Just a quick update for my blog subscribers. You’ve probably noticed I haven’t posted here in a while. That’s partly because I have been knee-deep in a new project. It’s a novel, due out in 2026. If you would like to follow my progress, I’ve set up a new Substack page. I’ll mostly be posting about the craft of writing.

I didn’t sign you up for that Substack newsletter because it isn’t strictly about psychology… though the topic will come up with some regularity. I hope you’ll take a moment to follow the link to my first post and subscribe. One of the nice things about Substack is the comment feature, which is difficult to maintain on a blog (so I don’t have one here). Hope to see you over there.

Cheers,
Shawn

A husband and wife visited their couple’s therapist. The woman complained that her husband usually wakes up grumpy in the morning.

The therapist asked the man, “is that true?”

The man replied, “No, usually I let her sleep.”

In more important matters, someone over at X asked me what men should look for in a couple’s therapist. Here’s my attempt at an answer. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s basically the same things women should look for.

Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class will probably stir you to reflect upon your own upbringing. Were you surrounded by love and composure, or was your childhood marked by chaos?

A stable, loving family primes a child to focus on success rather than mere survival. That much is obvious, but some people defy the odds.

Some are born into loving, healthy families, yet they somehow manage to struggle. Give them a shiny new Porsche on the road of life and they will produce a flaming wreck at the side of a dead-end street.

Others are born into unrest and mistreatment, yet they thrive. Give them a rusted-out Pinto and they’ll drive it to the stars.

Rob’s memoir is a shining example of the latter. Troubled covers his journey through the dreadful California foster care system, his service in the U.S. Air Force, and his success at Yale and Cambridge. However, the book never reads as a monument to its author. It’s an account of events and people, few of whom are easily categorized as heroes or villains.

Rob’s journey is captivating. That’s one aspect of the book. Here’s the other: his bumpy road led him to the notion of luxury beliefs, a term synonymous with his name. He describes luxury beliefs as:

“…ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on lower classes.”

When Rob left the working-class world of the Air Force and joined the upper-class world of Yale University, he found himself in an unfamiliar social circle with peculiar sensibilities. His outsider status gave him a penetrating view of their social conventions. He was like a traveler who experiences heightened perception of unfamiliar food in a foreign land.

In particular, he noticed that some of his classmates’ spoken sentiments didn’t match their behaviors. For example, he recounted an exchange with a classmate who told him, “Monogamy is kind of outdated.”

“I asked her what her background is and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent family, was raised by both of her parents, and that, yes, she personally intended to have a monogamous marriage—but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone. She was raised in a stable two-parent family, just like the vast majority of our classmates. And she planned on getting married herself. But she insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should evolve beyond them.”

Certainly his classmate knows children benefit from stable families, and monogamy is an efficient path to stability. It’s people like Rob, born into instability, who are least likely to find their way to places like Yale.

Why, then, would his classmate claim society should “evolve” beyond a convention that directly benefitted her? Why wouldn’t she want to share the wealth with people outside her circle, and why wouldn’t she be vocal about it? Rob’s answer:

“The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate the believer’s social class and education. When an affluent person expresses support of defunding the police, drug legalization, open borders, looting, permissive sexual norms, or uses terms like white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, ‘I am a member of the upper class.’”

Luxury beliefs also preserve the upper class’s status by exacting costs on lower classes. Rob might not explain things in precisely those terms, but that’s how I read it, and that’s what I see in the world.

For instance, defunding police departments is a popular stance among the people Rob calls the luxury belief class. People who live in safe enclaves and exclusive zip codes have the privilege of dismantling urban law enforcement because, as Rob points out, crime disproportionately affects poor people who live there.

“…to not stop criminals is to victimize the poor. Yet the movement to abolish the police is disproportionately championed by affluent people. A key inhibition against crime is the belief that our legal system is legitimate. Which means that those who promote the idea that we live in an unjust society also help to cultivate crime.… The poor reap what the luxury belief class sow.”

Rob was not hostile about the tastes and values of his affluent classmates, but nor was he particularly kind about the matter. That made me wonder: having satisfied the academic requirements of their world, would they count him among their own? Would he want to be counted among them? I asked him; here’s what he told me:

“They wouldn’t count me among them. This is just the reality of social class. Imagine a downwardly mobile PhD who gets a job as a cabbie. Would he be accepted among working class taxi drivers as being one of them? Not really. Just as Tom Buchanan wouldn’t accept Jay Gatsby as a fellow blue blood, modern day elites won’t truly accept parvenu members. You are the class you were born into. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to improve yourself.”

