'I Was Drifting In and Out of My Marriage' | Psychology Today

?Only dead fish swim with the stream.? Malcolm Muggeridge

?We can do no great things; only small things with great love.? Mother Teresa

?Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.? Maurice Chevalier

The decision to get married or to get divorced is such a significant one that it clearly should be taken after profound deliberations. Apparently, this is sometimes not the case and people can find themselves drifting into a certain situation without having thought deeply about it. Is drifting a proper manner in which to make important romantic decisions?

Drifting can be characterized as moving from one situation to another with the agent not having complete control over the process or a full awareness of it. I suggest distinguishing between slow and gradual drifting and fast and instantaneous drifting.

Slow and fast drifting

In its prevailing linguistic usage, drifting can be characterized as a slow and gradual shift from one situation to another without complete control over it or full awareness of it (for an excellent discussion on this, see Ullmann-Margalit, 2006). Slow drifting occurs in cases where people have been together for a while and although their love is not intense, they feel comfortable with each other so without thinking too much they find themselves agreeing to take the next natural step and get married. Similarly, slow drifting takes place when a married couple becomes increasingly less passionate toward each other and has less interest in the life of the other, and so takes the next natural step of getting a divorce.

Fast drifting, the typical example of is love at first sight, is not gradual but instantaneous. Like slow drifting, it does not involve complete control over the process and there is also no full awareness of any process; there is no process as the experience is instantaneous. In both slow and fast drifting, the agent?s attitude is mainly based upon emotional reasoning rather than intellectual deliberations.

The literal definition of drifting in English denotes a slow drifting and what I refer here as fast drifting could be termed "being carried away." In other languages, such as German and Hebrew, the word for drifting is used to denote both slow and fast drifting. A piece of log in the water can drift slow or fast depending on the speed of the current.

Fast and slow drifting can occur when falling in love and when falling out love. Love at first sight involves fast drifting; it does not follow a process of slowly learning to love someone while acquiring further knowledge about him. In love, such fast drifting gives significant weight to the attraction element in romantic love, while slow drifting gives greater weight to knowing the agent?s personal characteristics. Similarly, fast and slow drifting can also occur when falling out of love. Fast drifting might be triggered by a major dishonest deed, such as having an affair or neglecting a partner when she needs the agent most. Slow drifting in falling out of love frequently occurs in situations when the couple comes to know each other better and they gradually realize that they have nothing in common.

There are certain differences between drifting into marriage and drifting into divorce. Drifting is more natural in the case of marriage, as conventional norms tend to urge couples towards getting married and they are congratulated and even admired for entering into marriage; hence it is easier to accommodate oneself to these norms and receive the applause of others, without spending too much time on profound soul-searching. In the case of divorce, the process of drifting apart occurs as the initial love diminishes and as each person develops different realms of interest. However, once the two realize that they have drifted apart, actually splitting their lives and the lives of their children through a formal divorce is harder, as divorce has various negative emotional and financial implications that go beyond the individual agents. So unlike the situation of marriage, the final decision in divorce is typically made through a conscious process of intellectual deliberation.

The stories of Sandra and Carla Bruni

The story of Sandra, a beautiful and wise woman, illustrates slow and gradual drifting. Sandra drifted gradually into her marriage and then drifted gradually into her divorce. She was not particularly in love with her partner, but after a year of infrequent dating, in which they did not live together and hardly had sex (as she was from a conservative family), it was natural for them to keep drifting and move their non-passionate romantic relationship one small step forward?into marriage. Within the first two years, Sandra felt that they were drifting apart and he was not what she had thought him to be. She quickly developed her own career and each of them began living a separate life. The decision to divorce a few years later was a natural outcome of this drifting.

The story of Carla Bruni, the wife of the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, illustrates fast drifting. She claims that it was love at first sight between her and Sarkozy: what happened "between Nicolas and me was not quick, it was instant. So for us, [the wedding] was actually very slow." Similarly, a married woman said about her married lover, "I loved him at first sight. And the very first time in my life I ever felt passionate was the moment I saw him. It was a feeling so loving, so tender, so wild, so overwhelming and breath-taking, and all-involving, a feeling I did not know before."

Fast and slow emotional reasoning

Daniel Kahneman, in his book?Thinking, Fast and Slow, has suggested differentiating between two systems of processing, fast and slow; he calls them intuition and reasoning respectively. Intuition (System 1) is a fast system based upon emotional reasoning; reasoning (System 2) is a slow system based upon intellectual reasoning. The two types of logic are not entirely contradictory and have certain common principles.

My discussion of the two types of drifting refers only to System 1, which uses instantaneous intuitive processing. I argue that this type of processing can be done in one significant occurrence or in an incremental, stepwise process of gradual drifting. In both cases System 2, involving intellectual deliberations, plays an insignificant part, if any at all.

The two types of drifting involve a significant change from one situation to another with the agent having no complete control over it, not being fully aware of it, and using emotional reasoning rather than intellectual deliberations. The difference between the two types of drifting merely concerns the pace at which it occurs?whether it is slow or fast?and whether the information processing is instantaneous or gradual .

Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-the-name-love/201209/i-was-drifting-in-and-out-my-marriage

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