Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [136]
This is the thing about intimate relationships: we sign up to share our lives with someone else, and sooner or later we realize that we are also living with another person’s reality. But we don’t particularly want to live with our partner’s reality. We just want him or her to second our own. The failure to do so constitutes a betrayal of a tacit contract—a commitment to affirm our vision of the world. This is the person whose job is to understand us perfectly and share our worldview down to its last particular (or so we think, consciously or otherwise), and his or her failure to do so is both maddening and threatening.
We also fight so much inside our intimate relationships because it is there that our core convictions are most vulnerable to challenge. Remember the difference between how communities react to internal versus external dissent? When strangers disagree with us, we can choose to ignore, dismiss, or denigrate them, without any immediate or obvious consequences for our own happiness. But when our loved ones disagree with us, we don’t have such an easy out. We can feel their realities encroaching on our own, and we have to deal with the discomfort of conflicting theories and the distressing possibility that we might need to be vulnerable, give ground, be mistaken. Of course, we can ignore, dismiss, or denigrate our loved ones, too—and many people do—but the result is miserable for everyone involved.
The other and better option, Hendrix says, is to accept our partner’s reality alongside our own. “People have to learn to listen and listen and listen and listen until they finally get it that their partner has their own inner world—that you like apples and your partner likes oranges and that it’s okay to like oranges. One of my axioms is that if you want to be in a relationship, you have to get it that you live with another person. That person isn’t you. She’s not merged with you. She’s not your picture of who she is. She doesn’t live inside your mind. She doesn’t know what you’re thinking, and you don’t know what she’s thinking. So you have to back off and move from reactivity to curiosity. You have to ask questions. You have to listen.”
That sounds pretty basic, but it is harder to pull off than you might think. After I talked to Hendrix, I shared some of his remarks with a good friend who was going through a difficult time with his girlfriend. He wrote back, gratefully and wryly, to say that he found the passage comforting—because he felt it justified his own position in his relationship. “Hearing him say that there are two sides to every story makes you say, ‘if only my partner realized there are two sides to every story…’—a statement to which the conclusion is something like, ‘then she would realize that I’m right.’” My friend understood, of course, that Hendrix’s advice applied to him, too. Still, he said, he couldn’t help but feel like: wow, my girlfriend really needs to read this.
Well, surprise, surprise. Our attachment to our own sense of rightness runs deep, and our capacity to protect it from assault is cunning and fierce. It is hard, excruciatingly hard, to let go of the conviction that our own ideas, attitudes, and ways of living are the best ones. And yet, ironically, it’s mainly relinquishing this attachment to rightness that is difficult and uncomfortable—not, generally speaking, what happens afterward. This provides a crucial clue about the origins of our desire to be right. It isn’t that we care so fiercely about the substance of our