Blurring The Line

Blurring the Line

An offended friend is harder to win back than a fortified city. Arguments separate friends like a gate locked with bars.

Proverbs 18:19

We were flying home to Seattle after a speaking engagement in Atlanta when we sat down on the plane next to a professor at the University of Washington, Pepper Schwartz, whom we’d met a time or two. She’d recently written a book called Peer Marriage and was returning home on this flight after a long media tour.

We were all a little tired but not enough to keep us from talking. Pepper still had enough energy to tell us about her recent research findings, and her enthusiasm was contagious. “Loving couples negotiate,” she said. In her study of couples who enjoy their marriages, Dr. Schwartz found that there’s less of the rank pulling and power playing seen in unhappy unions. Schwartz reports that these egalitarian twosomes have conversations filled with supportive questions and what she calls tag questions, such as “Do you agree?” and “What do you think?”

Think about that for a moment. Do the two of you use these little questions as you’re negotiating what to do or where to go? It turns out that these little questions are vital. They open the conversation to the other person’s views, just as two business people who respect each other might. They allow a couple to hash out a fair agreement on anything important, from day care for the kids to what kind of vacation they will take. “Our solemn oath is: Never give up, never walk out—until we are both satisfied,” one woman in a peer marriage told Schwartz.

British statesman Winston Churchill once said, “The English never draw a line without blurring it.” We love that statement. Why? Because that should be true of the couple who learns to compromise. When a husband and wife come to believe that equality means splitting things down the middle, keeping score, then marriage becomes a contest of who can get a better deal. And that wipes out the true spirit of compromise. Marriage is not about score keeping. It’s not about equitable distributions. It’s about compromise. It’s about bending rather than breaking. Agreeing to find an agreeable solution to one’s disagreements means that on some occasions one partner gets a bigger piece of the pie, and on other occasions the pie is cut differently.

So when was the last time you learned from the British sentiment that both sides win when the lines are blurred and no one is keeping score in your relationship?^a

Better bend than break.

—Scottish proverb

^a 110