Ambigamy

Insights for the deeply romantic and deeply skeptical

by Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D.

Fungibility: Build to last forever; be ready to leave tomorrow

A few weeks ago I wrote an article called Job Security: loving your work whether you’ve got work or not. Basically it was a case for cultivating backup plans, fungible, functional equivalents to your main plan. I applied for a job recently that I didn’t get, and it didn’t bother me because I have lots of other work to do. Read More

Empathic Intelligence: To put yourself in their shoes, unlace yours

F. Read More

Can I trust them? Here's the quickest true test

The quickest test is your gut intuition: Do I like them? Do they like me?

But that’s too quick. The stakes are high. Most of us have had the crushing experience of trusting someone untrustworthy simply because there seemed to be mutual rapport. And the only experience as crushing, is not trusting someone who turns out to be trustworthy. Read More

Job Security: To love your work whether you've got work or not

I play bass and sing in jazz combos. Unlike rock, where band members stay together for years if they can stand each other, jazz gigging is more like pickup softball games. You get a call asking if you can make some café gig and if you can, you’re often meeting fellow players for the first time while setting up for the show. Read More

The benefits of a closed mind.

Which is healthier:To be receptive or assertive?To be flexible or firm?To be unsure or sure? Not obvious? We have other words for these traits so let’s try a few more. Which is healthier:To be easy-going or pushy?To be accommodating or pigheaded?To be generous or stubborn?Now it’s clear isn’t it? It’s better to be the former than the latter.Just to be sure, try these too. Read More

What's the real difference between feeling used and feeling useful?

I hate feeling used; I love feeling useful. Read More

Mixed signals: I know you don't believe me but, believe me, you can believe me.

Last week I attempted an objective definition of a butthead, one that doesn’t boil down to what we subjectively call someone who persistently disagrees with us. I proposed that a butthead was someone who claimed to be pre-qualified for infallibility. Sometimes the prequalification is by means of membership in some club--the People who have Seen The Light. Read More

Objective definition of a butthead: Lessons in personality from the Tao and Team America.

In an amazingly profound yet vulgar speech at the end of the movie "Team America" the hero defines three types of people. I can't use the names he uses, but if you've got a stomach for that sort of thing, do watch the speech on Youtube. Read More

Selective Omni-moralism: How to be completely moral and do anything you want

Take my advice. You know what you should do? Actually, if those words make you bristle a little, there’s some history. About 400 years ago, the enlightenment began to erode the foundation of society’s religious and political fundamentalism. Ever since, people have been less willing to take dictation. It’s gotten harder to just tell people what to do. We’re growing up. Read More

Gangstas R Us: Why we love crime drama

I’m an epistemology professor. Read More

Fallacy pairs: For every infraction there's an equal and opposite infraction

I have a motto for this work: To name it is to tame it. Read More

Meta-conflict; Playing couples counselor in your own relationship can be dangerous...or helpful depending

I got in a hassle with a friend’s wife a few years back. We both work in psychology. Read More

What if everybody didn't? How common sense becomes nonsense when it's not fully common

What do New Agers, religious fundamentalists, libertarians, anti-war activists, and hawks have in common? Recent conversations across a spectrum of political and spiritual beliefs reveal a common yet tangled thread. Read More

My toolkit: How I've been able to generate a new idea/article every week for a decade

You get the right toolkit, it's amazing what you can build. I can't stop thinking of new ideas for articles because my toolkit is amazingly generative. The kit itself is actually pretty simple though and anyone can have it. Here are most of the tools in it: Read More

Speed reading our critics: How anxiety makes us gloss over the feedback and causes misunderstandings

I speed through feedback. Yes I’ll listen to it. You can’t be a decent person without listening to feedback. But lord, it’s always too long for my taste. And why? Because I feel threatened by it. So when I get criticized on paper I speedread it before quickly posting my response. And when I’m given feedback in person, I want to find the fast-forward button. “Yeah, yeah,” I want to say. “I understand. I get it. OK already.” Even when the person is not going slowly, I want him to go faster. Read More

Good gut: How to convince your gut to do the right thing

In an early moment of refreshing frankness, Aristotle acknowledges that it’s not generally fun to do what’s good. He, like many psychologists after him wonders how to reconcile gut impulse to the cause of virtue. Freud, for example notes the way impulse and morality aren’t on the same page. Read More

Absolutely: The roots of this useful, powerful, dangerous word.

