The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [35]
Alternatively, maybe Dexter’s newfound feelings for other people will motivate him to stop killing. Perhaps he will stop himself. Then he won’t need to lie so much. With Dexter (and his brilliant writers), you just never know what’s going to happen next.
Bella DePaulo (PhD, Harvard) is the author of Behind the Door of Deceit: Understanding the Biggest Liars in Our Lives and Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. She has published more than 100 scholarly articles. DePaulo’s work on deception has been described in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, the New Yorker, and many other publications. Dr. DePaulo has appeared as an expert on deception on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, the BBC, and other television outlets. She has also lectured nationally and internationally. Dr. DePaulo used to believe that she loved only true crime stories until she discovered Dexter.
How is it that we manage to balance our paid employment with all of the other parts of our lives, such as friends, family, and other interests? That’s a topic that many of us obsess about. Scholars have filled books and academic journals with their research and writing on the matter. But this chapter may well be the first one devoted to a critical discussion of how juggling is accomplished by a serial killer!
THE SCIENTIST AND THE SERIAL KILLER
MORRIE MULLINS
A Study in Work-Life Balance
“Dexter Morgan: Blood tech, husband, father, serial killer . . . Which one are you?”
—Harry Morgan, “Hello, Dexter Morgan” (4-11)
Life is complicated. Every day, we juggle demands from bosses, coworkers, friends, family, and neighbors. Everyone wants something, and they want it now—or sooner, if possible. Our task is to figure out how to balance all of these demands. How do we keep our work and non-work lives separate? Is it even possible?
Work-life issues have been an increasing area of interest for psychologists over the past few decades. In 2004, a theme of the American Psychological Association’s annual conference was the interface of work and family. Issues of how people manage their increasingly busy and over-scheduled lives have only become more central to the field, and with the huge numbers of families in which parents are trying to manage dual careers, raising children, and being members of their community, that shows no sign of changing.
Enter Dexter Morgan. At work, Dexter is a quiet lab tech with the Miami Metropolitan Police Department, a pleasant-if-eccentric analyst of blood spatter. He gets along with his coworkers (for the most part), doesn’t make a lot of noise, and is good at his job. At home, Dexter has a different role. He hunts and kills criminals that the system is unable to bring to justice, dismembering them, dumping them in the ocean, and retaining only a collection of blood slides as mementoes. These two lives—the scientist and the serial killer—have to coexist. Like all of us, Dexter has to find a way to make the things he does to pay the rent fit into the same brain that carries all of his nonwork needs and desires.
Dexter is an extreme example of work-life balance,14 since most of us don’t have a Dark Passenger to exacerbate the con-f lict. When we met him, he was already established in his career, having developed a routine that allowed him to manage both his work and non-work activities. The complications involved in this routine became a source of both internal and external conflict over the course of the first four seasons. As a result, Dexter offers an excellent vision into how people try to manage the demands that arise from different areas of their lives.
A number of theories have been presented to try to describe the why and the how of work-life balance. I will discuss three of these theories—the compensation