You do get to choose. That’s the good news

The bad news is you have to choose. You don’t get to have both, even though the committee that meets inside your head is clamoring for a both-and victory.

During the euphoric/romantic phase of a relationship — when your brain is on drugs — we don’t care about being right. It’s irrelevant. The sheer joy of being together, with the rich pleasure of companionship and the marvelous games of courtship make any kind of competition for power or position matter not a whit. Not the least little bit of whit. All we want is to be together.

Fast-forward a few years. You have had about as much togetherness as you can stand. Your heart no longer pines when your partner is apart from you, in fact, you may rejoice in a few hours of freedom, of privacy, of solitude or the chance to chat with girlfriends or to play poker till the wee hours.

If we cannot simply command obedience from those who live with and love us, we try the next best thing.

We try to talk them into it.

We try to persuade our partners to see things the way that we see them, to believe what we believe. We try to win conflicts and resolve disagreements by convincing our loved ones that they are wrong. And right is what I want.

There’s only one problem with being right. Partners hardly ever agree.

No matter how I marshal my arguments, no matter how persuasive my rhetoric, no matter how unassailable my logic in the defense of my position, my partner sees right through to the core. My partner knows what I really want is to win.

At my partner’s expense. When I’m trying hard to be right — arguing passionately so that my partner will abandon her position and adopt mine — the subtext is always that my partner loses.

That’s why it is always choice, between being happy and being right.

When my partner loses, we don’t get to be happy.

Feeling like you lost is incompatible with happiness. Although I think that winning will make me happy, winning over my partner’s objections always contaminates the relationship with resentment, some degree of bitterness, and a guarantee of future friction. To win the battle of being right always loses the war for a rewarding relationship.

Does that mean we have to give up ever getting what we want?

Of course not. What we have to learn is to be collaborative, cooperative, and maybe compromising, instead of competitive.

In a loving relationship, the long-term reward of increasingly satisfying and fulfilling companionship over the decades justifies giving up any rigidity about being right or needing to win the short-term conflict.

Long-term loving trumps short-term winning every time, over time.

Being happy beats being right. Eventually.

We welcome questions!

It’s not a good idea to detail your mate’s flaws and foibles, so you might want to think carefully about how you describe what’s going on.  There’s a fairly large number of people who might be reading what you post here, so … use some discretion.

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