Stop Compromising and Improve Your Relationship

I often hear couples talking about compromise as the key to resolving conflict in their relationships. Those same couples often end up disappointed that their efforts to compromise don’t seem to resolve the conflict in their relationships. They often blame their partner for not doing his or her share rather than questioning the wisdom of the underlying compromise strategy.

Let me give you an everyday example. It is common for couples to have differences about how they like to sleep. One likes a firmer mattress, and the other prefers a softer mattress, or one likes it cooler in the bedroom while the other likes it warmer. No surprise people are different. What are the odds that two people who decide to live together will like everything the same way? A compromise might mean that they buy a mattress of medium firmness or set the temperature somewhere between where they each like it. While it is commendable that each person is at least recognizing their partner’s needs and making an effort to accommodate them, their compromise is likely to result in neither one of them getting a good night’s sleep.

What’s the alternative? The key to successful conflict resolution is to do three things:

Be willing to be honest about your own needs and preferences
Be as committed to meeting your partner’s needs as you are to getting your own needs met. This requires accepting your partner’s needs at face value without judging them because they are different from your needs or challenging for you to understand.
Be fully committed to hanging in there until you find a resolution that meets both of your needs.

This may seem daunting to you, but in my experience, it’s remarkable how often couples can work out creative solutions to complex problems when they hold to these three principles. In this case, you can buy electric blankets that set a different temperature on each side of the bed and mattresses with different firmness levels on each side.

The best example is sex. Sex is most mutually enjoyable when each partner is as attentive to their partner’s pleasure as they are to their own. Sex in which one partner is focused only on his or her pleasure is not enjoyable for either person. In the same sense, sex in which one partner is not attentive to his or her pleasure is also not as enjoyable for both people. Mutually enjoyable sex requires both partners to be interested in their partner’s pleasure as well as their own.

How does this look in more complex emotional conflict? A common area of conflict for many couples is the level of emotions they are comfortable sharing. Women are often socialized to feel more comfortable openly experiencing and sharing their feelings. Women often connect with other people by being emotionally open with them, and they feel closer to others who are more emotionally open. Men, on the other hand, are often socialized to be less connected to their feelings and less open in sharing those emotions with others. Men who are raised this way may feel threatened by their partner’s expectation of more emotional openness and may experience those expectations as intrusive or threatening. They often respond to this discomfort by pulling back and emotionally withdrawing. Women, naturally, are hurt when their partners respond to their efforts to initiate closeness by withdrawing, so they double down and become even more emotional, leading to their male partner’s withdrawing even further in what becomes a mutually dissatisfying mutual escalation.

How can mutually respectful conflict resolution help in a situation like this? Remember, the process begins with each person being open about their needs. The woman needs to explain that her expression of strong feelings is her way of trying to connect with her partner and that she does not mean to judge or criticize him. The man then needs to explain how he feels intimidated by the level of emotion his partner is expressing and seems to want from him.

The second step is for each person to accept their partner’s needs at face value without judgment and to be as committed to meeting their partner’s needs as they are to getting their own needs met. In this case, it requires both people to understand that their partner is also interested in feeling closer and more connected but that they each have different histories of relationships and different levels of comfort and pacing in how they want to get more connected. Again, sex is an example that most people can understand. While simultaneous orgasms are wonderful, most couples have differences in the timing and pacing of their arousal and sexual response. Couples with mutually satisfying sexual relationships learn how to speed up or slow down their arousal to be more in synch with their partners and have a mutually satisfying experience.

The last step is for each person to fully commit to finding a mutually satisfactory solution. This means the woman is committed to paying attention to her partner’s level of emotional tolerance and pacing her level of emotional openness in response to her partner’s readiness to receive. For the man, it means not just withdrawing when he feels uncomfortable or threatened but talking to his partner about his discomfort and working with her to find a pace of emotional openness that works for both of them.

I understand that it may feel counter-intuitive to suggest that compromising less in your relationship will help you feel closer to your partner, but give these three steps a try and see how it goes.

Excerpted, in part, from Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men’s Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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