A decision never framed as provisional is easier to treat as final

The argument

A second argument offered for this explanation concerns what a long selection teaches the person conducting it. Extended deliberation, proponents note, trains someone to hold a decision open: to keep gathering information, to defer, to treat each candidate as a hypothesis under test. That is the right posture while choosing and an awkward one afterwards, because the habits that make for a careful search are the same habits that make a commitment feel revisable. A person who has spent a long time keeping options open has practised keeping options open. The argument is that a choice made quickly never establishes that posture in the first place. The decision arrives as settled rather than as the provisional conclusion of an inquiry that could be reopened if new information appeared. Proponents argue that this matters most in the ordinary bad patches, where what determines the outcome is not how the couple feels but what they take the question to be. If the question is whether this was the right choice, the bad patch is evidence. If the choice is simply the frame within which problems get solved, the same bad patch is a problem to be worked on. Holders of this explanation present it as being about the structure of commitment rather than about the merits of either way of marrying. They accept that a decision treated as final can be final in bad circumstances as well as good ones, which they regard as the serious objection to their own view. Their claim is only that endurance, considered on its own, is well explained by a decision that was never framed as provisional, and that long deliberation tends to frame decisions that way whatever the deliberator intends.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that this describes a reason marriages do not end rather than a reason they succeed, and that the two come apart sharply in bad cases. A frame in which difficulty cannot count against the marriage is exactly the frame in which mistreatment is most likely to be absorbed, and proponents concede as much. Critics also dispute the psychology: people who deliberate carefully frequently report greater rather than lesser confidence in the result, and treating a decision as considered is a common way of treating it as closed rather than as open.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Careful deliberation often produces confidence rather than provisionality, since having examined the alternatives is a common reason for regarding a matter as closed. [Rejecting P2] A commitment can be held as settled for reasons of its own, such as a promise given publicly, independently of how it was arrived at. [Rejecting C] Enduring through difficulty is not the same as succeeding, and the premises describe a mechanism that would hold a marriage together whether or not it was worth holding together.