to commit to working with them, much less entering into a contract with them, much less entering into marriage with them can be a very time consuming, ambiguous, anxiety producing process. However, if you are waiting for someone to make a decision, create enough structure to their process so you know when you will decide to stop waiting.
Now a word or hundred about regret, because a lot of indecision is about fear of regret, and a lot of conflict comes from matters not going as one had hoped, and regrets that result. When planning is done alone, one's regrets are one's own, which is bad enough. But when those regrets can be used as weapons against each other, it is time and past time to find a way to live without having to regret.
I do not mean you are now required to make exactly the right decision at the right time, all the time.
You are required to do something else, which you may find hard, at least at first, but which I believe you will grow to love doing. Expect things to turn out a little differently than you think they will. Plan for that -- plan to change your mind, to change your tactics, to consult with your partner, to commiserate together, to celebrate together. When you have to choose between several, incompatible paths, think well before the decision about what the future after that decision be, how you and your partner will live with that decision. After the decision is made, however, do not maintain those future selves. That future you, that future partner, is dead when you decide to pursue other, incompatible goals. If you pretend that those future yous, those future partners, are still alive in some sense, you will experience dissonance with your current life, and it will manifest as resentment, regret, and a lack of commitment to the choice you made.
If you want more than one thing, and you don't think you can have them both, whether career and family, a child and a regular Friday night out at the clubs, feel free to search for ways to have both. Keep working at it. But after you decide you can't have both, and you pick one, you have to forget the other one, let it go, let it fade.
You may have difficulty with regrets. You may anticipate regret, and fear it. You may fear the unknown. To some degree, overcoming regret, the anticipation of regret and the fear of the unknown, is to experience these things and realize that it just isn't quite as bad as you had thought. However, we can confuse ourselves easily. When I make a decision and the results are bad, I may incorrectly associate the bad outcome with myself, or with making any decision, rather than realize that, hey, I was sixteen at the time and hadn't fully internalized what "stopping distance" meant. Keep bad results of a particular decision separate from your feelings about making decisions in general. Learn from the specifics, but get back on and keep riding.
You may at some point in your life have had your entire future mapped out ahead of you. You would meet that special someone, you would settle down together at good jobs that would turn into fulfilling careers. You would buy a house, have a child or two, pay off the mortgage, go on great vacations, save for the kids' education and your own retirement and eventually go on that cruise and stuff yourselves silly while gloating about your grand kids. You met someone, but somewhere along the line, it didn't quite work out the way you planned. You were committed to your plan, though, so you dismissed your doubts or assumed the fault was yours until eventually, blind persistence was inadequate as well and your whole future vanished like a dream in the face of a nightmarish reality.
A friend of mine, Jeffrey, describes this kind of behavior as "scripting", a Transactional Analysis idea. This kind of attitude and set of actions are characterized by detailed future planning for a group of two or more done by an individual, who then attempts to fit people into that plan, rather than trying to adjust that plan with the assistance of others. It is another instance of ignoring feedback until everything blows up. Generally, people who engage in scripting, or otherwise ignore feedback, blame the person they picked and try to find someone else to fit the role, until in discouragement, they give up on one of two things: either their ability to find someone to fit the role, or planning in general. These are both poor choices. Make a better choice. Choose to pay attention to feedback instead.
Just because you used to plan poorly and it didn't work out for you doesn't mean that planning is a bad activity. Planning is a necessary activity. However, you can't willy nilly impose your will on others. That's not planning; that's tyranny. You must plan together, to stay together, and your plans must be flexible, taking into consideration changing people and a changing environment.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created February 9, 2002 Updated November 19, 2003