Couples

Always Having To Be Right

By  | 

Forget for a second about how exasperating and exhausting it is to deal with a romantic partner who always has to be right. The deeper, fundamental problem with this attitude is that it puts your neurotic pride ahead of the thoughts and feelings of the real person in front of you, and this will be noted by your partner on some level even if it’s not consciously recognized.

From a psychological point of view, someone who has to be right at all costs equates his very sense of Self with his thoughts and opinions. If the thoughts and opinions are proven wrong, it hurts at a core level that is really not rational, but this doesn’t make it any less painful if you equate who you are as a person with an opinion you hold.

The real question to ask yourself is what you care more about, your partner or being right. Really healthy couples have the following mentality “At bottom I really don’t care who is wrong and who is right, all I care about is our happiness and creating the healthiest relationship possible.”

Always having to be right makes compromise, so essential to romantic relationships, basically impossible, and even when it does occur there is almost certainly going to be residue of unhappiness and exasperation in your partner because he or she knows your position is basically intractable even if you gave ground in one small area. It’s like two armies in the trenches waging a long, drawn out war against each other where ground might be given at times but the underlying goal is the total decimation of the other side. Obviously this is no way to build a loving relationship.

Right, wrong, who cares? Thoughts and opinions are not something you are, they are something you have, and they can be adjusted without effecting your core Self at all. The mentality of always having to be right is the mentality of conflict, and conflict is what you will get unless you decide to relax a little bit and let yourself be influenced.

Related posts:

  1. Couples And Trench Warfare The problem unhealthy couples have is not the lack of any desire to improve the situation but rather an inherently flawed strategy to get there. They hope to go about improving things with the very same underlying mentality that caused problems to begin with. This mentality can best be called adversarial. It pits partners against […]...
  2. Don’t Say It Most of us have done it in one relationship or another. We start to have doubts about our partner, whether he or she is the best match, and we convince ourselves that airing these doubts is the responsible thing to do. Honesty is the best policy right? This person deserves to know how we are […]...
  3. Fighting Couples Many couples worry that fighting all the time signifies that their relationship is doomed. Each person comes to therapy with the secret hope that the therapist will agree with his or her side of the story and help to knock some sense into the deficient partner. If that partner changes their lives will improve. The […]...
  4. Wanting Out Of A Relationship How many people all over the world are still in relationships they desperately want out of due to not wanting to hurt the feelings of their partners? So many, and what a bad reason to stay. On the surface it almost seems noble, a form of self-sacrifice, putting the needs of someone else before your […]...
  5. What To Do If Your Romantic Relationship Is On The Rocks If you’ve been struggling to get along with your partner and feel like your romantic relationship is on the rocks there’s a good chance you’ve been giving your negative thoughts and emotions free rein. You say and do destructive things, rationalizing your actions on the grounds that you’re only being honest, that it would be […]...
  6. Couples Teaming Up Against Conflict Probably the most useful concept from narrative therapy is the idea of separating the problem from the person, in effect saying “You are not the problem. The problem is the problem.” Weight is instantly lifted from your shoulders and you feel lighter, that there is a way out of the mess you are in. Instead […]...
  7. Repair When a couple argues one partner is often so intent on besting the other that subtle attempts to create a feeling of solidarity are missed or ignored. John Gottman calls these attempts repair. A simple but vital difference between healthy and unhealthy couples is that partners in healthy relationships are more likely to recognize and […]...
  8. Couples Seeing The Bigger Picture During Fights Sometimes an issue looms so large that all else is obscured, and both partners find it very important to be proven right. One way to increase the health of your relationship is to make sure you take time to step back and see the bigger picture, not letting your goals for the relationship be overridden […]...
  9. You Do Not Have To Tell Your Partner Everything You Are Thinking And Feeling There is a pretty common sentiment out there in romantic relationships that it would somehow be dishonest or inauthentic to hold back certain thoughts or emotions. Even when these thoughts or emotions are destructive to the relationship, damaging its foundations, disintegrating trust and intimacy, some people feel like it’s their obligation to communicate the information. […]...
  10. Condescending Attitude In Romantic Relationships A condescending attitude in romantic relationships seeks to instill a power imbalance, an irrational hierarchy, which necessarily chips away at the sense of community that’s vital to mental health and happiness. Of course it hurts in the moment to feel minimized, but at the psychological level it’s the subtle trading of community for irrational hierarchy […]...
  11. Open Instead Of Defensive Not getting defensive in the face of criticism is a hard thing to do and in the context of romantic relationships can be looked at as an ideal to strive towards rather than an easy strategy to implement. What most of us do is rationalize our defensiveness as just sticking up for ourselves. We weren’t […]...
  12. Compromise People who drive a hard bargain, fighting tooth and nail to get a good deal, using wit and skill to best their adversaries, are generally respected in our competitive individualistic society, and it’s satisfying to get what you want. Why not take this mentality into the romantic relationships as well? But skilled negotiators know that […]...
  13. Not Wanting To Cede Control To Controlling People Many relationships come to be defined by one person’s endeavor to amass and maintain control over the other person’s life. The controller will usually secretly rationalize this controlling behavior on the grounds of knowing better and only wanting what’s best for someone they care about. Control disguised as help. The controlee, assuming the relationship is […]...
  14. Criticism And Defensiveness In Romantic Relationships Criticism and defensiveness are kind of like the yin and yang of dysfunctional romantic relationships. While to the objective observer it becomes obvious that these frequent patterns of behavior are deteriorating the foundations of the relationship and aren’t leading to any productive solutions, partners usually feel absolutely justified when they either take up the sword […]...
  15. Reassuring Your Partner When you feel like saying and doing things to reassure your partner the current health of your relationship probably doesn’t particularly depend on these things and when you don’t feel like saying and doing things to reassure your partner the current health of your relationship probably does depend on them. That’s the paradox. The times […]...
  16. Conflict Is Okay Most of us have an ambivalent attitude towards conflict in our romantic relationships. Some of us try to avoid it all together. Better not to rock the boat. Who enjoys hurt feelings and friction? Actually conflict is unavoidable in a healthy relationship though, and a relationship that is free of it is sure to have […]...
  17. Couples Complicit In Avoiding The True Problem When a relationship has gotten off track the people involved naturally want to know why. They hope that if they can figure out the roots of their problems they’ll be able to fix what’s wrong. Fair enough. But sometimes what’s really wrong, the true source of their problems, is simply that one partner is no […]...
  18. Changing Conflict Mentality I watched a comedy special last night by Bill Burr, and it was hilarious but also a reminder  of how the majority of us view conflict situations in our romantic relationships. Most of Burr’s jokes revolved around the power struggle; he said that when women are winning an argument they will stay on point but […]...
  19. Pick Your Battles Good counselors learn that they need to moderate the frequency of their comments during sessions. It’s not just a question of creating an open space to help clients feel free to talk, but it’s also to insure that they attribute significance to the things that are said. Even if you have some brilliant insight or […]...
  20. Abuse Checklist The longer people stay in abusive relationships the harder it gets for them to tell whether or not these relationships are abusive. The main reason why is that abuse, in all its myriad forms, always has the same goal which is to instill self-doubt in order to maintain control. The self-doubt part of the sentence […]...
Related Items