The dispassionate tone of that personal communication echoes throughout his book. While he is critical of certain upper-crust beliefs and behaviors, at no point does Rob invite the reader to detest the people who hold those beliefs.

I’m not sure the cultural elite will return the favor. An early review of the book by Kirkus (hardly a playground for the struggling classes) suggested Troubled might be the prelude to a career in politics. That interpretation reduces Rob’s careful, first-hand commentary to an opportunistic stunt. What a clever, cultured insult.

Or perhaps it’s just cynical and defensive… the type of conclusion an affluent intellectual might draw after seeing his or her own ambitious nature laid bare, and feeling the need to project that nature back onto the author.

Any psychologist worth his salt understands this: behind every observable double-standard lies an unconfessed single-standard. Luxury beliefs is a rock-solid estimate of the singular principle underlying the double-standards held by the most affluent and influential members of society.

If there’s a weakness in Rob’s approach, it’s that some of those affluent people are kindhearted true-believers who will be untouched by the logic of his argument, though I suppose that’s an inevitable obstacle rather than a shortcoming in his observations.

Consider his classmate—the woman who argued against monogamy despite its benefit to children regardless of class. Maybe she’s a sweet person repulsed by suffering no matter how distant it may be from her world. Maybe she truly believes she’s part of the solution, and Rob’s forthright indictment of her beliefs will repel her. No decent person wants to believe they’re part of the problem.

On the other hand, maybe Rob didn’t write the book for her.

His luxury-beliefs hypothesis aside, Rob’s memoir is an inside tour through the demoralizing foster care system and his particular path to a bright future. It’s also a touching account of the people who did their level best to help him along the way.

It leaves the reader on a hopeful note: origins are not destiny. Even if Rob’s book doesn’t leave you with a new perspective on class and society, Troubled will compel you to take inventory of your own past, present, and future.

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class will release on February 20th. You can pre-order it today.

(YouTube existed back in 2006, but just barely. Jawed Karim uploaded the first video in 2005, titled “Me at the Zoo,” in which he helpfully explained that elephants have long trunks.)

In this video, I helpfully explain that romantic infatuation has a downside. It’s like a rollercoaster that hasn’t passed inspection since the Bush administration: thrilling, but risky.

Check it out if you want a longer answer, including some work by an anthropologist who fired up an MRI machine and found infatuation to share some neurological ground with substance addiction.

Happy New Year!

The Washington Post recently published this article on intergenerational trauma. The author said many things about the topic, but she omitted something important: a definition. Nowhere in 460 words did she tell us what intergenerational trauma is.

She told us other things instead. She told us Oprah endorses the notion of intergenerational trauma, it’s “in the genes,” and “trauma is at the core of so many mental health problems.” I gather that intergenerational trauma is bad, but not even Oprah can tell us precisely what we’re talking about.

The general thesis of the article is reasonable enough: Disturbing experiences affect the way survivors raise their children.

That is not new information. Events shape parents, and parents shape their kids. That’s one of the oldest observations in all of clinical psychology. We know a lot about intergenerational transmission of behavior because researchers have measured it. For example, we know:

• Daughters of parents who have insecure attachment styles are likely to develop their own insecure attachment style (Kilmann et al. 2009).
• Alcohol use is a common factor in intergenerational transmission of violence, “such that alcohol-and-violence begets alcohol-and-violence” (Windle 1996).
• Parental divorce is associated with increased risk of offspring divorce (Amato 1996).
• Boys who enjoy good relationships with their biological fathers are likely to become loving, involved fathers to their own children (Brown 2018).

That’s just a sample. The list of specific observations goes on, and it’s quite old. Behaviorists have long noted that children learn to fear a thing after they observe a fearful reaction from their parents, and even Freud wrote about the transmission of taboos between generations (Hosein and Bulut 2021).

The author of the Post article has done what so many pop-psych writers do. She has replaced a well-established body of specific, limited observations with a slippery term that applies to just about everyone and every circumstance.

Your parents may not have been alcoholic or divorced. They may not have lost the family home by splitting queens at the blackjack table. But someone in your lineage had a very hard time of it… and apparently that makes you a victim of a vague malady called intergenerational trauma.

