Oh, I hear you. And I want to sit with that for a second, because I know how exhausting that is. Like genuinely exhausting. When you‘re living with someone who always has to be right, it can feel like you’re constantly being erased.
But here’s what I want to offer you, and I want you to stay with me on this, because it might feel a little sideways at first.
What if “always having to be right” isn’t actually about being right?
What if it’s about survival?
Because here’s what I see again and again in my work. The person who cannot let go of being right, who digs in, who argues the point to death, who has to win, that person is almost always someone who is terrified of being wrong. And being wrong, for them, doesn’t just mean “I made a mistake.” It means something far more painful. It means I’m not good enough. I’m a disappointment. I’m not acceptable.
So they fight for their position the way someone else might fight for their life. Because on some deep level, inside their nervous system, inside that most wounded part of them, it actually feels that way.
Now. Does that mean you just have to absorb it and smile? Absolutely not. Your experience is completely valid. The feeling of being dismissed, of never being heard, of always being the one who has to back down, that is real and it matters and it makes total sense that you’d be hurting.
Here’s the tragedy of it, though, and I use that word deliberately. Because when you feel dismissed and unheard, what does that do to you? It probably makes you push harder. Try to make your point more forcefully. Maybe get louder, or maybe shut down completely. And what does that look like to your partner? It looks like more evidence that they’re failing you. That they’re a disappointment. So they dig in harder.
You’re both throwing boomerangs at each other. They throw the “I have to be right” boomerang, it hits you and leaves you feeling unheard, so you throw it back, and it comes around and hits them right in the place that says “see, you’re not enough.”
Neither of you are the villain here. You are both caught in a system that is hurting both of you.
Now, the real work, and this is hard, this is real work, is getting to a place where you can see underneath your partner’s need to be right and find the frightened person who just cannot bear to be wrong one more time. And at the same time, your partner needs to be able to see underneath your frustration the person who just desperately needs to feel heard and like they matter.
That meeting place, where both of your pain is visible at the same time, where you’re not fighting each other anymore but sitting inside the sadness of what this costs both of you, that is where things can actually shift.
I won’t pretend that’s easy to get to on your own. But it is possible. And it starts with understanding that what looks like arrogance is almost always armor.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
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