Would You Rather Be Right or Understood?

A recent disagreement with my boyfriend:

“How do you feel about our home buying plans we talked about? You were quiet about it when it came up in the conversation with your friends yesterday,” I said.

“Ya, next time, you probably shouldn’t share those details with people,” he said.

“I was waiting for you to chime in. It felt like it was just no longer our plans since you didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, it’s still our plans. I just don’t think you should have shared that level of detail with them. We are still early in the process, figuring it out. I think you confused them.”

“I wasn’t asking your permission to share what I did. I am not a private person. It’s natural for me to open up. I am comfortable opening up and being myself.”

“Well, I am comfortable with myself too. I just show it differently.”

“I wasn’t saying you weren’t comfortable with it. I like that you’re private. I am just not, and now that feels like it’s a problem…”

What started with me trying to understand how my boyfriend felt about the collective “we” decision of buying a home, turned into an emotionally fueled debate about privacy, where we both ended up feeling hurt.

He felt chastised for being private, I felt chastised for being open, neither of which was relevant to washing away our savings on a home.

I didn’t advocate for my position in near tears to be right. I wanted to feel understood. I wanted him to acknowledge my feelings towards the home-buying decision and clearly articulate his thoughts on it, rather than commenting about my style of communication.

He needed me to help him understand my feelings, rather than veering off course and putting him in a position where he needed to defend himself.

What fueled the argument further was me highlighting our dissimilarities, creating a larger, unnecessary barrier between us.

For me, understanding has become a prerequisite to romantic love. It makes me feel not just respected, but empowered. Antonyms of empowered, bring up words such as constrained, rejected, and shut out — the worst case scenario for someone who used to scratch his brother’s face when he’d grab her wrists in gest.

Turns out, I’m not alone in that thinking. Clinical psychologist and author, Leon F Seltzer, said,

If we don’t, or can’t, experience others as understanding us — who we are and what we’re about — then all of these other wants can end up feeling relatively meaningless. Not feeling that others know us can leave us feeling hopelessly estranged from the rest of humanity. It may well be that feeling understood is a prerequisite for our other desires to be satisfyingly fulfilled.

When the emotional stakes are high, it’s easy to react with sensitive outbursts. I was reacting to the story in my head — that he no longer wanted to purchase a home with me, that he was having doubts about our relationship. “The most powerful stories may be the ones we tell ourselves,” says Brené Brown. “But beware — they’re usually fiction.”

When you feel like your partner doesn’t get you, don’t blame them. Rather, take responsibility for what you can control. It is your job to clearly articulate your feelings, which requires a level of vulnerability that many of us avoid out of the fear of rejection.

More than just the health of the relationship depends on us being open and honest. Studies have long shown that not feeling understood causes changes in our brain. When we feel understood, brain regions associated with reward and social connection light up, and when we don’t feel understood, neural regions associated with negative outcomes are triggered.

So next time a conflict comes up, share your wild expressions of fear, love, and belonging, just make sure you are giving your partner the same opportunity.

It starts with listening to the other party — by asking clarification questions, avoiding assumptions, acknowledging good intentions, and remaining curious.

And if you mess up and you end up down a rabbit hole searching for a carrot, apologize. We will all mess up again. But hopefully, our messes will get a little smaller, and be a bit more understood.

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This post was previously published on Hello, Love and is republished here with permission from the author.
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