Decision Making by Diane Burton

In the past week, I’ve written blogs about goals and resolutions, about accomplishments, and what I hope to do in 2016. I participate in a monthly blog hop called Insecure Writers Support Group and yesterday over 90% of the posts were about setting goals or making resolutions. (If you’re interested, here's the link to the post.) Consequently, I’m not going to talk about that today. Instead, I want to talk about making decisions.

When we first married, I would get very frustrated with my husband when we had to make a major decision. I’d talk and talk and he said little or nothing. Drove me crazy. It wasn’t until I became trainer for Girl Scouts that I finally understood him. First I taught leaders how to be leaders, and eventually I trained the trainers. In the process, I learned how adults learn new things. Some of us learn by talking in groups and coming to a conclusion. Others mull things over in their mind (without talking) before coming to a conclusion. (There are others ways adults learn, but those two examples explained my husband’s and my methods.) I’m a talker; he’s a muller. Once I understood, I learned to change my expectations. I gave him space then—surprise, surprise—he opened up. I guess after forty-three years we’ve learned to adapt.

So what brought up this topic today? We’re out in Arizona visiting our son and his family, esp. the new baby. (You’re probably tired of me talking about her. LOL) Within a day of our arrival, Son mentioned we should consider buying a place out here for part of the year. Now we just built a house to be close to our daughter and her family. We want to enjoy the grandkids’ activities (without a 4-hour round trip drive) and, in general, see them more often. At the time of making that decision, those were our only grandchildren and nothing was keeping us in the old house. But now we have another family 2,000 miles away. What do we do? We’ll want to enjoy her activities when she gets older.

Ever since we knew about the baby, I’d given thought to spending winters close to our other family. Never said anything to Hubs. (Who’s the muller now?) In the three weeks we’ve been here, neither he nor I brought up our son’s suggestion . . . until the other day when he wanted to show me a senior community. He’d been out driving around when I was babysitting and looking at places. I was shocked. He’d actually considered it. I figured he’d give me all these reasons why buying out here was a bad idea. This is what comes of my assuming I knew what Hubs was thinking.

What are we going to do? At this point, who knows? If money were no object, we’d do it in a heartbeat. I think. There are so many things to consider. More importantly, we need to talk to each other more. I’m all for listing pros and cons, while Hubs will mull things over. Or maybe he’ll surprise me and say “let’s do it.” That would be a real shockeroo.

For those of you who have to take another person into consideration when making major decisions, how do you go about it?

Diane Burton writes romantic adventure . . . stories that take place on Earth and beyond. She blogs here on the 8th and 30th of each month and on Mondays on her own site: http://dianeburton.blogspot.com/