Being in the Right

On the weekend I was talking to a friend and his wife who left me with a number of real-life realizations.  Sure they both told me the same story with the same facts but their stories were still totally different.

This is a couple who are heading towards divorce, even though neither of them wants to be divorced. They're both excellent parents and underneath they really do love each other. They just can't see this because they have become obsessively negative.

If they don't change their ways then divorce is a certainty. They have become so negative to each other that everything said was construed as an attack by the other persons.

The offending issue was extremely trivial, as these things normally are. In this particular case the husband needed new batteries for his torch, and the wife purchased new batteries but they were the wrong size. That seemingly innocent little mistake became a catalyst that turned into a major confrontation. The husband accused the wife of deliberately purchasing the wrong size batteries just to cause an upset, while the wife accused the husband of once again not appreciating her efforts to please him.

The realization is that past a certain point, divorce becomes like a runaway train; almost impossible to stop until it crashes and destroys something valuable. My friend of his wife are locked into a position whereby each is totally committed to finding faults in the other, and to protecting themselves from being found out by the other person. The result was a totally toxic confrontation, with no possibility of a positive outcome, and another certain step along the road to total marriage breakdown.

It really was a living example of that proverbial question, "Do you want to be right OR Do you want to be happy?"