Maintaining mutual commitment in the face of risk

• Partner incompatibilities pose threats to commitment.
• Motivation-management model explains how partners sustain mutual commitment.
• Three automatic ‘if–then’ rules for mitigating threats are described.
• Practicing the ‘if–then’ rules in daily interaction sustains commitment in newlyweds.

Because romantic partners are rarely perfectly suited to one another, threats to commitment usually arise. A model of motivation-management is presented to explain how couples sustain mutual feelings of commitment. It states that people can protect commitment by practicing three ‘if–then’ rules for mitigating threats: Justifying costs, ensuring mutual dependence, and accommodating when a partner is hurtful. Supportive empirical evidence is reviewed including: (1) selected experiments that document the automatic operation of the rules, (2) daily diary data that shows how mitigating threats sustains commitment, and (3) longitudinal data that suggests that people who are sensibly hesitant to trust a high-risk partner become better practiced in mitigating threats and protecting commitment over the initial years of marriage.