You Don’t Always Have to Be Right in a Relationship

A relationship will die very quickly if you constantly feel the need to be right and to win an argument.

When I was younger, I remember a scene in one of my favorite shows, Everybody Hates Chris. Chris’s mother complained about her co-worker at the beginning of the episode to Chris’s father. His father starts questioning his mother about details of the mother’s account, whether or not her co-worker actually said something or not, whether the co-worker actually meant a statement in a way Chris’s mother took offensively.

Chris’s mother took his father’s questioning very seriously, and very soon, they weren’t on speaking terms. She stops talking to the father for a pretty long time, and the father wonders why, and even though he didn’t think he was contradicting her, she didn’t interpret his questioning that way.

By the end of the episode, Chris’s father got the point. He was supposed to listen and validate, not object and poke questions — that’s what his wife wanted. Towards the end of the episode, Chris’s mother is on another rant about her co-worker, and Chris’s father completely gets it. He sees “uh-huh”, “she said what? How could she?” and other statements that just validate her and minimal encouragers to show that he’s listening to her talk instead of trying to insert himself into the conversation.

The message from the episode was clear to me then, and I still think about it when I think about conversations and relationships today — sometimes, people aren’t looking for you to win an argument. They aren’t looking for you to be the smartest person in the room. They want to talk, and they want you to listen.

. . .

One of my favorite quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald is the following:

“To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.”

I used to be someone who loved to argue. I loved to argue about politics, about religion, about sports, and I’ll be honest — I still do love to argue with my friends about these things. I love to stir the pot and generate a heated discussion.

But being kind is more important than being right, and in a relationship I really treasure (not like the conversations I see on Twitter), I will put down my words and shut my mouth when the time comes. Arguing is a sport where there’s no winning team — one side just loses more slowly, and both just hate each other more at the end.

I used to think I had to have the plans and solutions for all of life’s problems. Now, when people have genuine problems and experiences, I’ve learned to just listen. I don’t need to fix anymore. I don’t need to be right anymore. I just listen because a lot of the times, that’s what people need to hear.

I used to think a lot about how to make Trump supporters change their minds, for example. I would argue, fight, and shame on social media, only to realize that I wasn’t persuading anyone — I was just cementing my own beliefs and the people who argued with me. But some people I became friends with in college happened to vote for Trump, and while I might have detested them before, we had a lot of the same problems and struggles, and our bonds would become stronger as we listened to each other.

Did I change their minds? No, probably not. But maybe we shouldn’t aim to change people’s minds so often, because we start to see them as projects to be fixed over human beings who need to be listened to — human beings first, everything else second.

You can listen without thinking someone’s right. But you can’t listen without validating someone’s experiences and opinions. The best someone in a relationship can feel is heard, and instead of trying to win an argument or prove them wrong, take some time to hear them.

With my girlfriend, for example, we’ve gotten into very little fights if any. That’s because we know how to listen to each other when we have problems or are stressed about something — it’s not like we don’t have conflicts, but we don’t escalate those conflicts. We’ve learned to de-escalate and not make any of those conflicts big deals that have a lot of power over our relationship.

We do that by listening to each other and each other’s needs.

So take a lesson from Chris’s dad, played by Terry Crews. Don’t try to be the person who’s right or needs evidence and proof for everything. You are not a judge, jury, or executioner in a relationship — you are a human being that someone turns to in a time of need.

Most of the time, what they need you to do is listen.

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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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