Compromise is the enemy of happy relationships. Here's why ... and what to do instead.
Episode 4
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Tips for Having Hard Conversations :: our free resource for podcast listeners
The Hebrew Bible recounts the story of two women and an infant who come before King Solomon for help. Each woman insists she is the child’s true mother and both women press their claims before the King, each wanting him to recognize her as the child’s mother.
In the absence of any definitive proof as to which of the women is the baby’s mother, King Solomon declares that compromise is the only solution to the problem. The child will be cut in half and one half given to each of the women. Of course, at this point, the child’s real mother is horrified by this solution and releases her claim on her child in order to save his life … at which point the wise King Solomon returns her child to her.
While this story celebrates the wisdom of King Solomon, it also highlights a strange reality about compromise: when it’s used in intimate relationships, it so often ends up sacrificing that which is most precious to us. if this is true, why is compromise so often held up as an ideal way to solve problems in relationships?
Before we get into the downsides and negative consequences of compromise, let’s first talk about the positives. The goal of compromise is to keep the peace and in that regard compromise is an absolutely fabulous alternative to war.
In fact, this is actually the perfect tagline for compromise:
Compromise: it’s better than war.
And it is … to be sure, obviously better than settling disagreements through outright combat. When the goal is peace and to get along, compromise can be effective, because we can measure what we’re giving up in comparison to what we might lose if we went to war.
Compromise is also a great beginners skill for problem solving, which is why we teach it to children.
So the backup tagline for compromise could be:
Problem solving for preschoolers.
Compromise is ideal for helping children resolve short-term, minor disagreements. When we take turns or share our toys, we’re learning how to compromise.
The thing is, as we grow up, we’re never given an education on how to resolve conflicts that goes beyond compromise.
Because our society is structured hierarchically, the people at the top—whether that’s parents or a boss or the government … make the rules and we have to learn to follow them. It’s really only once we get into relationships as adults that we’re confronted with learning how to resolve problems amongst equals. In relationships, there’s a different balance of power, in which power is shared between two people who are equally invested in the relationship.
Here’s a truth about relationships that you probably already know. Relationships can very easily turn into power struggles. Even though compromise seems like a way to avoid power struggles, it ends up subtly reinforcing this way of looking at things, because it’s based on a zero sum understanding of problems and conflict.
The whole premise of a zero sum game is that there isn’t enough to go around … so we can’t both get our way. Since there isn’t enough to go around, we’re each going to have to sacrifice some of what we want and meet in the middle. This zero sum perspective is why compromise encourages a very limited vision of what’s possible when resolving apparent conflicts … as well as what’s possible in relationships.
It’s really fascinating that somehow we have this idea that compromise could lead to a happy relationship. Compromise presupposes that your interests and wants are truly in conflict with mine, so neither of us can have it all and we’re both going to end up feeling some amount of dissatisfaction with the outcome. But somehow my dissatisfaction plus your dissatisfaction is going to add up to a satisfying relationship.
It makes no sense to expect that if you each sacrifice some amount of what you want and neither of you is truly happy with the outcome, that when you combine your unhappinesses, you’ll somehow be happy together.
I (Angela) have worked with a lot of couples whose previous therapists have encouraged them to use compromise to resolve issues in the relationship. But when I explain it to them like this, they suddenly see why their efforts at compromising have never led them to feel more connected and happy together. From my perspective, relationship dissatisfaction is actually baked into the framework of compromise.
One of the reasons why compromise doesn’t lead to happiness is because it focuses our attention on what we have to give up in order to get some of what we want, so we start to look at our relationship as something that requires sacrifices rather than seeing our relationship as a space of abundance and riches.
Because compromise exists within the scarcity mentality of not-enoughness, it actually discourages a spirit of generosity.
When I believe there’s not enough to go around, I’m focused on making sure I get my share and I’m also focused on what I have to sacrifice in order for you to get your share. This kind of sacrifice feels bad … so maybe I start to wonder if I had to sacrifice more than you did. Or maybe I start to feel that the sacrifices I made actually outweigh what I’m getting from this deal. Maybe it seems to me like I had to sacrifice more than you did … or what you sacrificed doesn’t seem that valuable to me. So I end up not feeling good about the agreement we came to and there’s this nagging doubt in my mind about whether or not it was really a fair deal.
Once we’re in that kind of mindset, we can lose sight of the larger picture. We already mentioned that compromise subtly discourages generosity through its focus on arriving at a fair solution. Compromise fails to remind us that we have a vested interest in helping our partners to get their needs met, by virtue of the fact that their happiness matters to us because we love them.
Instead, it narrows our focus down to making sure we’re not getting screwed. We actually forget that we want our partners to get what they want.
