Can Mr. Emotional and Ms. Practical learn to get along?

January 20, 2009 10:31 AM

How does a very logical person deal effectively with someone who makes all their decisions on an emotional basis? I’m asking for the benefit of a friend who is a having a terrible time with her marriage, but I’ve also never had any success myself in dealing with people who make all their decisions on an emotional basis. I get very frustrated when someone insists on making the emotional choice even though it makes no practical sense, and especially when they won’t even take responsibility for the consequences of doing so. If any of you have had success in this type of interaction, I’d love to hear about it.

I’ll give you a few examples, taken from my own life, of the kind of decision I mean. A friend of mine wanted to get a cat. She was about to make a transatlantic move in a few months, but she was considering getting one right away. I didn’t think she was in a position to get a pet at all because her life was so unsettled, but she was so set on it I didn’t say that. I just said, “Why don’t you wait until after you move, because that way you don’t have to worry about quarantine issues? It’s only a few months until you go.” She said oh no, she wanted that cat soooooo bad, and she got one. And then she said, “There’s no way I want to put her in quarantine for months! I might as well give her away!” (Which is what she ended up doing.)

Another friend of mine complained constantly about her job, which she hated, and the fact that she didn’t have a house or a retirement fund (she was in her late thirties at the time). She spent all her time and money on ballroom dancing lessons and on going out dancing. I said, “Well, if you’re not going to teach dancing and make some kind of career out of that, why don’t you limit the time you spend dancing to say, twice a week, so you’ll have more time and money to work on other areas of your life?” She said oh no, I didn’t understand, she loved dancing, she couldn’t give it up. I said, “I’m not suggesting you give it up because I know how much pleasure it gives you. Just cut back a bit, to twice a week or whatever level you feel you can live with, so you can work on your career and save some money.” Oh no, she said, I didn’t understand that she LOVED dancing and couldn’t give it up. And she went right on complaining about how poor she was and how much she hated her job and that she didn’t have a house.

Obviously, in these situations, I have the option of just not worrying about it because it’s someone else’s problem. My friend, however, is married to someone who makes these sorts of decisions and it affects her directly and causes all kinds of strife. Are there any resources out there for dealing with these kinds of negotiation deadlocks and situations? Do you have any insights and experiences to share?

posted by orange swan to human relations (41 comments total)

Start from the positions that we all have the right to make our own choices, and we should respect the choices that others make, even if they differ from ours, and everything logically follows from that.
posted by zippy at 10:55 AM on January 20

I don't think anyone can change people like this. That being said, I wonder if the behavior is really more about avoidance than it is about irrational decision making. In your example of the ballroom dancer, she may have been actively trying to avoid having to make a decision on life outside of dancing and dancing became a convenient excuse for not dealing with her unhappiness – because to do so would be too overwhelming. You were attempting to break down her only method to avoid intense anxiety and she was having none of it.

If this is the case, it is likely that only therapy that looks to the root of the base issue(s) that cause this displaced attention and energy will have any effect. It's a long shot, as going to therapy is opening them up to the anxiety they are avoiding in the first place. Usually things have to get so bad that the pain of getting better is easier than the avoidance. Probably not going to happen while someone else is accommodating them in a relationship.

Or, their brain just works in a way that everyone else finds exasperating and they don't. In that case, others need to get over it or move on.
posted by qwip at 11:01 AM on January 20 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure the cat thing was an "emotional" decision so much as a bad decision. I would worry less about how someone is making a decision and work more on how you both can come to a mutually satisfactory solution. (You, or your friend with her spouse--whomever.) I think you're getting hung up on the idea that these emotional people are Doing It Wrong, "it" being decision-making. I'd let that go.
posted by Neofelis at 11:03 AM on January 20

I think my main tactic for these sorts of things is to remember that to a degree everyone has an internal logic. Even if on the face of it it seems irrational there are underlying connections and thought processes that drive how they see and interact with the world. Its just a matter of sussing these out. Its worked pretty well for me.

If people are irrational AND obstinate (as the person in your examples seems to be) then it becomes a higher order of difficulty with which it is difficult to reason. I think there is absolutely a threshold past which it will become a failure to communicate because on one side you have a person who makes a decision and then rationalizes after the decision (and is likely to defend the initial decision with as much emotional zeal as lead to its formation in the first place) and someone who reasons and then arrives at a decision. Its just opposite approaches.

