As a divorced 53-year-old man, who has been an active observer in the divorced dating scene, I have unearthed a common set of factors that complicate our ability to find ourselves in a happy, productive relationship the second time around. There are a number of factors that create dissonance in all male-female relationships in the modern era. Dissonance is a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements, the term cognitive dissonance is the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted, causing stress, distress, anxiety or depression when one cannot reconcile these conflicts.  If we look carefully at our relationship strategies wee may unearth many of the causes of this dissonance.  According to the CDC, divorce rates hover between 40 and 50%, while the marriage rate is at an all-time low.  This creates a community of divorced singles who aspire to correcting the failure of their marital relationship by replacing it with a new and improved relationship.  With dating moving from the bars and social introductions that were the norm to the modern online dating platform, there is far more apparent availability and selection as a person can meet people outside of their work and social communities.  Yet, even with all of this diversity and availability second marriages, fail at a disproportionately higher rate than first marriages. To discuss  these factors fully, it would require an in depth look into the historical, social, psychological changes that have occurred leading us to this point in history; so, for the purpose of this article, I will provide a less detailed overview of these factors that I will expand upon at a later date.

Erich Fromm, in his famous treatise “The Art of Loving,” noted that: “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.” The pessimism sadly noted in this statement, we could argue is founded in the statistical reality of marriage.  Considering that this quote comes from his writings in the 1950’s, imagine his sentiments if he were to write it today? Divorce rate notwithstanding, consider the number of failed but well-intended relationships that never had the opportunity to withstand the test of marriage. It would be easy to argue that society needs to move on from the notion of marriage noting its failure as an institution, though I would point out that marriage has evolved into a monogamous institution due to its functional application to aid in assuring the well being of the children, giving them the best chance for success.  If marriage has value, we need to discuss the changes that has caused the modern-day dissonance, distress or angst that we find permeating today’s relationships.

Historical Model

The historical framework for the value shifts that we have witnessed in today’s society find their genesis in the works of rationalist and empiricist thinkers who were a liberalizing force in society.  The shift from the historical feudal, monarchical governments to capitalism and socialism required a rethinking of individual liberties as well as ethnic, racial and religious liberties.  The Lockean tenet that “all men are created equal” may have defined “men” in a more limiting context than we find in society today as it referred to educated, white, male, property owners: this opened up a semantic possibility for the use of a pejorative use of the word “man,” equating to both women and other races and cultures.  If we look at the many examples of Western imperial conquests that occurred after the acceptance of this Lockean theme, we can see that equality did not apply to all and was rendered unto a select few males.  Rather, it still held onto much of the ethnocentric and chauvinistic definitions that we find in the Greek philosophers 2000 years earlier.  Yet, in time the door swung open, ushering in many of the liberal ideals that we find today in society.  The primary ideal being the rights of the individual to live life as they please without the overbearing restrictions of government, religion or social norms.  We have moved from our Puritan roots which H.L. Menkin described as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy,”  to our world today where we can do as we please as long as no one gets hurt. However, unlike the French and American revolutions these social changes did not spring up with the immediacy of storming the Bastille or The Boston Tea Party, they began as gradual changes that moved in concordance with the contextual changes in society with our move to an industrial and later technological society.

Cognition

With these new liberal ideals permeating society, we have raced forward redefining our individual identities along these new less restrictive lines.  Reaching back into the world of psychology, our identity is formed by the context of our learning that outlines the mores, norms and folkways of society along with our active and passive learning that creates our view of self, how we see the world and how we believe that the world sees us: or what Aaron T. Beck would refer to as our cognitive schema.  As we look backwards to our grandparents or great grandparents’ generations, we can see that their schema  and their lifestyles were more bound in reactionary ideals with more restrictive social and religious norms.  We must remember that these constructs are the substrates of identity, not just a moral window dressing.  Today we would never think of shunning a child for getting divorced, yet my grandparents didn’t speak to their daughter for eight years when she got divorced in the 1970’s. While this might sound harsh by today’s permissive standards, it did happen and not only in my family of origin.  Simply stated their expectations were much more restrictive than our own. This type of “parental down-pressure” (a term that I coined) causes inter-generational dissonance, especially as parents try to maintain governance over adult children who have different cognitive schema’s due to inter-generational contextual differences. I have consciously avoided such conflict with my own adult children, choosing to be an observer who only intervenes when they ask for my assistance.

