Shortly before I got married, I received a piece of sterling advice that I have been mulling a lot over the last year: “You have a big decision to make: Do you want to be married, or do you want to be right?”
Even a good marriage offers a lot of opportunities for grievance. Suddenly, you cannot make any major decision without consulting this other person — who will, inconveniently, often have very different ideas from yours about where to live, what to spend the money on, how to raise the children, and whether to turn the basement into a home theater space or a library. (The correct answer, for those who are wondering, is “library.”)
The more determined you are to win every battle, the more likely you are to lose what’s important: the person you love so much that you have chosen to spend the rest of your life with them. And so every time you have a real disagreement — the kind that cannot be finessed by agreeing that tonight you’ll order Indian, and next time you’ll get Chinese — you have to think carefully before you decide to have that fight. Is this really the hill that you’re willing to let your marriage die on? Because if not, now’s a good time to shrug your shoulders and let them paint the ceiling teal. How often do you really look up there, anyway?
You have to decide this even when the grievances are more important than paint colors: Your partner snaps at you when they’ve had a bad day, leaves their junk lying around for you to pick up, spends too much money on things you don’t need, or vanishes whenever your family comes over. Some hills are worth dying on. But a lot of them are of no strategic value in gaining your ultimate objective: a long and happy partnership.
If you spend your marriage trying to ensure that everything is always rigorously fair and just, and grabbing the flaming sword of righteousness every time some minor wrong is done to you, you may soon find that you spend more time fighting than you would have picking up their towels or going into the other room to watch a movie because your spouse is in a bad mood. Or you may find that you have a peaceful, clean house that’s exactly as you want it — because you’re living there alone.
Megan McArdle, “Can This Political Union Be Saved?”, Bloomberg View, 2016-12-30.
November 3, 2018
QotD: “Do you want to be married, or do you want to be right?”
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