I think the thing that makes these situations so intractable is that the emotional decision maker refuses to reason and the rational decision maker glazes over and assumes there is no underlying structure or mechanism that leads to the decisions they view as irrational. I'm a pretty firm believer that everything has a reason and no decision is truly without reason.

This is kind of rambly, but my main point here is just don't assume that what is ostensibly irrational is truly without structure or reasoning- its just different than the one a practical thinker would apply.
posted by zennoshinjou at 11:03 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

I think you have to be careful of false dichotomies here, because no decision can be purely logical or purely emotional. These are not different but equally valid ways of making decisions, with practitioners who simply need to learn to get along. Good decisions are always going to involve a balance of the two, and real damage can be done when a decision maker loses sight of one or the other. I think the key is to look at why people might behave this way. The decisions you're describing have obvious perverse effects, but they're intended to serve some hidden, genuine need. There's no direct logical path to understanding where these choices come from, but they do come from somewhere, and make sense on some level.
posted by jon1270 at 11:09 AM on January 20 [3 favorites]

Your friend's cat is none of your business. Your friend's dancing is none of your business. It's not your place to judge their decision making. Don't take ownership of other people's decisions, to do so enables their behavior.

Your friend's marriage, needs communication and boundaries. The conversation is about what decisions are shared, how are needs communicated and how is compromise reached. A professional may be of help in facilitating that communication.
posted by 26.2 at 11:18 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

I think the real problem here is not their decisions, but their complaining about the outcome of them. If the cat owner had instead had an attitude like, "I am so glad I had this cat for a few months to get me through the stress of moving, even though I miss her now," it might be easier to hear about that decision. Similarly, if the dancing woman said things like, "Dancing is such a stress reliever for me, it brings me happiness even though it's a financial luxury," it might be easier to take. I wonder if instead the solution for the OP might be to try to somehow reduce his/her exposure to all that complaining.

Some strategies might be: short-cut through the complaining without really engaging by just echoing back their emotional state, "That sounds really upsetting," "I can understand how much you must worry about that." Or evade the topic entirely, "Let's not talk about finances right now and get ourselves stressed out -- let's relax instead."
posted by xo at 11:25 AM on January 20 [2 favorites]

Your friend's cat is none of your business. Your friend's dancing is none of your business. It's not your place to judge their decision making.

If it's not my business, then they shouldn't have told me about it, should they? Once they do tell me (and complain about it at length), then yes, I will offer advice. And I will form opinions on what they do, though I will generally keep the unhelpful opinons to myself. That's just how interaction with other people works.

And as I pointed out, of course it's a completely different scenario when you're married to a person who makes these kinds of decisions. So concentrate on giving advice for dealing with these kinds of situations when one has a vested interest in the outcome, please.

I think the real problem here is not their decisions, but their complaining about the outcome of them. ... I wonder if instead the solution for the OP might be to try to somehow reduce his/her exposure to all that complaining.

I absolutely agree, xo, that in cases where one has no vested interest in a decision and the person who makes the decision is simply complaining about it, it's best just to try to stem the complaining rather than on trying to solve the problem.
posted by orange swan at 11:36 AM on January 20

I feel you. In dealing with these situations it's helped me to realize that not everybody thinks the way that you do and it would be a boring, if logical world if everyone made logical decisions like a robot.

As odd as it may seem to some of us, some people like to complain just to complain. They'll complain about some situation and seem really genuine. But they are not open to solutions and frankly aren't really even interested in a solution. They want to revel in the problem and somehow that is what attracts them in some way.

I can't tell you how many folks I've seen have a problem, and instead of approaching them with empathy and saying "that sucks", I break down solutions 1-5 and the probability of success of each, and how completely uninterested they are. It's almost like instead of being the helpful person you think you're being by allowing them to get to a place where they don't have to experience this painful emotional situation they seem to be going through, you short circuit their experience. They don't feel helped, they feel cut off. They want to revel in the way they were treated, in the bs that happened, in the jacked up situation, instead of taking what you view as a few simple steps to make sure it never happens again.

Perhaps this is a logic/emotion thing and perhaps this is the literal dividing line between youth and the aged. They seek to experience, to live, to feel something, even if it is negative. Others look to solve the disruption, to quiet the unusual, to optimize the experience, to dull the unexpected, the harsh and the inconvenient. Because we want to master and control our experience by advancing to the shore and viewing the tempest asea from safety and comfort, while perhaps youth want to ride along in the waves of being.

