Couples

Always Having To Be Right

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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.