This is true of all big personal decisions: we will know what is great about a college education once we have one; we will know what it is like to love our children only after they exist; we will know what living as an immigrant entails, for us, only after we have emigrated. In these cases, our grasp of the target and its value (e.g. married life) is a matter of living rather than thinking. Marriage is itself a learning experience, one that cannot be pre-empted by calculative reasoning, no matter how sophisticated. We cannot take the measure of our lives in advance.
If I may abuse some jargon, I would say that big life decisions entail a time inconsistency problem, in that you will be a different person after the decision has played out.
Your perspective on quitting a job to start a new career is going to be different years after you make the decision than it was before you make the decision. That is true either way. Your future self will live with a decision that your present self has to make.
One of the most interesting decisions is when to risk either a personal or occupational divorce. How will your future self look at these decisions? As best I can discern by observing myself and others, I would say that
1) if you’ve got a marriage that you feel sort of lukewarm about, then the risk/reward ratio from trying to find someone else is probably higher than you anticipate. It’s worth making more effort to improve your relationship with your spouse.
2) if you’ve got a job that you feel sort of lukewarm about, then the risk/reward ratio of trying a new employer is probably lower than you realize. You probably have already put too much effort into trying to improve your relationship at work.
Divorce lawyers can punish one of the partners to an unequal marriage as severely as if he has committed a serious crime.
If boredom initiates proceedings, and the bored person can receive a reward tantamount to a lottery win, then indeed ours is a sick culture. I have heard rumours of law firms actively touting for custom on the basis of what can be acquired.
I know of a case where a middle aged partner received over a million after a marriage of about a quarter of a century and blew it all off in a few years, and is now living on state benefits. Not only was the other partner shafted, but also the taxpayers.
Occupational divorces can have similar consequences for employers wanting rid of an ineffective employee.
Laws are now so complex that no one can really plan a sensible path through life.
The legal profession was once a less messy way of resolving disputes than hiring a gunman. It may well be failing on account of the complexity problem.
Certainly #2 – which I’ve been guilty of; staying too long in a slow/no progress job. It’s better to “cut your losses” (time on dead-end job) and find another job, sooner. Either another boss at the same company, or a new boss (who wants YOU) at a new company. Best time to look is when you still have a pretty secure job.
On #1, certainly working on the relationship is good, especially more communication, but also practice having fun. A common error (*been there, done that) is to spend all the relationship time talking about the relationship, and not enjoying life, or each other. In communication within and about the relationship, the most important thing is your dreams for yourself, and what you want yourself to become. Does your partner want this for you, too? Do you want your partner’s dreams for herself to become true? Are the dreams compatible?
There are hundreds, thousands of books about men-women / marriage & relationships. Like Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus — really a good book to both read and talk about. Understanding the differences between men and women is a good foundation for the very important skill of forgiveness, when the other messes up. Saying “I’m sorry” needs to be an easy habit, for both partners. Yet even with good relationship skills, the dreams need to be compatible.
The article goes into an example of a Big decision.
Johnson details his own big decision—a move to California—and the tensions between himself and his wife that ensued in the period following the move. Johnson wonders whether he could have anticipated and pre-empted these later struggles by thinking more exhaustively in advance: “I have often looked back at the decision and wondered if we could have approached it in a way that would have done a better job of reconciling our different values from the beginning.”
What Johnson should have done before the decision is talk more about it with his wife. So they both know the stakes. It implies there were problems, maybe even a split. Likely they had somewhat incompatible dreams.
Whether to go (Johnson wins? wife is doormat?) or stay (wife wins? Johnson is doormat?), when two people want mutually incompatible things, one has to “lose” – not get what they want. In this decision. Both have to agree to work on the marriage, in good faith and with generosity, with either decision. And the loser must not feel that they become a doormat, to be walked on.
The article points out that choosing changes the person who chooses; one becomes a bit different. A key point of a marriage is the decision to grow with the partner. Their dreams become a key part of your dreams — prospects for the future. Before you decide, you have lots of prospects. After you decide on marriage, you still have more possibilities of what you two can do than you can do in one lifetime, but fewer than your not married alternate life. The happy marriage pushes you to make the compatible possible dreams into reality.