Let your friend dance in the water and complain about its chill. Let the cat find a loving home aboard your friend's raft until she has to tearily gift it to a passing vessel. Some people prefer the smell of the salt, the vastness of turbulent experience and the struggle to exist above the still and deathlike calm of the beach.
posted by cashman at 11:36 AM on January 20 [10 favorites]

I want to second jon1270--there are so few truly "only logical" or "only emotional" decisions that I can't really accept the basis of your question, since I doubt that someone who only makes logical decisions would ever end up with someone who only makes emotional decisions.

That being said, knowing this might help: When you are involved in a discussion and one of you is emotionally invested (for example, very upset or passionate about something) and the other isn't, the emotional person cannot process logic in the same way. It isn't that they aren't a logical person, more that their emotion is over-ruling their logic at that moment. Trying to force logic on someone who is overwrought only causes them to grow more upset.

I think it might help BOTH parties involved to find out a little more about the concepts of "Emotional Intelligence" and Myers-Briggs personality types, so that each can understand where the other is coming from, and they can both communicate better. In a relationship, cooperation is more important than proving who is right and who is wrong.
posted by misha at 11:37 AM on January 20 [4 favorites]

I realize this is going to come across as jokey, but really it's not, and I'm both serious and a giant geek for suggesting it: Perhaps they could watch some Star Trek TOS and ponder it a bit.
posted by The World Famous at 11:40 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

Your friend's cat is none of your business. Your friend's dancing is none of your business. It's not your place to judge their decision making.

If it's not my business, then they shouldn't have told me about it, should they? Once they do tell me (and complain about it at length), then yes, I will offer advice.

This might be the problem right here. They're not complaining to receive your advice, they're complaining because they want to complain.

I'm with you--my initial impulse is also to provide advice to a situation when I see a logical (and to my mind, usually obvious) solution. But that's not always what friends are for. I've started waiting until my friend has finished talking about their situation and saying, "Do you want my opinion, or did you just need to say all that?" If it's the first, I'll give my impression. If it's the second, I will keep my opinion to myself, regardless of how badly I want to give it. And if their complaining starts to irritate me, I will limit my contact with them or tell them that I don't want to hear them complain if they don't want my advice and don't really want to change anything. But it is not correct that just because someone tells you something, it then becomes your business. It is still their business, and since you can't make them listen to your advice, your choice becomes to either not hear their complaining or stifle your desire to participate.

As for your friend and her marriage, she and her spouse need to learn to communicate better. There are some decisions, even within a marriage, where it is one person's business and not the other's. In situations where both partners will be affected, BOTH PARTNERS need to come to an agreement, whether it's logical or emotional.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 11:46 AM on January 20 [5 favorites]

You might want to take a look at this article for some help. It gets at what might be going on in the mind of the woman in your second example, and gives a practical way a friend or loved one might be able to respond.
posted by MsMolly at 11:48 AM on January 20

I think perhaps I introduced a bit of red herring here by giving examples that the "opposing" person doesn't need to worry about. They'd work though, if you imagined being married to someone who insisted on getting a pet for the household when it was going to cause a snafu in a move or on taking dance lessons in excess when the household budget didn't allow for it.
posted by orange swan at 11:48 AM on January 20

It doesn't matter how the decisions are made; people have the right to make decisions based on any criteria they like. Your friend, however, should ask that her spouse include her in any decisions that affect them both, allowing them to compromise and make the decision together. If her spouse wants to do something she thinks is silly, that's fine as long as it doesn't affect them both. But joint decisions should be made jointly and resolved in a way that both are reasonably satisfied with and can accept. She has every right to ask that of her spouse.

Your friends, on the other hand, are making decisions that don't affect you, and you should stay out of it unless they ask you for your advice. In neither of the cases you mention above did anyone ask for your advice; you should assume your advice is unwanted unless it is solicited. However, you can ask them not to use you as a complaint outlet if you don't want to hear about what you consider to be bad judgment. It will likely weaken your relationships with them, but you have the right to ask them not to talk to you about these sorts of things, which seem to make you angry.
posted by decathecting at 11:48 AM on January 20

In neither of the cases you mention above did anyone ask for your advice; you should assume your advice is unwanted unless it is solicited.

Uh, I may not have SAID explicitly that they asked for advice, but these are friends who did very often ask me for my advice and always told me they valued my insights and thanked me for my input. I don't feel I was pushy with my advice; I just wish I had drawn some boundaries and not listened to their constant complaining.
posted by orange swan at 11:53 AM on January 20

Perhaps they could watch some Star Trek TOS and ponder it a bit.

