One thing relationship gurus parrot often is the need for compromise. Conflicts are inevitable in a relationship, they say, and so sometimes you need to compromise. While sometimes it’s possible to hold back a thought or a statement, and prevent a situation from blowing up, at other times, there’s simply no way out.
Consider the situation last night, for example. The wife wanted to make Maggi for dinner. Now, unlike most Indians of my generation I don’t like Maggi, and I can at best tolerate it for a snack – definitely not for dinner. And so I definitely wasn’t pleased at the proposal that we have Maggi for dinner. The question was how I should react.
I had two choices – either to grudgingly accept, eat Maggi for dinner and feel unhappy about what I had for dinner, or to tell her I would make my own dinner, which would come at the cost of her getting upset that I wasn’t going to eat something she was going to lovingly prepare.
So one way I would feel unhappy, and the other way she would – so the moment she uttered the proposal to make Maggi, some kind of conflict or unhappiness was given.
That, however, doesn’t mean that it was her fault either – to propose that we eat Maggi, because the same tradeoff applies there as well. She could either propose we eat Maggi, with the result that either she’ll get upset or I’ll get unhappy, or she could hold back the thought and silently bottle it in. Both would incur a cost.
And it happens all the time – there are days when I want us to go out, knowing fully well that the wife likes to stay home. If I voice my desire to go out, it will lead to conflict – either I get upset that she refuses or she’ll grudgingly accompany me. If not, I’ll sulk silently at not having explored the option to go out. And it goes on.
How do you even resolve such differences? By backward induction, the conflict happens at the moment a thought is planted in your head – you could say that we should train ourselves that we don’t even get thoughts that could potentially lead to situations that potentially lead to conflicts, but isn’t that possibly taking things too far?
Anyway, last night we “monetised” our anguish, when I said she should go ahead and make Maggi, but only for herself and Berry (who also loves Maggi). I made myself a Halloumi sandwich. As it happened, all three of us woke up in the middle of the night feeling incredibly hungry!