The Age Conundrum: How Does Age Impact Our Mentalities Towards Relationships?

As an aging individual who is no closer to marriage than the day he came out of the womb, this is something that, as much as I try not to think about it too much, is more and more in my consciousness. I know I have talked about there not being "The One" in the past, but it doesn't change the fact that we are sort of conditioned to think about having a partner, and I am still a hopeless romantic at heart. Aside from this, though, I do have fascination with psychology and behavior, and as I have aged, naturally both my friends and the people I have dated have aged as well (I am definitely not the type to date much younger than I am). I'll tell you what I expected to see: I expected to see relationships lasting longer because, well, we're not getting any younger, and the fear of being alone begins to outweigh the desire to be in the relationship we want. I expected folks to settle, to put up with more and get less in return, to encounter severe problems with resignation and just continue on in a an unfulfilling relationship.

Much to my surprise, I believe I have found the opposite. Relationships seem to fizzle out more quickly. In hindsight, I do feel this does make just as much, if not more, sense than my original hypothesis. I think there are probably three contributing factors. The first I think speaks to "young love". Younger individuals may feel more inclined to stick in a relationship because it's a first love or unfamiliar territory. Without having experienced heartbreak or negative aspects of relationships, it does make it conducive to continuing on for a longer period of time due to lack of experience and wherewithal to identify problem areas or red flags. Younger individuals are also still developing into the people they'll grow up to be; certainly as teenagers we do have aspects of ourselves that are fairly firmly cemented into our makeup that won't change, but there are many other areas in which we will continue to change in. As we age, those aspects are a bit less likely to change, and therefore "we know what we want" and can identify if a relationship will satisfy those desires or not. That increased level of certainty along with the experience to enable identifying positives and negatives in relationships lend to older individuals having shorter relationships.

The second item, and this is perhaps what both makes sense and surprises me at the same time, is the desire to invest effort to making a relationship work. I really and truly believe that all relationships require effort, no matter how "right" people are for each other. A couple really should never be at the point of stagnation; much like we should always strive to grow and better ourselves, our relationships should continue to grow and find new ways to thrive as well. Now, with youth there may come a propensity to not be able to recognize incompatibility or significant issues that will make a relationship unfeasible. When we are younger, however, there is also probably a subconscious reassurance that even if the relationship fails, we're still young, and there is still plenty of time to find love anew. The older we get, the more doubt that resides there will be opportunities later. The longer we continue in a relationship that we have any sort of doubt about, the more time we've "wasted". I truly feel I have witnessed this very thing. And it is logical: the longer we spend in unsuccessful relationships, the more time we spent out of the dating pool, and the more time that others in our age range in the dating pool become unavailable (and at an older age, perhaps it is reasonable to make the assumption that more people exit the dating pool than enter the dating pool, but it certainly is not a one way flow of people). The flip side to this is does it make folks lazy? Does it make people more likely to nitpick items that are easily resolved or that are non-issues as a means to move on? There are a number of ways where this phenomenon results in folks demonstrating an unwillingness to put forth the requisite effort to make a relationship work. As someone is wired to give an immense amount of himself to others, due in part to a difficulty in finding the ability to love himself, this is a harshreality to encounter. In many instances it may be the right thing to cut short a relationship because it wasn't the right one, but in many other instances a relationship that does have a natural fit and legitimate promise may be cut short due to the anxiety of spending too long in a relationship and it not working out at an older age.

Now, one item that I think, at a minimum, facilitates the above, and perhaps is more responsible than either of the two reasons above, is the progression of technology and the ease with which people can find potential partners. This impacts us two ways. One is the actual ability to find more people more quickly than ever before with loads of information available at our fingertips. A second, less obvious outcome is perhaps a byproduct of the availability. Due to the technology, people may have developed a mentality to date around more and not invest as much regardless of if they use the technology to do so. Now, this could very well be an age independent variable as well, but to the extent it adds fuel to the fear of time commitment fire outlined above, it cannot be understated the role that technology and dating services play in how relationship behavior has changed. And, anecdotally, since this was not nearly as prevalent in my younger years, I have a difficult time comparing my younger years to my older years due to an inability to adequately correct for this variable. I do still believe that the other explanations provided are compelling enough to think there's merit to the hypothesis that relationships are shorter the older we get (when removing the relationships that end in marriage, that is).

At the end of the day, we're still individuals with our own tendencies and different inclinations on how to treat relationships. I don't know that my mentality will change that much for any of the reasons I listed above; if anything, I treat each failed relationship as just that: a failure, and it makes me try that much harder next time. It's probably a somewhat destructive mentality, as even now I am left wondering what more I can possibly do, and I fear that I won't be adequate for future potential partners because I will have set expectations of myself that I won't be able to continue to surpass. Being able to frame how others may perceive relationships as they age, though, has been a valuable dedication of my time as it makes me more aware of what I may encounter in the future.