There might be 1 minute of relevant discussion between Kirk and Spock, in some episodes, but really this would be a colossal waste of time if the OP's friend is not already a Trek fan.

Perhaps this is a logic/emotion thing and perhaps this is the literal dividing line between youth and the aged.

No, it doesn't depend on age. Some people like to vent and complain, and don't think they have a problem that needs solving. Other people like to spot problems and offer solutions, which irritates the first group who feel their venting isn't being appreciated. This conflict is seen among young and old.

The OP said: So concentrate on giving advice for dealing with these kinds of situations when one has a vested interest in the outcome, please.

Remember the OP is asking on behalf of a friend, who is married to the "emotional" party, which the OP refers to as "having a vested interest."
posted by JimN2TAW at 12:00 PM on January 20

Regardless of whether the friends asked for advice, it gets really draining to have your friends constantly complaining about the same thing while refusing to take any of the obvious actions to correct the situation. It affects the listener because it damages the friendship. Since you can't get your friends to change their lives (and you can't, I promise), the only thing you can do is change yourself. Maybe that means distancing yourself from people who spend all their time complaining. Maybe it means adjusting your attitude somehow so their complaints don't bother you any more - perhaps by a ruthlessly logical and rational process of understanding that complaining is not equivalent to expressing a desire for things to be different. Or maybe you just need to be better at changing the subject, so you won't have to listen to the complaints so much. If you're really good friends with these people, you might even be able to say, "Hey, all this complaining brings me down. If you want my help or advice in changing these situations, I'm totally happy to support you, but otherwise can we talk about something else?"

Similarly, when friends make decisions that seem stupid (like with the cat), sometimes the best you can do is understand that they don't see the consequences as negatively as you do. I'm sure to you (and to me too) it seems rather tragic and cruel to adopt a cat just in time to quarantine or abandon it, but a lot of people don't see animals that way. The animal is there to make the person happy, and the animal's happiness doesn't factor into major decisions. Generally, in cases where people are making decisions that seem irrational to you, it's likely that they are making rational judgments based on the way they, personally, value the possible outcomes and consequences. It's not that you're rational and they're not, it's just that you're starting with different data about what's worth worrying about.

In the case where the two people are married, it's very likely that one partner's emotional decisions have lasting consequences for the more "rational" person in the relationship, which makes this more than just a case of mind-your-own-business. As with most relationship problems, I personally feel that directness and honesty are the only solutions. Couples need to be able to talk about the way their lives fit together, and the ways they make life more and less difficult for each other. When you care about someone enough to get married, their happiness is (hopefully) something that matters to you. Sometimes people forget to consider how their actions affect their partner's happiness, but honest discussion can help bring that to the forefront, and can help people be more careful of how their decisions affect the person they love.
posted by vytae at 12:09 PM on January 20

Thanks, JimN2TAW. Yes, to keep these thread from getting sidetracked, I would like everyone to concentrate on giving advice on negotiating through these kinds of deadlocks within the context of marriage.
posted by orange swan at 12:12 PM on January 20

When it comes to a marriage, I have to agree that decisions are made together, as a unit, and therefore the spouse should not be making emotional decisions without the other person's input. Of course perhaps part of it is the possibility that although she get's her input, he still makes irrational decisions? It's tough not knowing what some of these "decisions" are. Let's assume it's a monetary thing (since God knows it's the root of many an argument in marriages including my own). If he's spending money "irrationally" on things that are not practical, then the need is for them both to create a budget. No dollar does not have a name. And part of that budget includes entertainment money for him to spend as he pleases. Part of the compromise in any decision is that some things are going to be group decisions (in the monetary example it would be the bills that must be paid) and some are going to be his to make (his allowance, if you will) and she has to learn to deal with the fact that he might not be a carbon copy of her and make the same decisions she would, but pick your battles and only interject if the decision being made is detrimental to the household or relationship.
posted by genial at 12:15 PM on January 20

You don't have to change yourself or the other person in order for a conversation to take place but you might make more headway by learning how the other side understands.

There are ways of talking to the 'other' types of people so that what you say actually registers with their brain. I'm thinking of NLP-type language techniques that take advantage of learning modalities, among other things.

When you talk reason to a feeling person (and vise versa), its a bit like Charlie Brown's teacher. It sounds all, "Wa wa wa WA WA wa." But if you couch your intention in the language of the other person suddenly the signal gets through.

