Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

This is the thing about intimate relationships: we sign up to share our lives with someone else, and sooner or later we realize that we are also living with another person’s reality. But we don’t particularly want to live with our partner’s reality. We just want him or her to second our own. The failure to do so constitutes a betrayal of a tacit contract—a commitment to affirm our vision of the world. This is the person whose job is to understand us perfectly and share our worldview down to its last particular (or so we think, consciously or otherwise), and his or her failure to do so is both maddening and threatening. We also fight so much inside our intimate relationships because it is there that our core convictions are most vulnerable to challenge. Remember the difference between how communities react to internal versus external dissent? When strangers disagree with us, we can choose to ignore, dismiss, or denigrate them, without any immediate or obvious consequences for our own happiness. But when our loved ones disagree with us, we don’t have such an easy out. We can feel their realities encroaching on our own, and we have to deal with the discomfort of conflicting theories and the distressing possibility that we might need to be vulnerable, give ground, be mistaken. Of course, we can ignore, dismiss, or denigrate our loved ones, too—and many people do—but the result is miserable for everyone involved. The other and better option, Hendrix says, is to accept our partn...