We start to believe that our needs are in competition, rather than remembering that our needs are intertwined. We flourish together or not at all. Because compromise is a zero sum strategy aimed at preventing escalating conflict, it doesn’t tap into our better natures, the generosity and care that we show others we love, and the sense of natural abundance that can exist in a loving relationship.
One of the clues that tells us that a couple has been heavily relying on compromise as a problem solving strategy is that one or both partners in the relationship are carrying a lot of resentment toward the other person.
Compromise almost inevitably feeds resentment because of the lingering doubts we have about whether or not the compromise was fair or whether I really got what I thought I was going to get.
To illustrate how this happens, let’s say that you and I are deciding how to spend our Friday evening. I want to go out to a party but you’ve had a long and tiring week at work and you’d really prefer to have a quiet night in and watch a movie together. So we compromise: tonight we go to the party and tomorrow we’ll watch a movie. We get to the party and you are miserable. I can tell by your face that you’re not having fun and as the night goes on, I start getting more and more annoyed with you—because we had an agreement. And here you are being the quintessential party pooper.
So we leave the party and now I’m in a sour mood and you look like you want nothing more than to just curl up in the backseat of the car and fall asleep. Fast forward to Saturday night and here’s part 2 of the compromise: we’re going to watch a movie together. You pick the movie and we sit down to watch. But am I going to enjoy the movie after what you did at the party? No way. Why should I? You may have technically upheld your part of the bargain, but from my perspective, you didn’t honor the spirit of the bargain and so I feel less inclined to honor my side of our agreement.
Cue the resentment, frustration, and lack of generosity. And Saturday night ends with both of us feeling like we got the short end of the stick. You went to a party you didn’t want to go to and I sat through a movie making no effort to let it be an enjoyable experience. And we end up feeling further apart than we did before the weekend started.
So what’s the alternative? This is really the question. We’re never taught how to really explore problems. In fact, most of us are so uncomfortable with problems in relationships that we want to either avoid them or immediately solve them.
And if we’re rushing to get to a solution, we end up making the mistake of slapping a solution on a problem before we’re really understood it. I’m guessing you may have experienced this as some point during childhood. Your parent walks into your bedroom, sees your things strewn all over the floor and says, this room is a complete mess. You need to have this cleaned up before dinnertime … without ever pausing to consider why you’ve spread out all of your legos or markers or your collection of stuffed pandas and what project you might be in the middle of. Instead, a problem is identified—the room is too messy—and a solution is imposed immediately—clean up the mess. After years of having solutions imposed on us as kids, we often turn around and do the same thing in our adult relationships.
Because we don’t experience the value of exploring problems growing up, we make the mistake of believing that there is no value in exploring problems as adults.
We try to solve the problem before we even have a clear understanding of what the problem is. Something in the relationship isn’t working for us and so we generate a solution that we think would work. We suggest our solution to our partner, who pushes back with their own solution, and then we find a way to meet in the middle, as in the example of taking turns picking the weekend plans.
If we think back to the example of compromising on weekend plans, the issue centered on the party versus the movie at home. It’s clear in this example that the problem wasn’t clearly identified. I wanted to go to the party and you wanted to stay in and watch a movie.
But what was the actual problem?
It wasn’t just deciding between these two particular options for how to spend an evening. What was I really needing that night that I thought the party would give me? Was it seeing friends … or having some lighthearted fun … or was it spending time with you outside the house, in a fresh environment where we could share a different kind of experience? And what were you needing with your night in? Was it just some quiet downtime when you could recharge after a long week at work? Was it quality time with me, when we could sit side and side without talking? Or was it something else entirely?
Imagine how differently this scenario might have turned out, had we taken the time to explore what we were really needing … the need that we imagined our proposed solutions—the party or the movie—would have given us.
If I’d realized that what I really needed was spending time with you outside the house, we might have made a plan for Sunday afternoon. If I’d realized I needed some lighthearted fun with friends, I could have gone to the party without you. If you’d taken the time to tune into yourself and discovered how much you just needed to be at home that night, you would’ve realized that going to the party with me would not be a good idea.
Shortcuts like compromise that try to resolve conflicts as quickly as possible are missed opportunities. When you aim for compromise, not only do you often end up with a solution that doesn’t truly address the real needs involved, you also miss out on the opportunity to understand what’s at the heart of a conflict or issue.
You miss out on the opportunity to self-reflect and figure out what really matters to you and you miss out on the opportunity to learn more about your partner’s deeper needs and desires. You miss out on the chance to use conflict as a way to build a deeper connection in your relationship.
Taking the time to explore together what your needs, desires and goals are allows you to work together to brainstorm potential ideas that allow both of you to get what you need and want.