The author seems to mean well. Nevertheless, she speaks volumes in what she doesn’t say: real problems like depression and anxiety have indistinct origins and require easy, indirect solutions. As treatment for intergenerational trauma, the Post recommends such bland interventions as yoga, “awareness,” and political activism.

Yes, according to the article, you can cure your intergenerational trauma by becoming a political activist. That alone is enough to conclude that intergenerational trauma—at least in the Post’s sense of the term—is an imaginary problem.

(As an aside, the article’s recommendation toward political activism comes from American Psychological Association president Thelma Bryant. APA’s history suggests she would like you to lobby for their causes, not yours. It embarrasses me to no end that the leaders of my profession seem to view every client interaction as an opportunity to proselytize. My colleagues and I don’t do that.)

Neglecting to define a term may seem like a small thing. Maybe I’m ruminating over a triviality. But I think the Post article says a lot in what it omits. It’s implicitly repeating one of the most prominent messages in pop-psych discourse: happiness comes from applying minimal effort toward imaginary problems.

Considering the alternative—working hard to solve clearly defined problems—I can see the appeal.

PS. I can’t really read minds, but you already knew that.

References
Amato, P. 1996. “Explaining the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 58: 628-640.

Brown, G.M., S.M. Kogan, and K. Jihyoung. 2018. “From Fathers to Sons: The Intergenerational Transmission of Parenting Behavior among African American Young Men.” Family Process 57: 165-180.

Hosein, A.M. and S. Bulut. 2021. “Reading Trauma as an Intergenerational Phenomenon.” Open Access Journal of Behavioral Science and Psychology: 4(2).

Kilmann, P. R., J. M. C. Vendemia, M. M. Parnell, and G. C. Urbaniak. 2009. “Parent Characteristics Linked with Daughters’ Attachment Styles.” Adolescence 44: 557-568.

Windle, M. 1996. “Effects of Parental Drinking on Adolescents.” Alcohol Health and Research World 20: 181-104.

Maybe you have heard the news: men are dropping out. Word on the street is that men across the globe are unemployed, uneducated, out of shape, and above all, lonely.

I’ve learned to be skeptical of catastrophic headlines. It’s true that many boys and men are struggling for reasons too complex to discuss here, but I doubt being male is uniquely difficult at the moment. The world has always had sharp edges. Men have always faced challenges.

Still, it’s indisputable that many men are falling short of their potential for reasons too complex to discuss here. Meanwhile, women are increasingly choosing the single life. At a glance, it all seems pretty dire for relations between the sexes… but I’m optimistic. Men and women have always valued each other, and we always will.

That’s why I placed a bet today. I wagered against the downfall of men, and against the demise of meaningful connection between the sexes.

Gatekeeper begins with a simple premise. Any man who commits to a woman is offering the most valuable gift he can provide: his exclusive time and attention. Every man’s future is a priceless commodity.

Why, then, do so many men give it away so cheaply? Why do so many devote themselves to women who drive them crazy, or even ruin their lives? And why do men repeat malfunctioning relationship patterns that damage their happiness, their health, and their productivity?

Gatekeeper tackles those questions at a time when so many people are hopeless about men, and when so many men are hopeless about themselves.

The book’s recipe is ancient and reliable. It’s the same recipe men have always relied upon: You want things to improve? Good. Then get to work. Repair your relationship patterns and be the gatekeeper of everything good that flows from your commitment.

This book, at this time of pessimism, is quite a gamble—especially for someone who has the marketing acumen of a 12-year-old with a lemonade stand: hang out a sign and call it good.

Luckily, my lemonade-stand strategy has worked before. Six years ago today, I released The Tactical Guide to Women. Someone recently told me it has become an underground classic; a staple in men’s spaces alongside books like No More Mr. Nice Guy and The Way of the Superior Man.

That’s the greatest praise my book could receive. It means The Tactical Guide succeeded despite its author’s marketing ineptitude. That’s what Gatekeeper will have to do. It will need to pass the market test mostly on its own.

I think it will. I think connection matters more than ever. That’s my wager. Wish me luck because if I win, we all win.Paperback and e-book are available today at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere. The audiobook will be along shortly. More to come…

Pretty dramatic.

