Yahoo Lifestyle My Wife And I Found A Surprising Way To Make Tough Decisions. It's A Secret To Our Happy Marriage.
When I was offered an exciting “dream” job working in the dean’s office of a medical school in New York City a few years ago, it posed a challenge. This would be an opportunity for me to live my values, really make a difference and also meet a long-held dream of living in New York. I wanted to say “yes.” But my wife, Pat, and I lived in New Hampshire, and I needed to have some long talks with her before I made a move.
We’d been practicing “intentional” decision-making for 30 years, and this decision was going to be a tough one. On one hand, our kids were grown and out of the house, the med school I had been working for was in a bit of turmoil, and I was ready for a change. On the other hand, Pat loved her job and her garden and had no desire to move. I proposed a plan that I buy a hybrid car, return home every weekend to help with house and dog chores, and call every day.
“Darling, I’d really like to try this, 80-20,” I told Pat. “I’m excited but frightened. 80-20.”
We talked it over for days.
“I’m in favor, too,” Pat eventually told me, “55-45. I’m nervous, too, but you should go for it. 55-45.”
Done. The decision was made. But what just happened?
Our numerical negotiation routine started when we first began dating. We were both interns in a family medicine residency in upstate New York, working about 80 hours a week, and on call every third night. Two weeks after Pat and I began to go out, we had a rare free evening and had to decide between eating Mexican or Chinese food. We had heard good things about the Mexican restaurant, but we also enjoyed the Chinese joint where we had our first date.
This question — where to eat? — quickly turned into a meta-question: How do the two of us decide where to eat? If we chose to deliberate, we knew that each would try to please the other, to figure out which restaurant the other person favored. We were aware that the initial steps in a relationship are important, and we were both committed to equity and equality. This decision, then — Mexican or Chinese — became a touchstone and metaphor for us. How could each of us express what our preference was without stepping on — or simply influencing — the other?
Pat suggested that we each independently decide which restaurant we preferred, and then compare our choices. We had to agree to be honest and stick to our choice. “But wait,” she reflected, “that won’t work. What if I say Chinese and you say Mexican? Then all we have is conflict, not a decision.”
We pondered this for a few seconds, and then — since we were both comfortable with numbers and quantitative thinking — I proposed that we add a weighting to our preference. If Pat preferred Chinese because she really wanted to reinforce those “first date” pheromones, it would be a lot stronger than if she just wanted to check out their moo shu chicken. Similarly, she couldn’t know if I wanted to go to Mexican just for a change of pace, or if I had secretly arranged for a special mole sauce for the enchiladas.
“Let’s do it this way,” I proposed. “Not only do we each have to quietly commit to our preference, but we have to say how strongly we feel about that choice.”
We agreed to use a scale of 0 to 100. Preferring a choice 60-40 would be a modest preference for the former choice over the latter, 90-10 would be a very strong preference, and 50-50 would mean an honest “I truly don’t have preference” between the two options.
Then — as if playing rock-paper-scissors — we each would state our preference and weighting. The restaurant that had the higher combined weighting would win our business. It was simple!
So, just as our relationship was beginning, we decided we would each have to be honest about our own preferences and needs. In this case, Chinese won. I like noodles and she likes eggplant!
Clearly stating our preferences — and especially the meaning of a 50-50 — had another important resonance beyond suggesting that either choice would be OK: 50-50 indicated the equality we sought. Both of us identify as feminists and came up strong in anti-war and civil rights movements, and we felt moral injury if the wishes of one of us would systematically hold sway over the other. So, with a smile, we’d say “five-oh-five-oh” as a mantra to renew the commitment to our ideals.
A problem that soon arose was that we could each feel more strongly than the other about different small things. I prefer to wash dishes. Pat prefers to brush the dogs. I prefer to do mechanical repairs, and she prefers to iron and sew. The fact that some of these preferences fell along traditional gender expectations was an irony that we appreciated. But the thoughtful and explicit balance of those household chores was a potential fork in the road.