“Absolutely,” we say when we’re convinced of something—a great and powerful little word--so powerful, we may get through our whole lives without noticing its origin and commonalities with other words. It’s got solve in it, like dissolve, solution, solubility, solvent, and absolve. Solve is from the Latin, Solvere which means to unfasten or free. Its prefix is ab Read More

Half-truisms: Why this month's PT cover story, "You're driving me crazy" is driving me crazy

I opened this month’s issue of Psychology Today eagerly because the cover story, “10 relationship headaches and how to fix them” is personally and professionally important to me. The article, while well and cleverly written, offered a familiar and frustratingly over-simplistic core idea. Read More

Believe it or not, beliefs are not what you believe they are.

For all of our talk about thoughts and beliefs, we generally employ a very simplistic notion of what they are. They are not things possessed but habits triggered. To believe something, even deeply, is not the same as having an exclusive habit that's triggered always either. So when someone says, "Oh, I believe deeply in integrity" it can't mean as it implies that in every situation in which the habits of thought associated with integrity might be triggered, that the only thoughts triggered are those of integrity. Which says a lot about the nature of integrity, actually. Read More

Posture drift: Proud of your opinion? Maybe worth rethinking in changing times.

The world is turned upside down. This week I talked to Republicans who sounded like new-age hippies and back to nature types who sounded like paper wasters. Read More

Crypto-prescription: Advice on how to give advice without seeming to

Giving advice is risky business. You lose friends. You get accused of being bossy, nosey, a know-it-all, controlling. It can invite reciprocation, and, if like many of us you are better at dishing out advice than taking it in, that’s no fun. Read More

Please and thank you: Stop saying them so much. Please!

I'm getting on in years, so it surprises me when I learn something new regarding a commonplace of human interaction. Saying "please" and "thank you" is as commonplace as it gets. We're told from early on that we say them to be nice. Only yesterday (and I wasn't born yesterday) did I recognize why we really say them.

Consider two scenarios:

I've been talking lately about subtexts in debate, sources of resistance that arise from the context rather than the topic under discussion. Even sound suggestions fall on deaf ears with people who feel they can't afford a hit to their self-esteem, or that they couldn't successfully implement the suggestion.

Why are these subtexts so hard to talk about?

Once I wrote a book six times, about three hundred pages per draft. Every time I started over, I cried. Read More

Emotional Reserves: What lurks below that tip-of-the-iceberg coldness

You're deadlocked. He thinks it's your problem; you think it's his. You've been going over what happened, how it started, and who started it. But you aren't budging.

So forget the past. Move on to right now. Right now you're upset. But then, he says he is too. You feel really put out; but then, he claims he does too.

You're standing in line for tickets to a concert. Some guy in sunglasses wedges himself into line right in front of you. You're furious. Someone behind you sees your reaction and says, "Relax. He's blind. He doesn't know what he's doing." You suddenly feel ashamed. But then someone else in line says, "He's not blind. I've seen him here before. Read More

Grindblindness: Given habituation, how do you keep the spark alive?

Minds notice differences. When things stay the same, minds tune out by a process psychologists call habituation.

Physical pain is the exception. In most cases we don't get used to chronic pain. Physical pain has to be inescapably vivid in order to convince us to do what's necessary to alleviate it. Sometimes there is nothing we can or even need do to alleviate it.

In every love relationship I've ever had, my partner and I sooner or later discover a way in which we are quicksand to each other. You know how with quicksand the more you try to save yourself the faster you sink? Read More

Intimacy: With them or with your truth?

1. A friend of mine once sought a teaching position at a somewhat New Age spiritual college. He‘s a Buddhist and also a scholar with high standards. In a job interview with the dean he asked, "What's your attitude about rigor?"

"You mean rigor mortis?" the dean asked, conveying an assumption that rigor killed the spirit.

One day when I was young and working as head of public affairs for a big, publicly traded, environmentally conscious retailer, I suddenly felt morally compromised by the company's flagship campaign, which it had me running. I wrote an angry letter to the CEO and board complaining about the campaign, exposing it as disingenuous and unworthy of my or the company's attention. Read More

Jeremy Sherman is an evolutionary epistemologist studying the natural history and practical realities of decision making.

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About Ambigamy

Ambigamy is a word I coined originally for romance but now extend to all of life. Ambigamists live with the tension between romance and cynicism, holding on and letting go, investment and divestment, an approach that is poignantly sweet and sour not blandly middlegroundish. By abandoning hope for some easy both/and solution, or formula for always being in the middle ground (e.g. tough love), ambigamists corner themselves with the challenge of figuring out where to be to be tenacious vs. relaxed, yang vs. yin, etc.