My boyfriend does everything halfway, save for playing video games and smoking weed. He does sloppy work at his job, just the minimum to get by, and is always late turning things in. He's gotten away with this so far, maybe because he's charismatic and fun. In our relationship, he'll promise me one thing and do another, and he does sneaky-lazy things like using up my shampoo but leaving the empty bottle in the shower. He's highly intelligent and could be so much better than this. Is there a way to get him to change?
--Disappointed Girlfriend
Sadly, few companies have the kind of position your boyfriend would be ideal for: Vice President of Watching Porn During Business Hours.
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that "action is character." In other words, the way somebody repeatedly behaves reflects the sort of person they are: for example, highly trustworthy or "better lock up the silverware -- including the stainless steel!"
Psychologists boil down a person's typical way of behaving -- along with the recurring thoughts and feelings that drive it -- as personality traits (for instance, extraversion). Personality traits have a hefty genetic component -- maybe even 50 percent -- and tend to be pretty consistent over time and in different situations. (A barfighter is a barfighter is a barfighter.)
Like classic Jolly Ranchers, personality traits come in five core "flavors," which psychologists remember with the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (aka emotional stability). Each trait is actually a spectrum ranging from low to high (from very little of a trait to lots and lots of it).
Ethically elastic, lazy sociopotato behavior like your boyfriend's reflects low conscientiousness. A person high in conscientiousness is disciplined, dependable, and organized, with strong self-control, while someone low in conscientiousness is unreliable, undisciplined, and slothful, with poor impulse control and little concern for how their multislacking affects others. They can be wonderfully spontaneous and a lot of fun -- that is, until they spontaneously pawn your dog to stake themselves into high-roller poker.
Being conscientious is one of the most reliable predictors of success -- in any job from CEO to dog groomer to Etsy birdhouse magnate. It's natural to assume low conscientiousness is bad and high is good. But high conscientiousness has a number of downsides, such as buttcheek-clenching inflexibility, crippling perfectionism, and being about as spur-of-the-moment fun as a refrigerated corpse.
Additionally, evolutionary anthropologist Daniel Nettle observes that the benefits of high conscientiousness are "exaggerated" in the "artificial ecologies" of modern workplaces. "Few of our ancestors survived and reproduced by being able to stay in the same place for eight hours a day, quietly getting on with a series of pre-planned or repetitive tasks" like entering sales data into spreadsheets. For an ancestral hunter-gatherer, life was "a series of urgent improvisations" to manage surprising situations that constantly popped up. "It would really not be a good response, observing a passing herd of wildebeest, to say, 'Actually Wednesday is my honey-gathering day.'"
Interestingly, research by psychologist Joanna Moutafi and her colleagues finds a relationship between high intelligence and low conscientiousness, suggesting that being brainy allows for slackadaisical behavior. People who are very smart learn that they can goof off and do work at the last minute because they've got the mental juice to squeak by.
Can a brainy slothlete like your boyfriend change? Maybe. But the chances of this happening simply because you ask are probably slim. Change is more likely to come through getting hit hard by some catastrophic loss, like getting canned or dumped or driving while sloshed and mowing down the neighbors.
However, you could tell your boyfriend you think he's awesome in many ways, but you see him doing things halfway, and it makes every area of his life so much less than it could be. Paint a picture of how great things could be if he just put in a bit more effort. Assuming he doesn't shut you down, suggest an experiment. For two weeks, he could pick a couple of things to do really well every day: one at home (maybe making the bed like they do at a nice hotel) and another at work. During the two weeks, pump him up when he follows through, and afterward, ask him how it made him feel: about himself, his job prospects, and making you feel loved.
Going back to Fitzgerald's "action is character," if your boyfriend feels good enough to keep up and expand the changes, you might see that action also becomes character. We can choose who we are (probably more than most of us think) by repeatedly acting like the sort of person we want to be. Accordingly, some committed slackers do finally start climbing the corporate ladder; however, others prefer to keep napping underneath. ("My spirit animal is the sinkhole!")
