Is It Win-Win or Lose-Lose in Your Relationship?

Source: Brocken Inaglory/Wikimedia Commons

One of the many mantras I try to drill into couples I work with is that in relationships, it’s either win-win or lose-lose. There is no win-lose in relationships.

I remember asking a husband once: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?”

“Can’t I have both?” he asked me plaintively.

“No,” was my emphatic reply.

What do I mean by this? Why do so many of us, so often, take delicious satisfaction in trying to prove ourselves right and our partners wrong? Why do we look to our friends to bolster our sense of grievance with our partners or practice arguments in our head when we’re upset, arguments in which we’re always the aggrieved party and our partner is the wicked oppressor?

I think there are a number of ways to say it, a number of lenses through which we can view this, but underneath it all is one core issue that is at the heart of so many disagreements: We take ourselves too seriously. We think we are at the center of the universe and that our feelings or perspectives or issues should trump everything else.

And with that inflated sense of self-importance comes a sensitivity to slights and bumps on the unfairness metric of life. So we go out of our way to make our point, convinced that our cause is righteous and our anger just. Fueled by perceived slights and our partner’s perceived faults, we argue endlessly over who started it, who spoke more sharply, and who did this or that. It can go on for hours, or days, or weeks, or even an entire marriage.

Stop it. Just listen to yourself and ask yourself the following question: Are you being your best self in this particular moment? It doesn’t matter what your partner did or didn’t do to deserve it. Is how you’re acting how you want to be remembered or seen by others? Is it the legacy you want to leave behind in this world? If the answer is “no,” then just stop it.

Because these kinds of fights never end well for either party. Even if your partner grudgingly concedes a point—what have you gained? A partner who feels less than you in some way? Is that what you want, to feel superior to your partner? That’s like your right hand slapping your left hand and feeling triumphant.

The magic of partnership, the promise of a good marriage, is not needing to keep score. It’s the security of trust that comes with knowing you are each other’s ally, and even if one or the other of you should say something nasty, it doesn’t matter, a) because you’re not that important, and b) because your partner surely didn’t intend to hurt you. Do you realize how much time and energy you can save if you can trust each other’s better selves; if you can automatically assume the best rather than the worst in each other?

To expand this focus from the narrow lens of your primary relationship outward: I believe that there is no win-lose in life—that we are all connected to each other and to everything else, even though it’s in ways that are less visible than in our primary relationship. So approaching life and the world through the lens of win-win could help mitigate the lose-lose we are seeing around us in so much of the world today.