Maybe you aren’t fighting about the same thing.

“I don’t know why he keeps saying that- I’ve told him how it really is 1000 times!”

When you have been trying to get a point across to your partner, and they just don’t get it, how possible is it that: they also want you to understand something that they have been trying to get you to hear?

When arguments happen again and again and again it usually has to do with people never actually listening. Instead, each person keeps arguing their point, to the deaf ears of someone who is also arguing their own point. You never get anywhere.

I explain this to the couples I work with in terms of the two of you discussing two different sports. One person is talking about basketball and one person is talking about football. You never get anywhere because you aren’t even understanding what sport the other person it talking about… you hear “score” or “ball” every so often, and then you keep right on convincing or coercing or trying to persuade them to understand how you saw it, how you are hurt, and what the problem was from your point of view.

You can solve the problem together, but not if you are talking about different problems. Imagine if one of you (I don’t care which one) was able to take a breath, calm their body and mind, and then say, “wait a minute- are you talking about basketball?”

This is allowing your partner’s experience to be just as important as yours is. It means finding the courage to show interest in how they experienced whatever topic is at hand, knowing that you saw it the way you did and they saw it the way that they did. And it is okay that it was different.

You have probably heard about this happening when 3 different people witnessed the same crime but had different stories about it afterwards. One witness saw it from across the street and cars driving by blocked some of what happened. Another witness was right next to the criminal, but was on the phone so missed what was said. Another witness saw the crime, but thought she recognized the criminal so was caught up in placing who they looked like and was more in her head about that than presently aware of what occurred. The same event went down, but everyone had a different perspective. Each person saw things differently, by no fault of their own. They can all talk about how they saw it differently, but no one is going to be able to convince the other to see it they way they saw it- they can’t. They had different experiences.

In the same way, we all bring our own shit to relationships. If you grew up with parents who ever forgot to pick you up after school or an activity, someone showing up late to a date is going to affect you in a different way than someone who doesn’t automatically have a wound about lateness or of being forgotten. In either case, it would be great if people were on time. But because of what you bring to the relationship, you will be wounded in a specific way.

Because we bring our own way of seeing the world to our relationships, something so obvious to one person is not going to be obvious to the other. When you KNOW you are arguing about basketball, your partner might simultaneously be certain you disagree on a football play.

When I work with couples, one of the strategies I help partners develop is the ability to leave their own world behind (“but it didn’t happen that way- it happened THIS way!”) and cross the bridge to visit the other person’s world. Their world is different than your own world. Maybe in their world, their parents did things differently. Maybe in their world, they had different expectations put on them. Maybe in their world, they only ever played ball on a field, not a court.

It takes courage and mindfulness to be willing and able to stop trying to convince someone of something long enough to really be interested in what their world is about. And doing so can calm your partner. It feels good to have someone listen and want to know more. It feels connecting to have a partner say “tell me more,” and “that makes sense to me,” even if the way they saw it was different.

This is all easier said than done, and it isn’t even that easy to say!  A whole version of relationship therapy is based on this concept, and I’ve seen it bring people together after they thought they couldn’t be close anymore. This skill is important for couples who have lost their ability to communicate. And, it is useful in all relationships. The ability to be interested in someone’s perspective, even if you fear the way they saw it might be hurtful to you is, in some cases, lifesaving.