This article is featured on: Sex & Spirituality & Psychology
By Aaron Ben-Zev, Ph.D. w/ Psychology Today

“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” Henry Louis Mencken

When I talk about what people do when being consistent, I mean that they generally behave in similar ways under similar circumstances. When it comes to thinking about what people say, I mean that what they say is coherent and not self-contradictory. A woman is consistent when she always loves her spouse. Saying today that “I love you” and saying the next day that “I do not love you” is inconsistent. The uniformity of a consistent behavior reflects reliability and predictability.

We expect people to be consistent, and this expectation has a great deal of intellectual and practical value. However, from the point of view of emotions, which are generated by change and are more sensitive to contextual factors, the value of the expectation that people be consistent is questionable. The behavior of extreme people, for example, those governed by extreme political ideologies, who appear to be uninfluenced by the complexity of the world, is consistent. On the other hand, people who are sensitive to such complexities are more flexible and therefore likely to be less consistent. When one politician was asked why he changed his mind concerning a certain issue, thus being inconsistent, he said: “because reality has changed.”

Consistency of others in our personal relationships matters because understanding and predicting their behavior is important to the extent that it affects us. Predicting the behavior of others enables us to prepare our responses and even to control it if the occasion calls for it. These goals are of lesser utility concerning ourselves and hence the requirement of consistency is less significant when applied to our own behavior. We do not usually perceive ourselves as inconsistent, but we often perceive others as behaving in an inconsistent manner.

The charge of inconsistent behavior in a personal relationship often reflects a lack of awareness of the complexity of the other’s situation. Concerning ourselves, the need for consistency is weaker because our own complexity is automatically taken into account as we have mental access to much more information about our own situation and beliefs than we do concerning others.

Thus, people who told me about their own experiences of loving two people at the same time considered their experience and related behavior to be acceptable and justifiable. They sought to justify their seemingly inconsistent behavior by referring to the complexity of the situation and focused on their claim to love different aspects of their beloveds. However, when considering the possibility that their partner would love two people at the same time, most of them found the behavior unacceptable and did not acknowledge a comparable complexity of their partner’s situation (see In the Name of Love). The complexity of our views of ourselves is matched by the simplicity of our views of others.

The strong need for consistency is compatible with what David Schnarch calls “the other-validated model of intimacy” wherein one’s whole identity is based upon the other. When people cannot predict the behavior of their beloved, they cannot validate, in this model, their own identity. But if one’s validation is based more upon oneself, inconsistency in one’s own behavior is less likely to be destabilizing or threatening.

The prevailing model of the romantic relationships involves the expectation of acceptance, empathy, validation, and reciprocal disclosure from one’s partner. As this model involves profound dependency upon the other, the issue of the other’s consistency is of great importance. Consider the case of Nancy, a married woman, who prefers not to be in love because it involves dependency on another person: “When I was once in love, I lost control of my happiness; my happiness belonged to someone else. It is important for me that I experience my happiness not through someone else whose moods and sanity I do not control.” In this model the requirement of consistency is extended to the attitudes of both partners.

Indeed, in Karen Kayser’s study of disaffected marriages, the major events responsible for the deterioration of love involve the partner’s controlling behavior, in particular behavior that consists of unilateral decision-making. Her study indicates that spouses tried, with little success, to stop the process of disaffection by seeking to please their partners even more. A 26-year-old woman, married for four years, says, “I would always agree with his suggestions-whether I thought they were wrong or not, I would always agree.” And a 29-year-old woman, married for four years, says “I changed my interests so that they were more acceptable to my husband.” Here the simplification of one’s identity extends beyond the demand to be similar over time, but it requires being similar to that of another person.

As an alternative to the other-validated model, Schnarch proposes the model of self-validated intimacy, which relies on each person maintaining his or her own autonomy and self-worth. In this model, the foundation of long-term marital intimacy is differentiation, which is the ability to maintain one’s sense of self while in close contact with other people who may pressure us to be consistent with their perceptions or needs. In this model the issue of consistency is of less importance. This model does not attempt to maintain the exciting period of infatuation forever, but rather encourages the self-development and fulfillment of each partner and thus requires greater autonomy, sensitivity, and flexibility to the complex circumstances. Each must keep pace with the other’s development in order to keep the relationship alive; similarly, each must exhibit self-control and not try to control the other.

If we were stop expecting absolute consistency in others, relationships would become more genuine. At the same time, they would become more complex. Under such conditions, attitudes that are absolute, uncompromising, and unconditional, have little chance of ever being functional; more complex and flexible attitudes are more beneficial. Abandoning the expectation of absolute consistency is not the same as abandoning the expectation of some consistency. Some measure of consistency will always be necessary in order to prevent profound uncertainty about the world in which we live.