We saw other couples implicitly divide up the responsibilities, just as they implicitly made the decisions about what to have for dinner. We also saw other couples begin to drift apart, and we figured out that under that drift was, actually, resentment.
Resentment can build from one person seeming to get their way more than the other. It can lead to feeling that you are owed something in the relationship. If a partner doesn’t get what is owed, that may be what triggers the drift. Since we were both in favor of clear communication — as family doctors, we specialized in listening — we decided that resentment about what was unfair or unsaid could be averted by being up front and explicit all of the time.
Well, OK, most of the time.
When Pat came home from her 36-hour shift completely exhausted — both physically and emotionally — I knew to greet her with a hug and a cup of tea, and not remind her that she had agreed to not leave her knitting projects on the dining room table and the hall table. I’d raise that later. But it would be important to let her know at some point soon. Otherwise, my tendency to obsessively tidy our surfaces would bother both of us and lead her to resent my putting her piles away as much as I resented her making those piles.
So we began to use the 0-to-100 scale to describe how much we liked or disliked various behaviors as well as choices. If her piles were only upsetting me 55-45, I could live with them. If they were really bothering me, it’d be 80-20, and I’d have to find a way to say something. It was my job, not hers, to know how I felt and to express it clearly. And if I procrastinated in fulfilling my promise to fix the tangle of computer and television cords in the living room — and this made her gnash her teeth every time she passed through — she’d point at it and quietly say “70-30.” Then I would bump that chore up to the top of my to-do list.
Although household duties and dinner preferences were just the small things, we — then and now — try to end each week with a pretty reasonable balance. We each get what we want about 50% of the time. And if things begin to feel out of balance — if I begin to feel that Pat is “winning” more than I am — well, whose fault is that? If she is 70-30 a lot and gets her preference, maybe it means that I need to be clearer and more certain. Maybe I need to be 75-25 rather than 60-40. If I do not get what I want, it is my fault, not hers. And if we are both escalating our preferences to 80-20 and 90-10, maybe there are some real problems. To cover that eventuality, we agreed to go see a therapist if necessary, and we did have to do that once.
The system works most handily with quick decisions — which couch to buy, which charity to support, when to give up on a long line at the coffee shop. The test of the technique came with the big decisions. With the passing years we had to decide when and where to vacation, buy a larger home, get married, move, have children, move again.
As the stakes became higher, the need for clarity and honesty also grew, and it was useful to have our numerical system to help us. Pat felt very strongly that our “forever” home should have places for her to garden (“80-20”), and this desire readily outweighed my desire to not have a lot of lawn to mow (“60-40”).
How would we know without a language? We love each other, but neither of us is a mind reader. Love does not mean precisely knowing what the other person wants or needs at all times. It means respecting the other person to fully honor their wants and needs without sacrificing our own. And it sometimes means asking.
Some of the big things were tougher to rectify, and the numerical system did not always magically work or feel appropriate. If one of us enjoyed sex more than the other — and, yes, that happened — the decision about when, where and how became a bit tougher. If she comes into the bedroom with a spring in her step and a little grin on her face, I might think that the odds of a good night were pretty high. At that moment I am not going to whisper steamily into her ear, “Yeah, honey, 90-10 to go ahead, how about you?” And making decisions about raising our children required consensus more than instant resolution.
Now, as we age, as our bodies grow slacker and slower, and our minds are not as sharp, we have to be even kinder with each other, so there are fewer instances of 90-10. And even though “five-oh-five-oh” remains a central theme of our marriage, we still are careful to be honest when we truly have a preference.
Did that tough decision — the dream job — work out? Yes! Without explicitly sharing our values, I might have held back from exploring what turned out to be a wonderful experience. Can other people use our system? Sure. Our kids — neither in medicine, by the way — have told us that they and their spouses use our number system on occasion, but maybe not as relentlessly as we do. Their strong and resilient relationships have their own checks and balances. Love, after all, is — at its best — qualitative, not quantitative.
Don Kollisch is a semiretired family doctor. He spent most of his career in rural New Hampshire and had short stints in North Carolina and New York City, with lots of teaching as well as clinical care. He writes short fiction and still adores his wife.
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