Making decisions

Making major decisions is difficult.  It is even more difficult when you need to consider the needs and desires of more than one person.  And it is extremely difficult when those persons have different decision making styles.

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The Professor and I have very different styles.  We both believe in research but approach it opposite ways.  I look quickly for something wrong so I can eliminate options and narrow down the list.  The Professor thinks outside the box and comes up with ways that we have even more options than it previously looked like.

So if we start with 10 good options, by the end of the day I will have things narrowed down to 3 and the professor's list will now have 20.

This is not the stuff marital bliss is made of.

And it isn't over once the decision is made.  Once I have made a decision I consider it done. Closed.  Over.  I don't want to hear anything that might make me think I made the wrong choice.

Not so the Professor.  He likes to do a lot of post game analysis on decisions.  After we bought our first house he continued to read the housing ads in the newspaper for months always sharing with me when he found a house that might have been bigger, better, cheaper than the one we bought.

Neither approach is perfect.  Several times we have ended up living in a house that we loved that I, in my rush to narrow down the list had already eliminated, and the Professor insisted on putting it back on the table.  On the other hand, at some point you do need to stop adding choices and researching options and make a decision.

So, as in many other ways, our decision making strategies complement each other.

And that IS the stuff marital bliss is made of.