When we last left our intrepid researchers, they—i.e., Jaclyn and I—were gearing up to study power in marriage. More specifically, we were keen to understand how couples who subscribe to the whole marriage-as-merger-of-equals thing understand and manage power in their relationship. (If you missed part 1, go back and catch up here.)
The first theme that struck us was how opposed most interviewees were to the idea of power as something to covet. The goal was not to get their way as often as possible, they stressed, but to maximize the collective good. To paraphrase several respondents, ‘We’re a team. Doing something that’s good for me but not for my partner isn’t going to be good for our relationship.’
This motif, which Jaclyn and I labeled “mutuality,” showed up when interviewees talked about a wide range of issues. Sometimes mutuality meant something as simple as cutting back on your own exercise time to make room for your partner to get in her workouts. Sometimes it meant only looking for jobs in the city where your spouse found his dream position.
But it wasn’t just mutuality of outcomes that our couples were aiming for. Many also aspired to mutuality in effort. Prior scholars of marital power—and power in general—tend to focus on who gets their way at any decision point: if you “win,” you’re more powerful.1 Jaclyn and I believe this misses a key point: decision-making is work.
You know those stories about the tech CEOs and world leaders who streamline their routine, wearing and eating the same things day after day so as to avoid wasting precious energy on such quotidian decisions? Or, more relevant for us everyday folk, perhaps you’ve occasionally felt like my respondent Liz, who told me how much she loved the days her husband decided unilaterally what to make for dinner. She wasn’t “getting her way,” or even having any say in the matter of dinner, but she was also free from the cognitive labor of coming up with a recipe that would satisfy her household’s pickiest eater.
When we ignore the decision-making labor side of the equation and only focus on decision outcomes, we risk fundamentally misunderstanding the power dynamics at play. Perhaps one partner gets the final say in where their child goes to daycare, but that partner also has to do all the research to figure out what the best options are and coordinate visits at multiple childcare centers. Is she really more powerful than her spouse, who gets to feel confident his child is well-cared for but didn’t need to lift a finger to make that happen? At least some of Jaclyn’s and my respondents recognized this input/outcome dichotomy and sought mutuality on both sides of the equation.
Importantly, their mutualistic intentions weren’t just empty words. Most of our couples spoke in concrete terms about practical tactics they used (sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently) to keep power in balance.
The first resort for most couples was to “emphasize us.” This meant erasing the boundary between his and her interests in order to co-generate joint interests and preferences. Early readers were confused by this point—‘Um, I think you’re talking about compromise?’—so let me try to illustrate the distinction between emphasizing us and run-of-the-mill compromise.
Imagine two couples, both trying to decide where to go for dinner. In Couple A, she pushes for Thai, while he advocates Italian. Eventually, she gives in and agrees to Italian. They went with her pick last time, he points out, before promising that they can get Thai next week. Boom – compromise.
Couple B, meanwhile, sits on the couch together throwing out ideas. ‘It’s so nice out! We should eat outside.’ ‘There’s that place on the West Side with the patio?’ ‘Ooh, that one’s great. Or also that café on East 10th?’ Etc. Eventually, they converge on a restaurant. And technically speaking, one partner likely threw out that particular idea first. But the couple would struggle after the fact to remember who that was. Where one partner’s preferences ended and the other’s began would be difficult to reconstruct. That’s emphasizing us.
While the emphasizing us technique is nice and kumbaya, it unfortunately only works in limited situations, where interests are relatively aligned and preferences aren’t super strong. The rest of the time, couples had to turn to a different bundle of tactics, which we labeled “balancing their decision portfolio.”
Our days and weeks and years are full—too full, I say—of decision points. Partners balancing a decision portfolio acted a bit like investors diversifying risk: they tried to ensure that each spouse had roughly equivalent opportunities to “win,” and equal responsibility to put in the related decision work, across the broad sweep of their lives together. Zoom in on one decision, and you might assume one partner was more powerful than the other. Zoom out to the birds’-eye view, however, and power looked roughly equal.
“Balance” is a bit of a squishy concept, though, and we saw couples operationalize it in multiple ways. One was a straightforward specialization model: each partner took on the primary decision-maker role in a handful of domains, leaving the other to chime in or sign off as needed. In other aspects of life, they swapped roles. My interviewee Lisa took the lead on travel planning, with her husband Steve generally going along with whatever schemes she proposed. When it came to managing their finances, however, Lisa was happy to defer to Steve’s recommendations.
Another strategy for balancing a decision portfolio was to divide and conquer within the context of a broader decision or issue. This showed up more often in Jaclyn’s data on couples contemplating big moves: Partner A got two job offers in different states, so partner B got to pick between them. Or, Partner A’s job moved the couple to a new city that wasn’t Partner B’s top choice, so Partner B picked the house they lived in.
The final balancing approach was taking turns. In this case, Partner A got the “win” today (e.g., the couple moved so he could attend his dream grad school), in exchange for the promise that after graduation Partner B would decide where the family relocated next.
So, to sum up: spouses didn’t want to dominate each other, or leave one of them saddled with more of the decision-making work. And they came up with clever ways to avoid those suboptimal scenarios, whether by emphasizing us or balancing their decision portfolio. What could go wrong? Stay tuned for the final part in this impromptu series to find out…
Reading rec
With a few notable exceptions, I am neither a fantasy nor a romance person—probably for snobbish reasons I would do well to interrogate. But I have several friends, and one sibling, with such enthusiasm for the fantasy (and especially the romantasy) genre that I’ve been giving it a go lately. I’ve just finished Book 2 of the ACOTAR series, and I think I recommend it? Honestly, my feelings are somewhat mixed. If you want an immersive reading experience, this is as good as it gets. But as a gender scholar, I will admit to having more complicated feelings. It's one of those texts that is superficially feminist (Centering female pleasure! Featuring badass heroines!) while also reifying a ton of gender essentialist tropes that I’d rather we moved beyond. If you’ve read it, reply with your thoughts (no spoilers, plz!) and help me resolve my cognitive dissonance!
There’s slightly more nuance here. No single decision can represent the whole picture of a couple’s power dynamic, so scholars more often look at a range of decisions and then see who gets their way the majority of the time.