The psychopath next door is different. He’s more like George “it’s not a lie if you believe it” Costanza. He’s manipulative, uncaring, and neither a genius nor industrious.

Psychopathy isn’t a binary trait. It exists on a spectrum like any other aspect of personality. (Psychopathy is variously referred to as sociopathy and antisocial personality. The trifling distinctions bore me. The behavior matters more than the label.)

Over at Twitter, my friend Paul asked if people with psychopathic leanings understand their own nature. Are Tony and George aware of their personalities? Do they possess insight?

It depends on the definition of “insight.” Hervey Cleckley, the psychiatrist who pioneered the study of psychopathy in the early 1900s, saw it like this:

“[The psychopath] has absolutely no capacity to see himself as others see him. It is perhaps more accurate to say that he has no ability to know how others feel when they see him…” (Cleckley, 1988)

These days, self-insight refers to the capacity to understand our own nature. Cleckley meant something slightly different. In his clinical world, working with very ill patients, insight was about adjusting to feedback — a skill at which the psychopath does not excel. Cleckley wrote:

”Instead of facing facts that would ordinarily lead to insight, he projects, blaming his troubles on others with the flimsiest of pretext but with elaborate and subtle rationalization.”

That sounds like George Costanza. Cleckley continued:

“What I regard as the psychopath’s lack of insight shows up frequently and very impressively in his apparent assumption that the legal penalties for a crime he has committed do not, or should not, apply to him.”

That sounds like Tony Soprano.

To my knowledge, Cleckley didn’t really answer Paul’s question: do psychopaths understand their own character and reputation? In 2011, a group of researchers looked into it. They wrote:

“Psychopathic individuals appear capable of reporting accurately on psychopathic traits when there are no direct consequences to accurate reporting (i.e., sentencing). It may be that the lack of concern for the consequences of these traits has been mistaken for a lack of insight into them” (Miller et al. 2011).

Both stances can be correct. Cleckley can be correct that psychopaths reject feedback and responsibility. Miller et al. can be correct that psychopaths see themselves as others see them — they just don’t care, and they’re willing to lie about it.

A Thought Experiment

I asked a former clinical supervisor what would happen if, hypothetically, he told a psychopath, “Bub, yer a psychopath.”

My supervisor is skilled. He wouldn’t do that. But the population with which he works puts him in a good position to speculate on how the conversation might unfold. He said the patient might take offense or feel unfairly pathologized, provided he didn’t understand the label.

However, if he understood the label, he might feign indignation or try to gain information he might use later. Or he might simply shrug and disregard the diagnosis if he saw no utility in the discussion.

I took my supervisor’s response to mean that a true psychopath would use the label the same way he uses other information: as a potential tool for manipulation or profit.

I’m reminded of a different study which asked whether narcissists possess insight into their personality and reputation (Carlson et al. 2011). The answer seems to be yes. Narcissists generally understand:

1. Others see them less positively than they see themselves.
2. They make positive first impressions that deteriorates.
3. Others see them as arrogant.

If you tell a narcissist he displays narcissistic characteristics, like conceit or entitlement, he’s likely to agree. He overvalues everything about himself, including his narcissistic behaviors. (The findings are more nuanced than that, especially on the lighter end of narcissism. The paper is worth reading.)

Of course, you and I know narcissistic behavior hides (from the narcissist) the fear that he’s unworthy of love or attention. That’s why the narcissist isn’t injured when you call him egotistical; he is injured when you question whether he should be.

Try it sometime, if you’re feeling psychopathic, and watch what happens.

As Cleckley noted, the undiluted psychopath has no such concerns about worthiness. He’s too busy having fun. By definition, he doesn’t care what you think about his character.

Undiluted psychopathy is uncommon, but lesser psychopathy isn’t. I can confidently predict you know someone (or are someone) who’s a little like George Costanza — willing to transgress occasionally just because he can get away with it.

That person isn’t necessarily a villain. Nor is he necessarily bright.

One study (Paulhus and Williams, 2002) described such “subclinical” psychopaths as low in agreeableness and conscientiousness, with verbal IQ scores slightly lower than nonverbal — and no special intellectual advantage overall. Other studies have found a negative relationship between IQ and psychopathy (e.g. Spironelli et al. 2014).

