Agreement is usually not necessary.
Many of us have lived as if we always had to be right. We did not stop to notice that other things we cared about were being lost such as friends who got tired of our persistent need to be right, or children whose self-esteem was undermined when there was no room for their ideas, or a former mate who drifted away because we could relax only if we were proven right. In our differences there is much more to look at and far more to settle than who is right and who is wrong.
An intimate connection is simply communicating our differences to each other and understanding them. Agreement is usually not necessary. Our partnership gives us an opportunity to view the world intimately through someone else’s eyes. Defeating our differences defeats our opportunities to learn. We need just exclaim, Oh that’s another way to see it!
Our task is to learn how our partner sees the world. We grow because we gain a second outlook.
You are reading from the book:
The More We Find In Each Other by Merle Fossum and Mavis Fossum
Before I got into recovery, I thought love equated to always agreeing. If you didn’t agree with me, that meant you discarded a part of me, and to protect myself from your contempt, I would be sure to let you know how much I thought you sucked first. That was easy enough to do with people I didn’t have a big emotional attachment to, but for my close friends and loved ones, it was always such a huge internal conflict. If you didn’t agree with me, didn’t that mean you didn’t like me? How could we be friends/lovers if we don’t always agree?
Where does that line of thinking come from? I obviously learned it somewhere along the way. I’m glad that I “unlearned” it because I have so much more peace today knowing that disagreeing is not a bad thing. I love knowing that everyone is allowed to have a different opinion about every single thing they want to and it doesn’t reflect one tiny iota on how much they like or dislike me. It’s not about me. But that’s a concept for a whole ‘nother blog entry.