I'm thinking of Words That Change Minds as a starting point, maybe also Influence.
posted by trinity8-director at 12:16 PM on January 20 [3 favorites]

I think what you're talking about isn't really adequately characterised by the term 'emotional decision making'. After all, people make emotional decisions that are very good ones. You say that if your friend had got a short-term cat just for the joy of having an animal for a brief period of time, you'd have been fine with it - but that would have been just as much an 'emotional' decision. It would also have been a 'logical' decision, in that it would have resulted from a sort of de-localised thought; she'd have had to take into account all of her emotions at all times, not just those most immediate to her, and really assessed the implications of those feelings, and of the material facts, simultaneously. The 'logic' and 'emotion' venn diagram looks like a fat man in a tight belt.

You are closer to the mark, then, in describing these as 'non-logical' decisions - ones resulting from a failure to think things through. In terms of getting along with people who make these kinds of decision, the first thing is not to tell them off for being too emotional. They aren't being too emotional! The problem isn't that they're feeling too much - it's that they're thinking too little.

The emotions vs logic divide, then, is reducible to the far simpler one of human cognitive weakness. Your friend with the cat failed to correctly predict her future feelings about putting a cat in quarantine, and allotted far too much weight to her immediate desire for a cat. Your friend with the dancing either has a cognitive blind spot preventing her from drawing the connection between her indulgence of her desire to dance and her poverty, or else is repeatedly allotting far too much weight to her immediate desire to go dancing, and too little to her long-term desire for greater financial stability.

The solution to this is humility. On the one hand, you may well more logical than your friends, but you are almost certainly not as logical as you think you are. This is because human cognitive weaknesses are almost always exacerbated by first-person positions. It's easy to see that these are bad decisions when it's not you. On the other hand, you are unlikely to singlehandedly remove these cognitive blocks. You almost certainly don't have the sheer blarney power to talk them into sanity, any more than someone can talk you out of a bad decision you're convinced is the most logical one in the world, because how could it not be when you're such a logical person, right?

I have this problem all the time when, for example, I'm trying to understand how my mother can spend four hours choosing shower tiles but not put the effort into getting a new desk chair that won't give her serious, physiotherapy-requiring shoulder problems. But here's the real demonstration of the powerful cognitive blindness we all suffer from: despite the fact that I know that I also have made and will make terrible decisions, some of which I know of and some of which I will never recognise as such, despite everything I just wrote about humility and understanding and so forth, the next time we are talking about this I will totally fail to take my own advice and go on a long, only partly internal, rant about how nonsensical and illogical her decision-making process is.
posted by Acheman at 12:27 PM on January 20 [3 favorites]

IIRC, "Please Understand Me II," which is based on Myers-Briggs/Keirsey, goes into detail about temperaments and has practical suggestions on how to talk effectively to each.

I know, I know, not a lot of science there, but the suggestions often work anyhow.
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:29 PM on January 20 [2 favorites]

Add me to the list of those who think that "rational" vs "emotional" decision-making is a false dichotomy. Emotions provide both the impetus for making any decision at all in the first place as well as the underlying direction for what decisions will be made. (See Descartes' Error for more on this.)

Even if you possessed the mental capacity to approach each decision as a finely crafted logical syllogism, your rationality could only provide the reasoning - your emotions would provide the premises. In fact, however, we're all much, much better at rationalizing decisions we've already made than in making decisions in the first place based on some sort of deductive reasoning.

I suspect that what you're referring to as "emotional" decisions fall into various categories which could be more helpfully described in different ways:

Decisions made for the immediate result, without consideration of the longer term consequences

Decisions made based on premises or values that you don't share

Decisions made where the decider lacks the skill in automatically generating a plausible logical sounding rationalization to explain their decision.

And so on

In your first example, your friend placed a higher weight on the pleasure of having a cat immediately than on the pain of giving up the cat a few months later. That's not necessarily an "emotional" decision. She could have decided just as "emotionally" that "I can't get a cat now, because it will be too upsetting to give it up later." It might very well be an example of poor decision-making based on excessively discounting the weight of future consequences compared to immediate consequences, but I'd have to know the actual levels of pleasure & suffering that she and the cat derived from her decision in order to judge that. In any case, a poor decision is not necessarily an irrational decision. (Nor are all rational decisions good ones)

In your second example, you seem to be making some assumptions. First, that your friend's time and energy spent on ballroom dancing are the deciding factors in her ability to save for a house or retirement account. (Without some in-depth knowledge of her finances, I don't know if this is very likely.) Secondly, that the happiness she could gain from the money should could save by cutting back on her dance lessons would be greater than the happiness she gets from having those dance lessons every night. (This you have no good way of knowing.) This decision may fall into the second category I listed above: decisions made based on premises or values that you don't share.