That’s hardly the recipe for world domination, nor is it a recipe for being invested in the opinions of others. If this person has an advantage in life, it’s the willingness to do what other people won’t, with little regard for morality. But that will only take a person so far. (Jail is one destination. Politics is another.)

One of the most useful things to know about people like George Costanza is that they have their own shifting and self-serving moral compass. That can be disorienting. Your sense of ethics and fair play don’t apply when dealing with them. If you can accept that, then you might be able to navigate a relationship of sorts.

As for Paul’s question, it’s hard to imagine George Costanza is unaware that others dislike his scheming. It’s equally difficult to imagine that he cares.

References
Carlson, E.N., S. Vazire, and T.F. Oltmanns. 2011. “You Probably Think this Paper’s About You: Narcissists’ Perceptions of their Personality and Reputation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101:185-201.

Cleckley, H. 1988. “The Mask of Sanity.” Private printing downloaded from http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/sanity_1.PdF

Miller, J.D., S.E. Jones, and D.R. Lynam. 2011. “Psychopathic Traits From the Perspective of Self and Informant Reports: Is There Evidence for a Lack of Insight?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 120:758-764.

Paulhus, D.L. and K.M. Williams. 2002. The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality 36:556–563.

Spironelli, C., D. Segrè, L. Stegagno, and A. Angrilli. 2014. “Intelligence and Psychopathy: A Correlational Study on Insane Female Offenders.” Psychological Medicine 44:111-116.

But you haven’t tried MY zucchini!

The more tenacious ones will argue well past the point of incivility. If you ask them why it’s so damned important to eat their hellspawn food, they’ll say something like, “you’ll like it!”

That’s not an answer. It doesn’t offer a lick of insight as to their motivation. They’re just repeating themselves. Why?

We all wrestle with this question once in a while: how do you make sense of a person’s motive when their motive is elusive?

Lately, in answer to that question, this advice seems to be making the rounds:

If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequence and infer the motive.

I have heard Jordan Peterson attribute the saying to Carl Jung. A rudimentary search suggests there is some basis for the quote in the fourth volume of Jung’s Collected Works.

To my mind, it doesn’t matter where the maxim originated. It is the worst kind of speculation. Why? Because it looks good, and it sounds smart, but it’s little more than a fancy way to guess.

I have started calling this maxim Jung’s Shovel because shovels are good for spreading manure. Manure is useful, but it’s not the desired end product. Likewise, Jung’s Shovel isn’t necessarily a bad way to think about un-understandable behavior. I’ll get to that.

First, here’s the problem. Suppose I’m squaring off against the zucchini bully, and they won’t relent. The consequence of their behavior is that I will get angry. In the absence of any other explanation, Jung’s Shovel would have me infer the person wanted to make me angry.

Maybe that’s true… or maybe not.

The best Jung’s Shovel can give you is a hypothesis. A speculation. A guess. I don’t like to make judgements or decisions based on guesses — especially at work.

Example: suppose a kindhearted family man exceeds the speed limit on a highway. As a result of his recklessness, he causes a 17-car pileup.

The police interview him afterward, and he honestly has no reason to explain his speeding. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t inattentive or distracted. He wasn’t late, or hopped up on caffeine, or trying to outrun the bad guys.

He was simply speeding, and he can’t explain why.

If we infer the motive from the consequence, we have to conclude he wanted to cause an accident. That conclusion is — if you’ll pardon the clinical jargon — dumb. There is simply no basis for it.

In a clinical context, it’s worse than dumb. Imagine a psychologist testifying in court that, in his professional opinion, the kindhearted family man intended to cause an accident. Yikes.

No skilled psychologist would do that in court. But we do it in the clinic all the time — as does anyone who has ever tried to figure out a boss, a significant other, or a carnie at the state fair.

I can think of three things that make Jung’s Shovel alluring to otherwise rational people.

1. It might be correct. Technically, it’s possible the kindhearted family man intended to cause an accident. However unlikely it might be, it’s possible.
2. It’s unfalsifiable. We can’t prove that he didn’t intend to cause the accident. To a lazy mind, or to a mind that really wants to believe a thing, that’s close enough.
3. It’s fancy. Once we decide the outcome was intentional, then we get to contrive an intriguing explanation. People love a titillating story. Maybe the man was speeding because he was angry at his wife, and beneath his conscious awareness he was feeling especially nihilistic. That’s a good story. The less data you have, the easier it is to write that kind of story, and the harder it is to notice when you are wrong.