Why Your Employees Don't Like Your Offsite Meetings

Hi-di-ho! Lately I have felt more and more like writing, so perhaps you'll see a few blog posts. It was actually interesting going back and reading some half to nearly complete drafts from a couple of years ago. Not sure if I will finish those as well or just start with fresh writing. In any case, this was a piece that I felt like publishing on Linkedin, but due to obvious ramifications with employers and that it would be perceived quite negatively (despite companies insisting they want honest feedback so they can improve), I figured I would just write it here.

Anyone who has worked in corporate America has been to one: the annual offsite meeting. For those unfamiliar, it is common for companies to host a meeting at a venue, typically a hotel conference room, hire a speaker to come in and talk to the company about something the company leaders find pertinent to, and perhaps lacking for, the company and/or the employees. It's part motivational speech, part educational lecture, sometimes part team building, and rarely very influential. Now, leaders will typically place the blame for the lack of impact squarely on the shoulders of the employees. It is assumed that folks who don't take the meeting seriously are negative influence on the environment, and sometimes there is truth to that. There are feelings that the company is doing something valuable for employees and that they should reward the employer by taking everything to heart, putting whatever the topic of discussion was into practice in the workplace, and that it should yield the desired outcome the employer had in mind when they picked the speaker.

Nothing stated above is really outlandish, and I am sure that managers and non-managers alike can think of the cancerous employees in their workplaces. They are only a small fraction of the problem, though, and I feel there is a much bigger issue that often goes lost on the company leadership. There is a reason that there is widespread disinterest and lack of enthusiasm at such events, and it is not because a cancerous few have permeated the atmosphere of the company and influenced everyone in a negative manner. Employees don't go into these meetings expecting not to get anything out of them. Quite the opposite actually; I believe most employees look forward to seeing a speaker come in to share some insight and value with the organization, and they hope to get something out of the event. The skepticism comes from the fact that the people who need to heed the words are the ones least likely to listen, and those people are the company leaders. To illustrate, I will give a couple of examples.

Take an insurance company whose profitability has suffered for several years running. The company employs at least a good number of smart, competent people who have not managed to fix the issues causing the lack of profitability, but the reason for that comes from IT resource bottlenecks and dated sophistication relative to the competition. For this offsite meeting, a speaker is brought in who speaks about Progressive Insurance and their innovation in motorcycle pricing segmentation. The speaker goes on about how they created a positive risk selection mechanism for their company and forced their competitors into an adverse selection downward spiral. The speech is very well articulated and insightful. The leaders of the company picked someone who addressed the issues at hand quite well, and the problem is not that the employees did not hear or understand the message. The management did not live into the lessons and takeaways. What message does it send to your employees when you have someone lecture on segmentation when you then turn around and tell them they can only take a flat base rate increase (in laymen's terms, the most unsophisticated, broad, across the board change you can make that only serves to throw a company further into the aforementioned adverse selection downward spiral)? What does it communicate to the pricing actuaries who developed a by-peril rating algorithm years earlier and were not allowed to implement it? The end result is you have a group of employees that feel like management not only does not trust their talents enough to solve issues by bringing in someone to highlight issues they are already aware of and have not been enabled to try to fix, but that the message that is being preached falls on deaf ears.

Further, let's look at another example. A company brings in a speaker to discuss workplace behaviors and leadership styles and meshes it with the company culture and goals. The exercise is engaging, encourages participation and contemplation. It is designed to make people fit in and make the company seem like a very employee environment-centric company. The speaker talks about how companies that succeed tend to employee a workforce whose styles and attributes align with the types of goals the company sets, and proceeds to unveil his view of the company's artifacts, that is, the explicitly communicated objectives from the company's website or other materials highlighting what the company strives to be. What does the exercise show? Well, that the work force does not align at all with their communicated objectives. Instead of learning from this and either changing the goals and external messages, or working to emphasize shifting the environment to better suit the established objectives, they continue down the path of executing on a strategy that runs contrary to the values set forth in their messaging, persist with the clash in what is asked and what is expected, and seemingly ignore everything that the speaker highlighted in his presentation. Again, what does this communicate to the employees?

At the end of the day, there is responsibility held by each individual to put in the effort to learn from and incorporate the knowledge acquired into his/her work. That much should not be disputed. To what extent an employee can do that, however, is largely dictated by factors outside of his/her control, and that is where the leadership of a company is so important. All too often, when middle and upper management demonstrate time and time again that they are blind to the damage they do to employee morale by hosting offsite meetings and not living into the message communicated. At best, it is disappointing to employees, at worst, it is patronizing. One thing is for certain, though, in order to truly get the utility desired from such meetings, companies need to have buy in at all levels of the company, and that means the leaders at the company most of all.