As far as practical advice in dealing with those people whose decisions seem irrational to you, the best thing I can suggest is to give up some of your preconceptions and try to learn what really makes people tick. (This involves a lot of patience, listening, and observing. Reading up on the research in cognitive or social psychology couldn't hurt either.) Once you understand someone, you can try to communicate with them on their own terms if you think they're making a bad decision. You might also end up accepting those decisions once you understand where they come from.
posted by tdismukes at 12:33 PM on January 20 [2 favorites]

Does the *emotional* spouse judge others on their decisions? (e.g., so-and-so is an idiot for doing that...or...so-and-so is brilliant for doing this) If so, that may be a clue to how they are really thinking. If one can judge others critically, they are not entirely a "live and let live" type of person. If they're cool with what anyone does, they are consistent with their own actions. Solution? Not sure.... The former type of person may be more malleable ( "I see you find John's decision to buy a sportscar ridiculous for financial reasons, but you shot me down when I asked you to cut back on dancing lessons to save money.")
posted by teg4rvn at 12:33 PM on January 20

Perhaps they could watch some Star Trek TOS and ponder it a bit.

Oh my no. And I am a huge Star Trek fan, but it's completely wrong for this purpose.

Star Trek indulges far too often in the Straw Vulcan conceit, labelling things as "illogical" which are actually quite rational, when looked at critically. I fear that watching Star Trek would only perpetuate the false dichotomy of logic vs. emotion, which seems to be part of the problem here.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:36 PM on January 20

"I think perhaps I introduced a bit of red herring here by giving examples that the "opposing" person doesn't need to worry about. They'd work though, if you imagined being married to someone who insisted on getting a pet for the household when it was going to cause a snafu in a move or on taking dance lessons in excess when the household budget didn't allow for it."

"Yes, to keep these thread from getting sidetracked, I would like everyone to concentrate on giving advice on negotiating through these kinds of deadlocks within the context of marriage."

In this case, the whole "emotional vs logical" thing is a bit of a red herring. What really counts in the context of a marriage is for both partners to be respectful of the other's position and to be willing to compromise. (Knowing when to stand firm, when to give in, and when to negotiate is a whole lifetime's study in itself.)

However, if one partner perceives that his/her position is the "rational" one, while the other's is irrational, that can be a major stumbling block in learning to compromise. The "rational" spouse may not see the need to negotiate, because the other view is "obviously" wrong. The "emotional" spouse may feel disrespected and let resentment get in the way of compromise.

In this case, the advice I gave in my previous comment still holds.
posted by tdismukes at 12:48 PM on January 20

I think one thing you have to realize that these decisions are in fact not as illogical as they seem. Whether it's the cat or the dancing or whatever, these things are filling a pressing emotional need that is obviously far greater than the emotional well being that comes from owning a house or avoiding a later inconvenience.

It's like if you are really thirsty and the only thing to drink is an overpriced bottle of water. Well you'll be home in an hour and then you can drink all you want for free. So really it's illogical to buy that bottle of water, but chances are you will buy it anyway because the dehydration is giving you a headache and that's going to be one long painful hour until you get home if you don't buy the bottle of water.

I think when you start viewing emotional needs like any other need people's actions will become far more logical to you. In terms of a relationship, if you can pin down what emotional needs the person is trying to fill with whatever the thing in issue is, you might be able to come up with alternatives to filling that emotional need that is more practical.
posted by whoaali at 1:13 PM on January 20 [1 favorite]

Not to put too much stock in the Myers-Brigg test, but I believe what you are talking about here is finding a way for a Thinker to communicate with a Feeler. I think a google search along those lines might net you some useful resources, like this book, Just Your Type, which deals specifically with the personality types as they relate to romantic relationships. There's a book preview on Google. Good luck to you and your friend!
posted by geeky at 1:45 PM on January 20

as others have said, the emotional/logical split is a bit of a confusion, and as xo says, perhaps in a way it's that the people making "emotional" decisions are just not as good at explaining the logic of what they are doing - they know they need these things, but they have difficulty communicating the benefit of it to you. If your friend benefitted from having a cat for just those few months, where was the harm, really? Is a relationship that ends not worth experiencing at all? Just because she didn't foresee all of it and spell it out logically as part of her plan, that doesn't mean it isn't a positive memory now.