Here’s a more mundane and realistic example to show how tempting this kind of addled thinking can be.

Suppose a woman has a history of dating men who turn out to be distant and faithless. Maybe one ex-boyfriend fled the country after they discussed marriage. Another was unfaithful. A third was so self-absorbed he couldn’t focus on her at all.

Let’s suppose further this woman has no idea why she keeps choosing men who abandon her in one way or another. If we apply Jung’s Shovel, we have to conclude she wants to be abandoned.

That’s not so far-fetched. People have clever ways of getting affection while avoiding intimacy. Still, there are plenty of other possible explanations.

Maybe she’s drawn to qualities in men that happen to correspond with disloyalty. Maybe she’s on autopilot, unwittingly repeating the pattern her parents modeled. Maybe it’s just the luck of the draw.

Jung’s Shovel can’t see those explanations. Worse than that, it encourages us to stop looking for them. Why should we keep looking? The Shovel gives us an explanation that might be correct, is unfalsifiable, and is delightfully fancy.

Having said all that, I’d be lying if I said I don’t use Jung’s Shovel all the time. I try to use it responsibly by remembering this: Jung’s Shovel provides a hypothesis, not an explanation.

Maybe the zucchini bully was trying to provoke me. Maybe the kindhearted family man did intend to cause an accident. Maybe the heartbroken woman is avoiding intimacy.

The ideas are worth exploring. They also merit skepticism until the evidence is compelling enough to reject other explanations.

I don’t know about you, but I have to be skeptical of my own hypothesizing in order to avoid motivated reasoning, which is that process of reaching the conclusion I want to reach.

Here’s how Lee Jussim and his colleagues (2019) described motivated reasoning:

When information supports preferred conclusions, people experience positive affect and easily accept the evidence.… When information supports an undesired (or belief-inconsistent) conclusion, however, people experience negative affect and critique, ignore, or reject the evidence on irrelevant grounds.

I call it buying my own bullshit. Whatever you call it, motivated reasoning is enticing because it feels good.

Jung’s Shovel can be useful, or it can be an on-ramp to motivated reasoning. If you want to be a genius, just avoid buying your own bullshit whenever you can manage it. You’ll be miles ahead of most people.

So often, what we think we know about a situation is only the beginning of understanding, not the end. Jung’s Shovel is a reasonable tool for building a hypothesis. Beyond that, it can only sling manure.

References:
Jussim, L., S.T. Stevens, N. Honeycutt, S.M. Anglin, and N. Fox. 2019. “Scientific Gullibility.” In J.P. Forgas and R.F. Baumeister (eds.) The Social Psychology of Gullibility. New York: Routledge.

I agree. The urge to be courteous is reduced if your spouse has no escape. At least that’s what Anne Boleyne told me.

However, I would add an important qualifier: the possibility of divorce is a positive incentive for spouses who have something to lose. Not everyone has something to lose. The pain of divorce, and the incentive to protect the marriage, are not necessarily distributed evenly. I think that’s evident in a few statistics.

In the US, women initiate 70 to 80 percent of divorces (American Sociological Association 2015). There are various theories as to why, most of them conveniently aligned with the political beliefs of whoever is doing the theorizing.

Women also win 80% of child custody cases (Grall 2020) and almost all alimony awards (Sorge and Scurlock 2013). At the societal level, there’s a pretty strong correlation between the one who initiates divorce (the woman) and the one who profits by it (again, the woman).

I’m careful about reading too much into correlations. (Did you know the divorce rate in Maine correlates with per-capita consumption of margarine? Bastard margarine.) Just because women generally fare better in family court doesn’t mean they initiate divorce for fun and profit. A few sociopaths aside, divorce isn’t fun for anyone.

However, I think it’s fair to say women are not disincentivized in the same way as men. That turns the Rabbi’s incentive on its head.

I have met dozens of men who hesitate to marry for fear of “divorce rape,” but I have yet to meet a woman with that concern. I haven’t even heard rumors that she exists. I have certainly met women who were concerned about protecting their wealth, but not because they fear an institutional bias against their gender.

Prenuptial Agreements Recalibrate the Incentive to Be Lovable

People tend to think prenups are about money and child custody arrangements. That’s only the surface. At a deeper level, prenups increase the incentive to be continually worthy of our spouse’s love and admiration.

