Do You Know the Importance of Deciding Rather Than Sliding into Decisions?

            “Sliding vs. Deciding” is a theme that Dr. Scott Stanley thinks about often, and it comes from his study of commitment. Stanley is a research professor and co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver. One of his colleagues is Dr. Galena Rhoades, who is research professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Denver.

            Stanley speaks and writes about “sliding vs. deciding” in connection with his study of commitment. However, the same idea can be applied to every big and major decision in our lives. How many college students slide into a career rather than making a firm choice about their future? How many people slide into buying the car that is readily available rather than researching and deciding which car to purchase? Of course, the decision about who and when to marry is far more important than buying a car or a house, and no one explains it better than Stanley. [See sidebar.]

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

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

            Stanley has a blog that is referenced above. He also has several videos about deciding vs sliding. Two of his videos can be found here  and here.