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
February 10, 2021I typically avoid conflict to keep from having ugly conversations. I'm in an unhappy relationship, and it's clearly not fixable. I always rely on the other person to end a relationship, even when it's making me really miserable. Why do I do this, and how do I change?
--Stuck Girl
Note that fighter planes have an "ejection seat" and not a "go down in a flaming wreck" seat.
Fighter plane seat design is a helpful model for relationships that have run their course. Facts don't change because you refuse to acknowledge their existence. Your approach -- which I'll call "nonfrontational" -- is particularly counterproductive. Clinical psychologist Randy Paterson calls this a "passive" style of responding to conflict, driven by a goal of avoiding conflict "at all costs." In fact, what you end up avoiding is not conflict but temporary emotional turbulence -- the queasyfraidyanxiousness -- that would come with taking steps to resolve it. So, by avoiding conflict, you end up having much more conflict for a much longer stretch of time!
But say you braved up this afternoon and told your boyfriend it's over. It would feel miserable in the moment, and that misery would have plenty of company as you did all those fun breakup things like sawing the couch in half. But then you'd be out -- instead of neck-deep in still miserable for another three months, or as long as it takes for your boyfriend to notice he's had enough.
Healthy assertiveness starts with telling yourself that you have a right to try to get your needs met. Feeling worthy might take some emotional renovation. If so, do get on that, either on your own or with a therapist. However, there's a secret to asserting yourself, even as a person who's long avoided it. You don't have to feel worthy or even comfortable in order to do it. Admit that it'll feel scary, totally foreign, and generally like a big pile of suck to assert yourself -- and then do it anyway.
You might also apply this to other areas of your life, from friendships to work. When a situation you're in becomes irreparably toxic and awful, there's a reasonable thing to do, and it isn't staying in it and having the cat join you once a week in a small private funeral for your enthusiasm.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I'm a woman in my early 30s. I grew up on a steady diet of romance novels, and I keep longing for the true "soul mate" love from my fictional world. No guy ever seems right, so I never feel that yearning, intense desire, and connectivity I've been searching for. I feel more of those emotions reading romance novels than I ever did with any boyfriend. Do you believe each person has a "true love"? Am I too much of a romantic?
--Lonely Dreamer
So, going by the romance novel standard, you're just looking for that handsome, rapey, billionaire sociopath who follows you around like a puppy.Unfortunately, a belief in "soul mates" is about as realistic. Each of us supposedly has our one and only perfect romantic match. Naturally, this person is conveniently located and culturally in lockstep and is never, say, a nomadic desert goatherd who thinks his life will finally be perfect if only he turns you into wife number eight.
A person who believes in soul mates has a "destiny theory" of love, explains social psychologist C. Raymond Knee. They think two people are either fated to be together or they're not; whether a relationship is good or bad is beyond their control. They can be quick to give the boot to "less-than-perfect candidates" and to see any conflict as a sign a relationship should be abandoned as "just another distraction in the search for perfection." (I think he left out the word "endless.")
Back here in reality, all humans are fallible, and being two different people (who are not dead) often means wanting conflicting things. People who understand this have a "growth" or "work-it-out" theory of love. They believe a happy, satisfying relationship doesn't just happen. It takes work. It's something two people create through what Knee describes as a paired process of "conquering obstacles and growing closer."
Probably the best anyone can do in seeking a partner is figure out their personal must-haves (physically, emotionally, ethically, and any other essential "ly"s) and then find somebody with enough of them to make it worth working to build something together. Realistically, maybe your soulmate is that Mr. Wonderful who finds you beautiful while you're drooling into your pillow -- who you can sometimes hear from the next room chewing like something that eats hay out of a bucket. (All you need is not love but a pillow to smother him with and the wisdom to instead use it to stifle your screams.)