That might be what makes prenups such an uncomfortable topic. To sign a prenup is to acknowledge that the person we idealize today may be less-than-ideal tomorrow, and so might we.

Yet people don’t generally think about prenups in those terms. They think about financial safety, or lifestyle freedom, or whatever money represents to them.

Most men seem to think about it like this: prenups make sense because they minimize the influence of biased and unaccountable judges in the event of divorce. If a man’s fiancé refuses to sign a prenup, it looks to him as if she’s refusing to relinquish her legal advantage down the road. She’s refusing to put skin in the game and share the risk.

From the vantage point of most women, I think the prenup conversation looks a bit different. If her fiancé asks for a prenup, it looks to her as if he assumes the relationship will fail. She might think he is trying to grease the wheels for an easy exit by signing a prenup, just like he might think she is trying to maintain an easy exit by not signing.

They’re in the same boat. They’re both concerned about staying together. But they will never realize if they think they’re only talking about money and children.

The Prenup Conversation Is About Investment

The hard truth is that becoming unmarried — like becoming unhealthy, unwealthy, or unalive — is always a possibility. Conflicts develop. People change. Bad things happen.

Equal risk encourages equal investment. A prenuptial agreement is one simple way to share risk, along with the incentive to stay lovable when times are tough.

Astute readers might wonder if my wife and I signed a prenup. We did not. It didn’t occur to us. I have no regrets about that. After 23 years, I am certain I married a woman of impeccable character. We each give more than we take in the relationship, and we have successfully navigated difficulties together. Those two factors alone make the odds of divorce remote. On the distant chance that our marriage should somehow disintegrate, it would be highly uncharacteristic for either of us to try to destroy the other.

Those are precisely the things you don’t know before spending decades with a person. The prenup conversation is a chance for less experienced couples to manage some of that uncertainty.

It’s also an opportunity to practice having difficult conversations. If a couple can’t do that before the marriage, while stakes are low, it’s unlikely they will be able to do so after the marriage, when stakes are high. Idealistic, untested couples are notorious for assuming they will have the skills to navigate any problem. Family courts are filled with older, more jaded couples who overestimated their skillset.

No Prenup, No Wedding Plans

I’m not a lawyer. I’m barely law-abiding. I have no legal advice to give. But I will offer two non-legal thoughts of the type I would offer my own son or daughter.

First, I wouldn’t even discuss wedding plans until after the prenuptial agreement is signed and filed away, hopefully never to be seen again. Why? Because once the wedding train starts rolling, it becomes increasingly difficult to back out, or to negotiate the terms of the relationship.

No prenup, no wedding plans.

(A side-note for men: if you’re afraid to bring up the prenup because you fear she will react badly, imagine what the marriage will be like.)

Second, don’t be cheap. Follow the direction of a skilled family law attorney who understands your local landscape. Attorneys have told me both parties should have representation so neither side can claim they didn’t understand the terms of the agreement, or that they signed under duress.

I believe prenuptial agreements are best seen as a statement about shared risk, and the prenup conversation is a test of the relationship’s integrity. Ironically, couples who can discuss difficult topics with grace and empathy are probably the ones who need a prenup the least.

References
American Sociological Association. 2015. Women More Likely than Men to Initiate Divorces, but Not Non-Marital Breakups. Press Release. Retrieved from http://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-more-likely-men-initiate-divorces-not-non-marital-breakups.

Grall, T. 2020. “Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2017,” Current Population Reports, P60-269. U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC.

Sorge, J., and J. Scurlock. 2013. Divorce Corp. Jackson, WY: DC Book LLC.

I once asked a physician about the annoying little tremor in my hands. I told her I’d had it all my life, as did my father.

“Don’t worry,” she said in a confident tone. “Those are just benign familial tremors.”

“Oh,” I said as if she had shared meaningful information.

It wasn’t until I left the building that I realized she had told me precisely nothing about why my hands shake. She merely gave me a label.

For a few minutes, though, I felt like I understood something new. Silly me. Since then, I have been careful to keep labels and explanations separate, like cranberry sauce and gravy on my Thanksgiving plate. They can sit side-by-side, but they should never get intimate.

This question of labels-versus-explanations came to mind recently while working on a section of the next book. It has to do with factors that keep people stuck in bad relationships.

