Which Would You Prefer In Your Marriage --
To Be Happy Or To Be Right?

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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 both.

During the euphoric/romantic phase of a relationship -- when your brain feels like it's on drugs -- you don't care about being right. It's irrelevant. The sheer joy of being together and the marvelous games of courtship make any kind of competition for power or position not matter. All you 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, privacy, solitude or the chance to chat with girlfriends or to play poker till the wee hours.

Now the seesaw tilts in the other direction. Now, being together isn't all you want. The honeymoon is over. Daily life, and everything that goes along with it, has replaced it. And unfortunately, your partner tends to get in the way of you having what you really want.

You try to persuade your partner to see things the way you see them, to believe what you believe. You try to win conflicts and resolve disagreements by convincing your loved one that they're wrong.

You want to win without it costing you anything. If your partner simply agrees with your position, you don't have to negotiate any compromises.

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

No matter how unassailable your logic in the defense of your position, what you really want is to win, and your partner knows it.

The problem is, when you're trying to win, the subtext is always that your partner loses. And when your partner loses, you don't get to be happy. Feeling like you lost is incompatible with happiness.

That's why it is always a choice between being happy and being right.

Winning over your partner's objections always contaminates the relationship with resentment, 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 you have to give up ever getting what you want?

Of course not. What you 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.

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