Like you, I tend to be analytic and want to have everything pretty well laid out. I have relatives who are much more fly by night, and there have been times that I have shook my head and felt like I had to be the "rational" one and help them out. But I have been shown more than once that "emotional" thinking can work out very well, much better than I'd have predicted. Sometimes people who make those leaps are willing to take risks that the more analytic among us hold back on, and they can get dividends for it. So don't feel you have to babysit anyone. Let people live their lives, supply your opinion when asked, but watch and learn as well.

As for marriage communication, it's a perennial problem that any couple has to work through, & most will make a certain amount of compromises when it comes to joint decisions. Recognizing that rational decisions are partly emotional and emotional decisions are partly rational is a good start, I think (aristotle calls it "thinking desire" and says "and such a principle is a man"). The differentiation may be more in how you describe your needs, or in how long term your needs are being set for (concern for next year vs concern for next week) or things like that, rather than an actually different origin of those needs.
posted by mdn at 2:39 PM on January 20

I haven't read the rest of the answers so my apologies if I'm repeating someone.

Within the context of marriage, what works for us is to have shared goals and values. It's extremely important that these be clear and that both parties actively agree (not grudgingly). For example,we want to buy a house. We are going to set $x aside every month for a downpayment. When Mr. Desjardins wants to spend [egregious amount] on [hobby], I remind him that we have already agreed to save that money. He can whine and pout all he wants, but he knows that he's already agreed to save that money, and I will hold him accountable for that. He's mature enough to accept that, or I would not have married him.

Basically, we have an agreement to discuss decisions that will affect both of us. That prevents the emotional stuff from becoming an issue.
posted by desjardins at 3:03 PM on January 20

I wanted to add that I think it's completely appropriate to put the kibosh on your spouse's complaining and set boundaries just as you would with a friend. If my husband is constantly complaining about his job, I will offer to help revamp his resume and point him to job sites. If it continues, I'll ask when he's going to start applying to other jobs. After that, I just won't listen to it anymore. I'm not talking about normal daily venting, I'm talking about constant complaining.
posted by desjardins at 3:12 PM on January 20

I have to disagree with most people in this thread. I'm married to an emotional decision maker, and rational arguments make no headway. I understand about the point of the above posters, that no decision is ever purely rational or purely emotional, but that misses the broader point that the OP's friend faces. There's a spectrum, some people base most of their decisions on objective rational facts, the Mr. Spock kinda person (that was me at one point). The other side of the spectrum is the type of person who goes completely by the gut and whether it feels right. The problem with the second type of approach is that facts don't matter to their decision process. I'll say that again, because it took me a long time to get through my head in my marriage. Facts do not matter in their decision process.
However, this doesn't mean they are wrong, or misguided, or bad or any other negative aspersion, it just means they approach decisions in a completely different way.
An example from my life. I can't have fans on at night in my house because of the excessive danger they pose. Now, if this issue was particularly important to me (it's not), the way I'd have to go about it is to somehow show that leaving a fan on at night leads to health, happiness, better sex, and more money. But, the handicap is that I can't use facts. The solution is to kinda wing it. So Brad Pitt, he looks good because he keeps his fan on at night. Did you know that Bill Gates invented windows when his fan blew papers across his desk while he was sleeping? I heard Madonna uses a fan to keep her looking young. You get the point. Now, she'd know I'm making these up and laugh at them, but it changes the whole dynamic of the situation. It may not change her mind, but it applies some positive emotions to an otherwise negative outcome. I only wish I had realized this much sooner, oh the grief I could have been spared.
Take your friend with the cat. If it were my wife, I'd have better luck painting some unfortunate emotional scene, than stating facts. So, I might say "OMG, you know that if you get cats in {current season} they're more prone to the hibaceous gluteonous virus, and my friend almost died of that." Or the dancing friend - "Oh this friend of a friend was dancing all the time, she spent a bajillion dollars up front to get ready for a tryout with Dancing with the Stars, but she practiced so much she injured some ligaments in her knee from overuse, and she missed the tryout and was out tons of money".
Now, I'm not advocating lying, I can pull these off with my wife, because I'm so over the top that she knows I'm spinning a yarn. But the fact remains I've characterized the issue as an emotional one, not a factual one. The bonus of this approach is that to challenge my story on facts, allows facts to become introduced into the decision making process.

