11/01/2017

What to do when your partner disagrees with you? [1]

You want a new car, but your husband thinks the old clunker you have is just great; he’d rather save the money to start that “business” that has been talked about for years but has never happened.

You want your mother to live with you, but your wife says she’d rather have pepper spray in her eyes than see her mother-in-law at home every day.

If there is one thing that’s certain about every marriage is that, sooner or later, the couple will disagree about some important matter. There’s nothing wrong with that. The same thing happens in all other relationships: father and son, boss and employee, government and citizen, among siblings, neighbors, and even among best friends. It’s part of humanity and you should’ve gotten used to it by now.

For some reason, we think that, when it comes to marriage, it’s different. We assume that just because the other person loves us, they’ll always agree with us. But you should understand one thing:

Loving doesn’t mean always agreeing with one another.

And when your partner disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean that they hate you. We all have the right to want, like or think about anything, but not always can we have everything we want, like or think about. This is where a keyword in marriage comes in:

Negotiation.

Every human relationship happens through negotiation, that is, through exchange. People who are married have to learn to negotiate with their spouse. Don’t be shocked. There’s no point in romanticizing the issue and saying that “to love is to give and not expect anything in return.” It’s nonsense. It’s just one more myth about love. People who love and receive nothing in return are frustrated and unhappy. This is not an intelligent way of loving.

It’s obvious that, if you love someone, you want something in return. The biggest proof of this is that you’re reading an article about how to get the person you love to understand your point of view. If loving didn’t demand anything in return, you’d be happy even if your partner never did anything for you.

So, this is the first step: to understand that marriage is about negotiation. And the better negotiator you are, the better your relationship will be.