Assuming it was a split, which Johnson regrets and blames on the decision to go to CA, what could have been done differently? a) they stay. b) before going, more effort into understanding why partner doesn’t want to go, more effort into finding a win-win addition so she gets enough more in going the CA so that she thinks she “wins”, too. This should probably include some (possibly small) real sacrifice by Johnson. Something like every week doing something with wife that he doesn’t care to do, and if they stay he only does 2 or 3 times a year.
True love requires real work.
1) if you’ve got a marriage that you feel sort of lukewarm about, then the risk/reward ratio from trying to find someone else is probably higher than you anticipate.
What if you are simply happier single than being a lukewarm marriage?
Great post. I’ve always thought that finance “option theory” can be a useful lens to evaluate major life decisions because, as you point out, it is very difficult to evaluate many life decisions given the extreme uncertainly involved. As you know, higher volatility increases the value of a call option under a standard Black-Scholes option pricing, a result that I don’t think it intuitively obvious to many people. And as you probably know, that is because of the non-symmetry in potential returns. The value of a call option cannot fall below 0 (which equates to a 100% loss) but the value can increase by much more than 100%. I am aware of the limitations of applying something like Black-Scholes to life, because among other things, in life the decisions are often mutually exclusive, whereas under Black-Scholes they are not. Also, under Black-Scholes, a 100% loss is not considered catastrophic because the option is usually part of a diversified portfolio, whereas in life a 100% loss would probably be translated as “death”. Still I think there is some applicability. For example, I’ve often thought that younger people, and children especially, can be more inclined to change course in life, because their “expiration date” is much further in the future. I’ve also pondered how my life decisions would probably change drastically if I knew I was likely to live to, say 500. I’ve pondered how option theory may explain some actions people take in their daily lives. My apologies in advance for going far afield with respect to your original post.
Without having any opinion on the matter, I’m struck by the difference between 1) and 2), in your view.
What do you think gives rise to it?
8 hours a day vs 16 hours a day.
Most people 50 or over have actually had more jobs than spouses. It’s a LOT easier getting a new, reasonable job, than getting a new spouse.
I’m sure that most divorced people spend more months “looking for a relationship”, than in “looking for a job”.
Tho for day to day survival, paying the bills, a lukewarm job is far better than no job; even a known lousy job is better.
On the other hand, with the rise of hook-ups, booty calls, and living together, it might seem that there is a cultural tendency to “commoditize” relationships more, so as to allow lower cost changing.
Until the commitment of marriage. Once committed, “looking” effort should be spent on looking for how to make the marriage better.
I think there are a lot of reasons why the difference exists. These are just my intuitive guesses:
Changing jobs tends to increases your market value, to a limit, whereas divorcing (especially post-children) decreases it, particularly for women.
Both parties in a professional separation are incentivized to make the break as clean as possible. This is not always true when personal relationships are involved, and there is literally no limit to the amount of suffering a sufficiently motivated counterparty can inflict.*
*This is true even in business relationships – firing someone who is egotistical, connected, rich, and bored can destroy a company.
And a third reason – you can search for alternative jobs while working with minimal cost, which is not true for relationships.
I agree. Marriage is a mutually exclusive concept, whereas employment can be mutually exclusive, but isn’t always so. Also, marriage is mutually exclusive vis-à-vis looking for a new relationship (unless you are looking on the sly), whereas it is pretty easy to simultaneously have full-time equivalent, and also be looking for a new job. Big difference.
not so straight forward as you put it. One needs to assess time one has been in the life situations you describe and one’s age.
Like all complex systems, perturbation impacts the system and so the decision making process can’t be one of real deductive or inductive ‘trial and error’ because each trial is against a perturbed system. So there is a do-observe-orient loop that would normally occur with small decisions; but the magnitude of the impact from large decisions makes it effectively a chaotic process at that time scale. Some people attempt to retain an illusion of control by saying that the big decisions don’t matter – but simply being unable to predict the outcomes sensibly doesn’t mean the decision didn’t matter. It means the statistics and metadata were inappropriate for the analysis.