Yet, even with “progress” and change directed towards the ideal of “we should all live as we please”, our new individualism cannot escape the reality that we are by nature social beings that must, in order to maintain function, have rules and expectations that govern our conduct.  One of Beck’s protege’s, Robert J. Berchick relates that in any relationship one needs to be responsible, reliable and accountable, both to oneself and to others.  This pragmatic statement is challenged by the reality that man will most often act in favor of his self-interest in addition to the geist that we should all live as we please.  If we follow Berchick’s lead and are reliable, responsible and accountable much of the dissonance that causes dysfunction in relationships is removed. If this seems simple, it probably is, but it a value that can only be instantiated by parental figures who behave in that manner and teach it as a virtue to their children.  Given the relationship statistics regarding baby-boomers and generation X, one can only increasingly pessimistic about the future for generation y (millennial’s) and generation z.

Social Learning: From Fairy tales to Television

As social scripts have rewritten our perception of our essence in a relationship, we need to look at the subtle, yet very powerful influences that are part of our individual identities.  The term “enchantment” has been used to describe the deliberate influence of young children’s schema’s through devices such as fairy tales. Through these simplified tales, we teach moral and practical principles that become woven into our psychological tapestry.  For example, Hansel and Gretel might certainly reinforce the idea that children shouldn’t wander far from home as they might be might with an awful fate.  While not all lessons are as overt in nature, mightn’t Cinderella offer us some interesting scripts to add to our schema’s.  (Many have written entire books attempting to explain the affects of fairy tales on our psyches, this is just a glimpse for the purpose of explanation.) Interestingly, the story of the persecuted step-sister is repeated throughout the historic literature of many cultures, so there must be something intrinsic to this tale that tells us something about human behavior.  Wander a short distance to psychology, statistics show that step-children are murdered at a statistically high rate. Cinderella can be said to be a story of hope as her toil has led to finding refuge in the arms of a prince.  Freud might have said that the prince is representative of the longing for the attention of the father whom she lost.   Regardless of how you frame it, this is a simple example of the influence that we find in childhood stories.

In modernity, we could be said to unconsciously “go down the rabbit hole” (thank you Louis Carrol for the metaphor) on external influences that shape some aspects of our identity.  Our modern fairy-tales are found in the weekly television shows that impart to us some very salient lessons about ourselves and the way we are or should be.  My concept of family was shaped by the television of my childhood: The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family tells us much about the geist of 1970’s society.  Notably, both shows feature divorced/widowed single parents who managed to raise successful children in light of their new-age singularity.  Stepping back to the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, television focused on “nuclear” families with strong male figures like Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show.  We move forward to the early sixties and find  My Three Son’s a classic tale of a single man struggling to raise his three boys along with his female surrogate Uncle Charlie.  Going back to the 70’s, what did we learn from these shows?  The most obvious message, that may cause a great deal of dissonance for those who have accepted it, is that life is pretty good after divorce or raising your kids on your own.  Look at Mrs. Brady, she found a successful man with three boys who are the same ages as her three girls and built a joyous life and loved happily ever after: while Alice did all the heavy lifting.  For the Partridges, the discovery of musical talent guided them to a joyous life in beautiful Southern California, that features the freedom to do as they please travelling in their converted school bus.   The TV fairy-tale does little to teach us about the reality of real relationships, normal struggles and the complexities that arise that are nowhere accounted for in these fables. However, since society and most individuals had no schema for divorce, these shows helped us to form a relationship with the topic as a construct in the evolving world in which we live.

I grew up in a household with two parents who fought all of the time and seemed to be miserable in each other’s presence so I learned that you stay in a relationship no matter how bad it gets. When I got married and my ex and I were on different pages, I did as my parents and stuck it out with the antiquated idea that it was both an irrevocable commitment and better for my children. Was this the best solution for any of the parties involved, probably not: but to our credit, things improved post-divorce and my children had two separate and happier parents who get along much better when neither is an “object” in a relationship and one another’s expectations mitigating the relationship.  We do learn lessons from our families of origin and when you look at yourself in a relationship, you may find that you may be repeating some of the patterns of behavior you observed in your household of origin.

Gender Roles

The redefinition of gender roles in modern society has in many ways changed our gender identities.  We are no longer bound by antiquated roles that made women into second class citizens.  Over the course of the twentieth century women were awarded equal standing with the removal of historical restrictions. This created a clear problem for relationships and society: the removal of “old” values requires updated values to mitigate the psychological confound that states that man will usually act in her own self-interest. This is particularly true where there are no values in place to keep us in check. This rewriting of our gender script has created generations of men who no longer value relate to the role of taking care of and protecting their wife and children. While women feel cheated due to the lack of a traditional male presence and the reality that they still need to do a majority of the housework and child rearing. The ABA’s yearly report on women in the legal field states that female lawyers who maintain full time employment still do 70% of the housework and child rearing: sounds pretty equal to me: but in truth forced equality never works, look at the former Soviet Union and the Communist experiment another example of the attempt to force unnatural social equality. Also, consider the fact that our evolutionary path has rendered women and men different on many real, salient levels.  Even in modernity, maternal attachment seems to be stronger than paternal attachment, when it is measured psychometrically.  I know many women whose ex-husbands are perfectly happy seeing their children one night a week and every other weekend, not to mention those men who fight over any fiduciary responsibility for their own children.  From my perspective as a single dad, I have always found this to be a heinous reality of a segment of my gender that fails to attach to their own children: but hen we need to ask if male parental attachment was ever elevated to being a value in our society? In the end, women are forced to pick up the slack, while these men pursue new relationships without the burden of parenthood. Are we equal yet?

