Sometimes it’s better to be kind than to be right. Nowhere is that more true than in your relationships. You have to learn how to pick your battles, otherwise the relationship is just going to be chaos for both of you. The need to be right is the kind of thing that will undermine and eventually destroy the relationship.
Why? Resentment. Your partner will resent constantly being made to feel like they’re in the wrong. And resentment is poison for a relationship. If you’re more attached to being right, you’re going to have a hard time creating happiness and connection. So what are some signs that you should change your approach?
1. You listen to respond instead of listening to understand.
Active listening is an important part of emotional intelligence, which is an essential skill for healthy relationships. Too many people are just waiting for their turn to talk. They don’t actually listen to the person who is speaking.
Instead, they are spending their time thinking about what they’re going to say next. And that undermines the relationship because your partner will resent that their issue is going unheard. And when it comes to the need to always be right, you’re most likely thinking about what you can say that will disprove your partner’s point, rather than actually hearing their point.
Even worse, a lack of active listening can cause a small problem to explode into a much bigger one. Why? Well, because you miss important details that can change the context of a situation, you make decisions based on that, and now you’re in an argument over nothing.
2. You keep score on old wrongs done to you.
Apologies and forgiveness are a much deeper subject than we often acknowledge. In a perfect world, you would give an apology to someone, they would forgive you if they were over it, and then you would move on. But therein lies an important phrase: “If they were over it.”
It’s best not to accept an apology until you actually are over it. That way, you’re not regularly reopening old wounds and causing new fights about old issues because you say you’ve accepted their apology and moved on, when in reality you haven’t.
In a relationship, you have to let things go once they are resolved. And if you decide a particular issue can’t be resolved, then you must make the active decision to file it away and not bring it up again, unless it’s actually relevant. Yes, the emotions surrounding the event may surface, but you will have to sort through that and process those emotions, possibly with professional support if needed.
3. You always have to have the last word.
Relationship therapists share that an argument is best approached as you and your partner versus the problem, instead of you versus your partner. Needing to have the “last word” is the opposite of that. It’s something that communicates disrespect. It’s saying, “Hey, I feel like it’s important that I am the one who closes this situation off.” Even if it’s not your situation to close.
How does this relate to needing to be right? Well, some people may feel like they’re losing the argument if they don’t get the last word in.
But, again, it shouldn’t be you versus your partner. It should be the two of you as a team against a problem that has come up. You have to let go of the need to end an argument on your own terms. Sometimes, it’s better to concede the battle to preserve your relationship, rather than focusing on preserving your ego. Plus, if you keep pushing, they may feel they need to keep pushing back, and the argument just continues.
4. You care more about facts than feelings.
I struggled with this for a long time. I’m on the autistic spectrum, and in my brain, facts often override feelings. For example, if I feel upset about something, I stop and examine what I’m feeling and why. If it doesn’t make logical sense, a lot of times I can shut off that negative emotion and let it go. In my mind, facts were always more important than feelings because facts are what we could agree on.
But that’s not a good approach in relationships. I eventually realized that my issue was because of how my brain is wired. Emotions aren’t logical and rational for everyone nearly as often as they are for me. I had to stop trying to hold other people to the standard of my emotional landscape and just accept them as they are.
Sometimes, people get emotional for reasons that don’t necessarily follow a logical course, or at least not a logical course in your opinion. But it still needs to be respected, otherwise they will resent not being heard.
5. You correct instead of allowing connection to happen.
Not everything needs to be perfectly factual and accurate. If you focus too much on the details, you will find that the other person just stops communicating with you. And once they stop communicating, that will be the death of the relationship. Accuracy may seem important all the time, but it’s not when it comes to handling emotions.
Why? Well, instead of seeing it as a correction of accuracy, the other person is likely to interpret it as nitpicking.
That’s more likely if the two of you are fighting for some reason. And focusing on mistakes or inaccuracies will cause the person to get defensive. Once that happens, the lines of communication will shut down, which again can lead to resentment. And as I’ve already pointed out, there’s nothing worse for a relationship than resentment.
6. You give non-apologies instead of taking responsibility.
It stands to reason that someone who always needs to be right will struggle to say sorry. After all, it’s essentially an admission that they weren’t right about something after all. So they’ll either avoid apologizing altogether or give non-apologies like, “I’m sorry you felt hurt by that.”
Then there’s the “I’m sorry, but…” apology. Any apology that includes the word “but” is most likely not an apology at all. Instead, it’s someone who is apologizing because they know it’s what you want to hear, not that they are actually sorry.
Apologies should be treated with great consideration and respect and given sincerely, because they are the glue that keeps a relationship together. You’re both going to make mistakes, errors in judgment, or just do dumb things sometimes. That’s all a normal part of life and relationships.
What matters is how you put the pieces back together once something is broken. The more you repair those breaches of trust, the deeper the trust and respect will go. However, that will never develop unless both parties can take responsibility for themselves.
7. You feel like compromising is a loss.
The interesting thing about compromise is that it doesn’t particularly feel good, most of the time. In fact, if you walk away from a compromise feeling good about the situation, you probably took advantage of the other person. The reason being, is that if you have to compromise and meet in the middle, then both of you are sacrificing some of what you want to reach that agreement. Naturally, neither of you will be entirely happy as a result.
If you aren’t sacrificing something, then it’s not a fair compromise. And if it’s not a fair compromise, it will lead to – you guessed it – resentment. Your partner will feel that they’re being treated unfairly, because they are, and they will be angry about that. Ultimately, it won’t lead your relationship anywhere good.
Final thoughts…
The need to be right is disruptive to a healthy relationship. The fact of the matter is that not every battle is worth fighting for. Sometimes, you just have to let other people be wrong or develop the emotional intelligence to accept being wrong with grace yourself. The ability to admit you’re wrong is what helps you learn and grow.
In a relationship, it’s a way to show respect and care for the well-being and comfort of the other person. To not do that is to light the fuse for a bomb that will explode later on down the road, once all of that resentment builds up to a breaking point.