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
February 6, 2021My boyfriend, who was adopted as an infant, just heard from his birth mom for the first time ever. She contacted him out of the blue, sending a perfectly nice message, not expecting anything from him. Instead of responding to it, he's just sort of shutting down. Times are tough enough, and I don't think it's healthy to bottle up his feelings. However, whenever I point that out or ask him how he feels, he says he doesn't want to talk about it. How can I help motivate him to process his feelings?
--Caring Girlfriend
We all have to deal with rejection, but most of us get our first taste of it at 6 -- years old, that is, not six minutes after a nurse cuts our umbilical cord.
Emotions are basically the helper elves of humanity. They evolved to motivate behavior to help ancestral humans survive, mate, and pass on their genes. We tend to see "negative" emotions like sadness and anger as damaging, but evolutionary researcher Randolph Nesse, M.D., explains they are just as functional as "positive" emotions.
Negative emotions are the brakes for behavior that isn't working for us. Though, these days, minor bad choices usually aren't fatal, our psychology is calibrated as if they could be. The psychological operating system driving our behavior today is adapted for a harsh ancestral hunter-gatherer environment. Say some Neanderbro had the brilliant idea that he'd catch wild game for dinner by asking it nicely to throw itself onto his spear. But say, after collecting only windblown dust on his spearhead, the emotions he felt were happiness and excitement. He'd stick with his hunting approach and end up dining on tree-bark rib-eyes, the culinary choice of people who slowly starve to death.
Though men get depressed just like women do, another evolutionary researcher, psychologist Joyce Benenson, notes that men tend to be less emotionally sensitive than women, showing less fear and sadness from infancy on. Men are also less emotionally fluent, meaning they have trouble understanding exactly what they're feeling, which, in turn, keeps them from being able to put names to their emotions. Though these seem like shortcomings, they serve men's evolved role as the "warriors" of our species. In combat, men would put themselves and their fellow warriors at risk if they jabber on about how terrified they are and plop down on the battlefield for a good cry.
How does your boyfriend feel? Best guess: Emotionally overwhelmed. If so, his "shutting down" makes sense. It's basically the human version of overloaded electrical wiring triggering a circuit breaker in your house -- as opposed to keeping the juice flowing and triggering an electrical fire, turning your home into a two-bedroom, two-bath pile of smoking ash.
Sigmund Freud, who saw having actual evidence to support his claims an unnecessary bother, drove the widespread assumption that "repression" -- avoiding upsetting thoughts to prevent or minimize anxiety -- is emotionally and physically destructive. In fact, clinical psychologist Karin Coifman and her colleagues observe that there's "a small and relatively inconsistent body of evidence" that associates "repressive coping" with health costs.
Research increasingly suggests it can be "adaptive" -- beneficial -- for a person to direct their attention away from experiences that cause negative feelings (especially negative feelings about themself...say, like being "given up" for adoption). And the Coifman team's own study finds that the "emotional dissociation" of repressive coping can actually lead to better adjustment, fewer health complaints, and "a less significant medical history."
Consider, too, that men often "speak" through action rather than words. Your boyfriend is probably flooded with uncertainty about what he should do: contact his birth mom, meet with her, do nothing. You can help him -- by being loving and supportive as he goes about this his way. If he still seems to be suffering a month from now, you might Google adoptee discussion boards and ask him whether you could give him the links. Reading about others' feelings and experiences could help him understand his own feelings and decide how he'll proceed.
Ultimately, the emotional expressiveness that comes naturally to many women is unnatural for many men. Benenson explains that women tend to bond through "sharing vulnerabilities" and soothe themselves by talking about their feelings, behavior that would leave most men feeling exposed and threatened. This provides helpful perspective on men's seemingly counterproductive reactions to bad stuff that happens. True story from one of my male friends: "A few years ago, I mentioned to my wife that there was a guy at work who was a real pain in the ass. She said, 'Do you want to talk about it?' I said, 'I just did.'"
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