While this offers us some illumination regarding our schema for divorce, we need to circle back to discuss some of the “identity pieces” that belay our relationship dysfunction and our inability to choose wisely.  If human behavior is indeed predictable and we act on our own self-interest, we must look closely at the movement from traditional gender roles to new gender roles to assess how modern relationships are viewed.  In truth, even with skyrocketing divorce rates and changes is relationship schema’s the normative precept for a “marital” or permanent relationship is the same as the traditional mindset. We accept our wedding vows and work towards the ideal of “happily ever after.” However, as I have alluded to previously there is a veritable plethora of value and selection problems that render happily ever after almost impossible.

Decision-Making and Relationships

Going back to Eric Fromm and “The Art of Loving,” Fromm pointed out something about human tendencies that is very telling when we discuss partner selection.  It is what he called “passivity.” Passivity can in modernity be framed as a neuro-psychological misattribution of qualia to a person based on a feeling that is associated with a secretion of oxytocin and norepinephrine when we see a person to whom we are attracted. “I gazed across the room and I looked into his eyes and I saw my future.” Which one of us haven’t looked at or met someone who makes our heart’s race?  If you ask yourself, what do you really know about this person, you might discover that you know little to nothing at all.  In truth, what you really discovered is one of the tools that human beings use to simplify the process of decision making: it is referred to as heuristics. Heuristics is a term that was actually coined by two computer scientists in the 1950’s, Simon and Newell, and it refers to the manner which people use stored generalizations to posit solutions to decision problems.  There are a number of different types of heuristics that we use in our day to day lives to simplify our decision-making processes.  One of the problems that occurs from heuristics are that they cause biases that are not about the “object” of the decision but instead our projections about the object. One of my favorite examples of our misattributions caused by heuristics was given by a woman who was a presenter at the APA conference in Washington in 2017.  A short, obese woman was a presenter who was part of panel that had discussed a number of different topics. Standing in front of a room of psychologists, she asked everyone to close their eyes and to picture a powerful Washington attorney, who graduated from an Ivy League University was at the top of their field.  She then asked us to raise our hands if we pictured a man: 70% of the room raised their hands.  She said keep your hands up if he is tall, the hands stayed up: keep your hands up if he is fit: the hands stayed up: keep your hands up if he is wearing a dark suit: the hands stayed up.  She then changed her line of questioning: she asked how many of you pictured me: not a soul raised their hands: she was describing herself.  I was sitting in the front row, with Steve Hollon who was running for president of APA and my aforementioned friend Robert Berchick and we all let out pained sighs.  Truth be told, the heuristics behind our collectively failed assessment has everything to do with our projecting our own ideals on someone we know nothing about.

Now move this concept from the APA conference to Match.com.  We look at pictures and brief descriptions posted by people whom we know nothing about besides generic data that contains our own attribution about ourselves, that contain our own “self-attribution bias” that has shown that people commonly view themselves in far more of a positively than their objectively measured attributes. Then we compound this problematic bias by projecting that we know who this individual is while we have no real data or history.  We see a handsome, fit, man in a suit, who says that he has a college degree, we assume that he is successful, owns a home, is a good parent: he looks the part.  Flip the narrative, you meet him and he is every bit as handsome, fit and well-dressed as he appeared in his profile: you may have found Prince Charming from my earlier fairy-tale reference! The date goes well, you may have met your match.   You can’t wait to go out again! He is attentive, texts you good morning, talks to you in the evening, asks about your day.  You tell all of your friends about your amazing find.  You go out with him again, he picks up the tab, you kiss deeply in the parking lot as he presses you against your car.  It’s so hot, he asks if we can go back to your place.  The heat continues, the passion is unbridled, and the sex is beyond your wildest expectations. I can take this narrative in many different directions as you have still really have no idea who he is in this world.  Try these on for size:

  1. He is Prince Charming (statistically unlikely, but score one for romance)
  2. After the second date you don’t hear from him again, he got what he wanted and your assessment was completely wrong. Sorry, it happens.
  3. You learn after a short period of time that he lives with his parents and has a history of being unemployable.
  4. He is a con-man and takes you for your entire 401k by getting you to buy into a phony Florida real estate deal.
  5. He has a history of drug addiction and has been to rehab ten times and it is just a step away from number eleven.
  6. He is an ex-convict with a history of felonies.
  7. He is a narcissistic sociopath who you will need to get a protection from abuse order to keep him away from you. (this has happened to at least three women I know)

I can go on and on with the possibilities, but when we don’t have real data, we use heuristics that lead us to making biased mistakes.