When you no longer see your needs as automatically being in conflict with your partner’s needs, it’s easier to reconnect with your own desire to make sure your partner’s deepest needs are met alongside your own.
True partnership requires a spirit of generosity.
Building a bank of goodwill in a relationship is vital, because there will be occasions when your desires won’t be totally compatible. It’s important to remember that this isn’t true only in relationship, but this is also true for us as individuals.
Sometimes we have two desires that aren’t compatible with each other. I might want to spend my whole Saturday reading a book and also I might want to have all my laundry done and my house clean by the end of Saturday. It’s part of the human condition that we sometimes have desires that are in conflict. When it’s an internal conflict, we’ve learned how to weigh our desires and figure out which one we’re going to prioritize.
The same can be true in relationships, when there’s trust that’s established that each of you cares about the other’s needs as well as your own.
Compromise encourages us to identify with our original positions. I want to go to the party. You want to stay home and watch a movie. Once we’re identified with our positions and looking at meeting somewhere in the middle, we’re focused on how much we’re willing to give up and what we’re going to get in return for our sacrifice. And we lose sight of the third path that’s neither the party nor the movie: the possible solution that meets both of our needs perfectly and without any requirement for sacrifice. It requires being willing to stay in conversation with the other person, trusting that an exploration of the issue will lead you to more clarity and understanding … and that new ideas of potential solutions will present themselves.
Questions are incredibly valuable during this process of exploration—in particular, questions that encourage curiosity and openness, which are essential for a conversation that generates more goodwill and generosity toward each other.
So here are two questions that you can ask when you want to get a deeper understanding of your own needs and desires and your partner’s needs and desires, when you have preferences that seem to be in conflict with each other, at least on the surface.
The first question is a question that you can ask yourself. Here it is: “If I got my way, what would I get? What would that do for me?” Try to come up with everything you can think of that you’d experience as a result of getting your preferred outcome.
For example, with the party, I might say, “I’d get to go to the party which will be really fun,” which in itself doesn’t give me much new information, but as I keep thinking about it, I might realize, “I’ve been feeling like I’m carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders and I just need a night out, to see some friends, and to be reminded that’s it’s okay to just have fun sometimes.” This might be the first time I’ve realized how burdened I’d been feeling or how it’s been too long since I’ve seen my friends, or how one friend in particular always manages to lift my spirit.
The second question is one for your partner and it sounds something like this. “Let’s say we go with what you want to do. What would that do for you? What would you get, if we go with your plan?” The goal is to get to the root of the desire or need. It can take some time to get there. When you stay curious and ask follow up questions, you can start getting to the need or desire that’s underneath the initial solution. Daniel wanted to go to the party, not because he needed the party itself but he needed something that he thought the party would give him … like connection with friends or lighthearted fun or time spent out of the home.
You’ll know you’ve gotten to the root desire or need when it just makes sense. It’s kind of like an ah-ha moment. Questioning will lead you toward the root answer. Asking myself, What will it do for me to go to the party? can lead me to the answer, I really want to see my friends, which, when I ask the question “What will that do for me?”, can lead me to, “My friend Alison always lifts my spirits and I could really use that tonight.” At that point, I get it. I know why it feels so important to go to the party and it’s easier for me to communicate that to you, to help you understand why it’s so important to me.
You know you’ve gotten to the root when you discover a reason why you want what you want that’s so simple that it becomes obvious why you want it, because it’s a good in itself. This way of asking questions to get more clarity takes practice, which is why we provide a guide to asking these questions that you can download in the resources for this episode, because it definitely takes some practice to get the hang of.
When we’re stuck in the scarcity mentality looking at conflicts through the lens of the zero sum game where there’s never enough to go around, it can feel like we can’t afford to be generous in helping to make sure our partner gets their needs met, because whatever I give you is taking away from myself.
When we’re in the mindset of abundance, we can afford to be generous because we know there’s enough to go around. Conflicts can be approached with curiosity and mutuality. We’re exploring together, discovering what’s really important to each of us and figuring out how to get those needs met.
The creation of goodwill that happens in a relationship when I communicate to you that your needs matter and you do the same for me is something that we can each draw upon later when we do run into a situation in which our needs and desires might be in conflict. We’re in a partnership, which means that we’re both invested in each other’s happiness. Our wellbeing is inextricably intertwined: the more I invest in your happiness, the more I invest in our relationship, which is also a way of investing in my own happiness. And in this way, there’s no conflict and no need to sacrifice or to compromise.
Ultimately, while it may be better than all out war, compromises always compromise the integrity of the relationship. It’s similar to how we talk about the integrity of a building being compromised by a shaky foundation. It’s better than a total collapse, but best avoided when possible.
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What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
