Why Relationships Matter

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The biggest issue couples fight about is whose version of reality is right—whose experience is valid, accurate, and what really happened. As their therapist, I am assigned the role of referee in the battle, with the power to determine whose truth is accurate and thus deserving of being heard and attended to. The question becomes which person’s story I will award with my official seal of rightness. Whose version of reality and experience in a particular situation is the psychologically correct one to have?

The experience people long for more than any other in their relationships is a simple one, but nonetheless, one that doesn’t happen often. People long to be heard. But heard in a very particular way—without judgment, correction, or interpretation, and without being told to change. Ultimately, to be heard correctly, without anything being done to or added onto their experience.

More than anything, people want to be seen and known, to be given the space to share what they’re living—without being told what to do about it, what’s wrong with it, why it’s invalid and not the right experience to be having, why they’re to blame for that experience, and essentially how to make it go away. They long for a space where their experience can feel welcome and safe, where they can determine their own truth, and define, for themselves, what they feel, want, and need.

At the core, we all long to have our truth related to as a destination, a place to land and be received, as it is, rather than a place from which to launch a campaign of alteration. We want our truth to be known and offered the dignity and space to be.

When couples fight, they don’t usually hear each other, not in a deep sense. They don't allow each other to express their real experience, not without trying to do something with or to it, even if that’s to try and make it better. Most people simply don’t know how to listen in the way we humans long to be listened to. At the end of the day, sadly, we often don’t give the ones we love the most what they really need.

When people listen to their partner, it’s through the filter of what it means and says about them (the person listening). They evaluate, judge, and respond to the other person’s experience through the lens of whether they agree with and share the same experience as the other person. In short, how does my truth compare with their truth? Does their truth make me feel good about myself, confirm my own self-esteem, and shore up my own identity? Does it validate my experience and the story I tell myself about myself?

In this way, while not malicious, the listening and attention we offer each other, at the core, is self-centered and protective; it's about our own survival. The other’s experience is viewed in relation to and in comparison with our own. The other’s truth must validate our own, so that our truth can stand, be right—and matter.

Most couples operate on a system of “but-s.” “But” is the word we use to separate and join differing experiences. If our partner’s feelings are unwanted by us or difficult to tolerate, if they contrast with our own, then one of us has to be proven wrong. What the other is living must be faulty, inappropriate, pathological, or the wrong thing to be living. Contradictory realities cannot coexist and be equally valid and deserving of respect, curiosity, or empathy.

Why Relationships Matter

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The other’s truth must not just be wrong, however, but proven wrong beyond a reasonable doubt. It must be disallowed, or put another way, annihilated. It goes like this: my experience is this, but your experience is that, which means that your experience, if I really hear it, and treat it like it matters, will make my own experience irrelevant and invalid (which will make me irrelevant and invalid). If I don’t prove your truth to be wrong, then I won’t be entitled to feel what I feel, to be attended to, and ultimately, to have my reality heard and known.

The problem we bump into, however, is that reality resolves in contradiction. It’s always both and. Experience is relative, not fixed, not one thing that’s either right or wrong. There’s no keeper of the real truth. What’s true for one person is rarely true for another. We don’t need to share the same experience with our partner or anyone else in order for both experiences to be true—for the person who is experiencing it. Another person’s truth can be utterly different from ours and also be true and valid, as true and valid as our own. Our experience is what we perceive, see, feel, and essentially live. It’s valid because it’s our experience.

What makes for a truly healthy relationship is an attitude of both and not either or. The other person’s experience—and—our experience, no matter how close or opposing their content. Both deserve a place at the table. A table, when it comes to love, that’s bigger than right and wrong, and wide enough to hold all contents.

It’s strange, we imagine that we’re all living in one world, one reality, one truth, one experience, and one what is. But in fact, there are 8.2 billion realities in this one world, as many realities as there are people. We’re all living inside our own private cinema inside our own private mind. What makes couples work and allows for true listening is when we connect different experiences with an “and,” not a “but.” Our experience—and—their experience, both true, and all welcome in a space of curiosity and kindness.

A trustworthy kind of listening is possible and can, in fact, be learned. It happens when we stop demanding that our partner be someone who agrees with and shares our experience, when we stop listening to the other through the filter of “me” and what protects our own rightness. In true intimacy, we realize that our rightness doesn’t depend on anything or anyone else. The rightness of our experience stands on the fact that it’s our experience. With that clarity, we then want to know our partner’s actual truth, not just the truth that feels good for us. This knowing creates a trustworthy and unshakable intimacy. Rather than any particular truth, we find refuge and love in the truth itself.

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