While we are on the topic of heuristics, I should at least touch on another decision-making heuristic that leads us to make questionable dating errors.  This is refereed to as the availability heuristic, which is the principle that there is an unlimited amounts of a commodity so the value of any one commodity is devalued.  This sounds like an economic principle, but the truth is the psychology of decision making is used to discuss and examine how our human tendencies are at the root of economic models and fluctuations.  Example, if OPEC restricts oil production the price and the perceived value goes up, if they release oil reserves the value goes down.  Going back to dating, before the evolution of online dating, we were forced to meet people either holistically at work or doing an activity or through introduction.  The probability of meeting a person who was outside of your social or work circle was limited.  With this restriction, the value of meeting a suitable partner is much higher due to the limited/restricted market. Once in a relationship, you were more likely to value your partner as a limited commodity than diminish their value do to availability of alternatives and a value set that states “do as you please, as long as no one gets hurt.” Fast forward to internet dating and you can view individuals who you would never meet holistically, you can peruse and communicate 24 hours a day and meet as many people as you can convince that you are a compatible potential mate.  The apparent surplus of possible connections drives the value of connecting with one person and working towards a relationship down since any flaw can present a reason to go back to look for a new partner.  We somehow know that Prince Charming is out there!

Evolutionary Model

We can complicate our dating discussion by engaging in an evolutionary discussion of gender.  At the root of evolutionary theory is the thought that our programming, our a priori drives and the behaviors that derive from them are to enhance the survival of the species. While men and women can be equal to whatever extent you want to extend the equality discussion, our drives, intention and design are completely different.  Looking at mankind from this standpoint, we can argue that women’s primary drive is to secure the well-being of their children.  This means finding a mate who can protect them and has the resources to promote the well being of their progeny.  Men, on the other hand, are programmed to spread their seed and their genomic material as prolifically as possible.  If we look to the history of polygamy in many cultures or to significant historic figures like Genghis Khan or Henry VIII whose DNA can be found in a significant number of individuals alive today, we see some hints to the reality of “maledom.”   These gender differences drive both perceptual and intentional differences between men and women as they participate in the new-world free market for relationships. Consider my discussion of social change: as we ran head first towards less restrictive normative values, we discarded values that may have made us be better partners in a relationship, more willing to commit, or to take time getting to know a person before running into a mine field with someone we hardly know.  At the simplest level, relationships require work and if there is no value of doing the work, why not just change partners?

In this world where we use the word equality to support every well-meaning but not completely well thought-out liberal ideal, we must first be reminded that we as human beings have evolved into social creatures for the purpose of the well-being of the species.  If the individual can “do as she pleases as long as nobody gets hurt” we inadvertently elevate the value of the individual over the well-being of society.  Historically, one could argue that it is our values have developed from epistemological and ontological ideals of philosophy and religion with he will to make society a better and less barbaric place.  Throughout history, we could argue that each era faced challenges due to the creation of new ideals or new technologies.  We run forward towards newness and we forsake our philosophical and psychological constructs that can protect us from ourselves, our drives and our self-interests.  As a child of the 1960’s, I witnessed tremendous social changes, from the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Equality Movement, Gay Rights.  These are indeed the symbols of modern social progress that have elevated mankind to new levels of freedom that she has never seen before. Yet, as we focused our mindsets on the removal of antiquated restrictions, we inadvertently missed some of the social fallout of the removal of historical values, norms and folkways that mitigated certain behaviors that are as grounded in our humanity as our genomic structure.

Conclusion

Relationships are hard, and our modernity has made them even more difficult.  I am hoping that this summary that touches on some of the salient problems that all relationships can face and opens your mind to rethinking the way you look at your relationship or at your quest for a new relationship. In our day to day lives, we forget to look deeply, introspectively at ourselves with the intent of understanding our cognition, emotions and actions and we project or assume that others feel the same way.  Even the syntax that we use to describe how we think, feel and act is limited in that the perceptual basis of each word or phrase only applies to the user herself.  If I say, “I love you,” can you actually understand how I define love or the complex neurological state brought on by thoughts and feelings involved in this statement. If the feeling that we associate with love is reducible to a neuro-electro-chemical state then we need to think more deeply about the meaning of relationships as they need to extend beyond a “brain state” and become a real tangible connection where two people receive what they need and enhance their lives through their oneness.

[i] https://www.chicagomarriage.com/does-the-bride-have-to-say-obey-in-her-wedding-vows/