This section has some mildly complex information about patterns of reinforcement. It’s stuff most non-psychologists don’t study. I was curious what my readers might already know about it, so I ran this poll on Twitter.

Let’s pause and define a couple terms.

Dopamine: A neurotransmitter found in pathways between the midbrain, limbic system, and cortex. Among other functions, it is associated with motivating us toward things we find rewarding. I would be lying if I said I understood much beyond that.

Variable-ratio reinforcement: You know how a slot machine pays out once in a while, but not consistently? That’s variable-ratio reinforcement. This I understand.

As long as we feel confident there will be a reward at some point, and as long as the cost of each attempt is relatively low, we will keep trying until we get the next reward. (1)

In most scenarios, this is a low-cost strategy to gain resources. You can keep fishing until you catch something; keep foraging until you find food; keep approaching the opposite sex until you get lucky. Just keep trying.

Variable-ratio reinforcement works on people, dogs, rats, and pigeons. It is one of the most potent non-pharmacological ways to maintain a behavior.

Those two definitions differ in character. The first one has to do with how we are built. It’s about structure. The second has to do with how we work. It’s about function.

Structure, like labels, can be easy to grasp without telling us anything useful. Consider these statements:

• Bats can fly because they have pectoral muscles.
• Cats can hunt because they have optic nerves.
• Race cars can go fast because they have gas tanks.
• People can gamble because they have dopamine systems.

None of them answer the question, why? If we point to dopamine as an explanation for behavior, we’re simply using a label in place of an answer. Knowing bats have pecs doesn’t tell us why they go to the effort of flying. Knowing people have dopamine systems doesn’t tell us why they gamble. (2) 

Nor does it tell us the conditions under which a person is likely to engage in other compulsive behaviors. That’s a handy bit of knowledge because sometimes the just-keep-trying strategy works against us. It can also be weaponized by people who want to take advantage.

However, if we understand function, then we can understand when and why we are susceptible to getting stuck in a cycle of variable-ratio reinforcement, like a compulsive gambler. That, in turn, let’s us see it as it’s happening and step away — or better yet, step away before it happens.

Getting back to the original question about being stuck in unhealthy relationships, variable-ratio reinforcement is one factor. It’s obviously not the only factor, but neither is it trivial.

Have you ever heard someone say something like this about their relationship?

”When it’s good, it’s great.”

That statement generally means the relationship is crap most of the time, but every once in a while there’s a fantastic payoff.

A few examples:

1. A couple argues aggressively on a routine basis. It usually ends in bitterness that takes days to resolve. But every once in a while, the fight ends with amazing make-up sex. Jackpot.
2. A man is stuck in a cycle of trying to please a disapproving and ungrateful wife. His effort is usually met with dismissal or complaints. But every once in a while, she shows real gratitude. Jackpot.
3. A woman with an alcoholic husband endures weekly adventures into his shameful, drunken exploits. Friends and family can’t understand why she tolerates his embarrassing behavior. But every once in a while, he showers her with contrition and heartfelt promises of a loving future. Jackpot.

Each of those randomly placed, periodic rewards keeps the person coming back for more. Obviously, that’s not the only factor. With humans, it never is. Nevertheless, it’s useful to shine a light on any factor that maintains self-destructive behavior. Does it matter if dopamine is involved? Not to me.

Structure is interesting. It’s worth studying. Understanding function, however, is where the smart money’s at. It’s the difference between knowing what a car is, and knowing how to drive.

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Footnotes

1. An ideal variable-reinforcement schedule finds the balance between effort per attempt and the ideal range of denials between rewards. However, things can get much more complex than that — something I’m sure slot-machine designers understand better than I do. For a little taste of that complexity, see D.P. Field, F. Tonneau, W. Ahearn, and P.N. Hineline. 1996. “Preference Between Variable-Ratio and Fixed-Ratio Schedules: Local and Extended Relations.” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 66:283-295.

2. Unfortunately, media and advertisers often explain behavior with meaningless descriptions of neurotransmitters. The most obvious example is the serotonin hypothesis of depression, which is pushed by the pharmaceutical industry. There does not appear to be much empirical support for that hypothesis, yet I’m sure we have all heard its associated (and nonsensical) explanation for depression: “chemical imbalance.” For some interesting background, see J.R. Lacasse and J. Leo. 2005. “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature.” PLoS Medicine 2:1211-1216.