Feeling tempted to stray from your partner? You could learn a lot about self-control from Frog and Toad.
No, you didn’t misunderstand me (or if you did, please comment below and tell me what you thought I meant—maybe there’s another interpretation of the story I should know).
I recently rediscovered Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad during the story-time segment of my daughters’ bed time routine (thanks to a good friend who gave us the book as a gift). It’s a charming collection. My children love to hear them and I love to read them. The type is large and the prose is simple, so the girls can even try their hand at reading out loud. But what I love most is that each story often contains a little piece of adult wisdom, articulated in such clear and simple language that it puts most self-help books to shame (except mine of course).
In case you’re not familiar with the stories (or don’t remember), allow me to provide a little background.
Frog and Toad are “friends.” (I say “friends” because they spend just about every waking moment together, share their deepest hopes and dreams, and plan the intimate details of the lives around each other. If you’d like to read this as an allegory for a same sex romantic relationship, feel free. I’m sure it’s been done, and you won’t find much in the series to contradict the interpretation.) Regardless of its eponymous couple’s relationship status, the Frog and Toad series is teeming with insights into the human condition.
Each story recounts an important lesson or adventure in Frog and Toad’s shared journey, and in one of my favorites, Toad bakes the most amazing batch of cookies he’s ever made (apparently the most amazing anyone’s ever made.). Generously, he offers to share them with Frog, who immediately begins gobbling them up as quickly as his friend.
(Later, having become bored with the snack food industry, they move onto churning hedge funds, which earns Frog a brief stint in a medium security prison. Kidding.)
They soon realize it’s not so easy to stop eating the most amazing cookies either of them has ever tasted, so they go through a series of attempts to control their cookie binge.
First, they vow not to eat them—a strategy which fails miserably. Next, Frog explains that what they really need is willpower. But then he does something interesting: rather than keeping the cookies on the table in front of them, he places more and more barriers in the way. He puts them in a box, which Toad correctly points out can easily be opened. He ties a string around the box, a strategy which, as Toad notes, suffers from the same fatal flaw—and on and on, until Frog, apparently convinced that the whole willpower thing isn’t working at all, unceremoniously carts the cookies outside and yells to some birds, “Hey birds, here are some cookies!” The birds then eat them.
Problem solved. No more temptation.
Beyond the Myth of Willpower: On Cookies and Fidelity
Like Frog and Toad, when it comes to temptation—the temptation of affairs, in particular—we put far too much stock in willpower. If you want to control yourself, relying on “willpower” merely leads to moments where you’re sitting with a pile of cookies in front of you trying not to eat them. Frog solved the problem of temptation by removing it altogether. That’s the real key to his success.
“Willpower,” Frog tells us, “is the act of trying really hard not to do something that you really want to do”—as good a definition as any. Notice, the emphasis, here, is on impulse control: successfully avoiding temptation through sheer force of will. This notion of willpower contains no implication of self-reflection, planning, or self-awareness beyond acknowledging the strength of your desire and making a commitment to resist it. In contrast, Frog’s success teaches us that sometimes the best approach to temptation involves being proactive, not sitting around hoping to develop perfect self-control.
Feeling an attraction? Use your appetite and fantasies as a cue to remove temptation. If they’re becoming stronger, you may not be able to box your desire up or send it away, but you certainly don’t have to be taken in by some outmoded (and vaguely puritanical) notion of self-control. Successful treatment programs for impulses as powerful as substance abuse, sex addiction, and eating disorders all tend to have one thing in common: a clear plan.
Make sure you have one, too.
You can’t act on feelings if you’re not around someone. At the first signs of attraction, keep an eye on the boundaries—and create some distance.
This is simple advice, but surprisingly difficult to follow when you fall into the whole “I just need willpower” way of thinking. Quiet moments at coffee, leisurely lunch break strolls, funny little updates and text messages—I’ve see all these behaviors from people attempting to exercise “willpower.” All these situations merely strengthen feelings of attraction (recall the power of proximity in the attraction research?). But the people describing them all felt the same way: when they finally gave into their impulses, they were convinced they’d simply been too weak to resist their feelings.
From my point of view, the problem lay less in their will than in their actions. By telling themselves all they needed was self-control they’d convinced themselves “it’s just lunch; I can handle a drink; I’m just driving her to work.” Where's the harm in a little friendly conversation, after all, when you have willpower? Unfortunately, by sticking with this logic, each of these people had essentially plopped themselves down at a table stacked to the ceiling with the most delicious cookies they’d ever seen and tried to sit on their hands to keep from grabbing one.
Ask yourself, do you really need to spend more time with this person? Are you meeting him or her for drinks because you trust your willpower to protect you?
Remember Frog’s lesson: The less opportunity you have, the less need you’ll have for any kind of willpower at all.
Also, birds really like cookies.
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