Hope this helps.

posted by forforf at 3:31 PM on January 20 [4 favorites]

I'm sure a rational person will look at my previous post and will wonder what the hell am I talking about with me claiming fans as a danger ... exactly how is a fan supposed to be dangerous? And that's sort of the point, a rational person would take that position, but its a position that leads to nowhere in my case. The threat is emotional, not factual. In other words there is not a concrete threat, just a general "it's a bad thing, so don't do it" kinda of threat. Trying to elicit details on what that threat is just ends up in mutual frustration.
posted by forforf at 3:42 PM on January 20

I don't think anyone makes big decisions logically, nor even for merely one reason. A logical person will find the largest factor that both supports their decision and doesn't contradict their morality. An clever honest person will accept that all motivations likely hold, even those contradicting their morality. But you're complaints are more about people being either (1) unable to accept their reasons, (2) unable to articulate their reasons, or (2) too stupid to recognize consequences. I'd just ignore all that stuff if it doesn't effect me.

Your friend otoh will likely divorce this guy eventually if they really can't see eye-to-eye about critical decision making procedure. To avert this, she can impose some restrictions on critical decisions, especially financial, while ignoring the rest. I mean, she can likely ignore him if he just misses social engagements, rearranges all the furniture, etc. while being sane about major finances.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:00 PM on January 20 [1 favorite]

Ask questions. "How will you feel when you have to put your cat into a three-month quarantine? Won't you miss her? Won't she feel abandoned?"

Work from shared goals, like desjardins said. Difficult Conversations is a book that explains how to frame your conversations in those terms. In these cases, there are probably different goals or needs. One person is probably valuing relationships or emotional connections or self-expression and the other seems to be valuing money or convenience or long-term results. Or maybe it's a difference in the intensity of need: one person can ignore the lack-of-cat loneliness and another finds that too painful to ignore. Both people's needs and values will need to be taken into account.
posted by salvia at 5:17 PM on January 20

This sounds like you are comparing objective- and subjective-based decisions making. People who live in a subjective world, it's all new every time they walk into a room - no reason to plan, or be accountable - you just talk and talk until you "feel" the way you want to about what's going on at the moment and, if at all possible, convince/bully/exhaust everyone in the room to at least go along with that feeling.

My mother is like this. My father is very much not. They seem happy. Of course, my mother is very good looking and my father makes enough money to pay for all her whims.

My mother complains that my father is a buzz-kill, but doesn't seem to upset by anything he does or doesn't want her to do.

Dad seems to consider mom an amusing, mysterious creature. Maybe your friend should try that.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 6:49 PM on January 20 [1 favorite]

Your friend and spouse have to recognize that there are three methods of deciding the various issues. One is he makes them. Two is she makes them. And, three is they do it together. Depending on the nature of the issue to be decided and the importance of the decision to each party is when you invoke one of the methods. Maybe if it is a decorating issue, he decides, if it is a dinner decision she decides and if it is a finance decision they mutually agree.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 6:53 PM on January 20

I think people actually do what they want. They may say and they may think they want a career, or more money, or a house, but actually they want to dance. Etc. I see it in myself all the time. I may say I want to lose weight, but actually I want to eat. A lot. The logic here is that many people don't do what they Should do or think they should do; they mostly do what they want to do. They just may not be consciously doing it.
posted by gt2 at 7:54 PM on January 20 [1 favorite]

Firstly, it sounds like you've conflated poor impulse control with emotional decision making. Secondly, sometimes 'emotional' decision making is just a code word for a decision that is made subconsciously. Just because a decision is not conscious and the person making it cannot articulate why it is rational does not make it irrational. As an example, my wife didn't like one of the apartment choices we had last time we moved, so we picked a smaller more expensive apartment in a different location. She had no articulatable reason why she didn't like the "better" option, but we found out much later that that area has a slightly higher crime rate (even though it looks nice). She probably picked up on some kind of subconscious cues. I could have tried to override her, but how rational would that have been? To live in a place she didn't like to save a little money? There's always another way to save money, and if we'd spent less time at home because she felt uncomfortable there, we'd have spent a lot more in the long run on gas, restaurants, etc...

Your cat friend seems to have poor impulse control, but your dancing friend's decision may be the correct one. Without the amount of dancing that she does, she may fall into a depression and lose what little control and empowerment she has.

Although I'll admit it is painful to have someone you love make a decision you disagree with and then whine to you about the consequences. Sometimes frienship is about saying I told you so, but more often it is about shutting up and letting them vent.
posted by BrotherCaine at 8:27 PM on January 20

As for dealing with someone like that, bring up a likely consequence of the decision, and ask what kind of sacrifice or compromise that they can make to mitigate the consequence.
posted by BrotherCaine at 8:28 PM on January 20