Man Caves and the Tyranny of Small Decisions
Your man cave is pretty harmless, isn’t it? I mean as long as we are fulfilling our duty as a caring partner, provider and at least part-time caretaker/babysitter, don’t we deserve a sanctuary for undisturbed scratching and swearing?
Some psychologists are arguing that we do “deserve” it but more in the you-made-your-own-bed-now-it’s-time-to-sleep-in-it kind of way. And I think they’re on to something.
Say it Ain’t So, Guse!
I know what you’re thinking: “what has this world come to if you can’t trust Tony Siragusa for sagely life advice?!?” But it’s not Guse’s fault either. Psychiatrist J.R. Bruns, M.D. gives two explanations for the rising tide of Man Caves. First, too many romantic comedies and fairly tales have convinced men and women alike that every man can be the perfectly sensitive girlfriend on the inside with distinctly male (ahem) features on the outside.
Dr. Bruns also says that men are complicit in the problem. By ceding control over virtually every element of decorating and house-making decisions to our wives, as men we’ve created our own issue.
This is just another example of The Tyranny of Small Decisions at work in our lives. Whenever I ask people to think of decisions they’ve made, they immediately think of the big, turning-point-type decisions like choosing their career, or their spouse or their home. It’s perfectly natural to think of these seismic shifts as the “big D” decisions that ultimately shape the quality of our lives. However, I think we too often overlook what economist Alfred Kahn in 1966 called the Tyranny of Small Decisions. Kahn was referring to the phenomenon of a group of tiny decisions that slowly but steadily cause an economy, a business or a relationship to unravel.
When you think about it, I’ll bet you can think of all sorts of relationships that ended not because of cheating or abuse, but because of a slow drifting apart. The same is true of many working relationships where we let an issue slide further and further in the name of “autonomy” just to avoid having to take part in a decision.
Man Up
As a practical survival tool, I often recommend “outsourcing” decisions–one person takes decision authority over a specific set of decisions, and the other person has authority over another set of decisions. At work, it might be one person takes customer facing issues and the other handles back-office decisions. At home, it could be one partner makes furniture decisions and another makes vehicle decisions. I still think this is a useful strategy.
However, in situations like the Man Cave issue, I think we have to be careful that the decisions we’re handing over aren’t slowly driving a wedge between us and our spouse or colleagues, or causing us to quietly resent the decision-maker. This doesn’t mean you get to claim the living room for the aforementioned scratching sessions. But it does mean that you have to speak up every now and again if you feel like your primal nature is too stymied by the decisions you’ve handed over that it’s going to cause you to completely withdraw from the relationship. It might create a challenging conversation now, but it should go a long way toward freeing you from the long term Tyranny.
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