You Don't Need To Compromise

One of the most common pieces of advice people give for relationships is that you must be willing to compromise. That you must be willing to meet people in the middle to live a mutually supportive life.

This advice fairly suggests that if you’re inflexible about how you go about things, it creates consequences and problems that impact your well-being more than the small compromises would. But that’s not the only way you need to think about it…

The term ‘marriage’ literally means to bring the elements of two things together. It does not require that we compromise, or that you can’t get exactly what you want. It simply means that there are more details and factors that must be considered.

It’s true that there are real tradeoffs in life. We can’t have it all. But don’t let that keep you from realizing that you can have way more of what you want than you realized.

One of the brightest minds in business today Ray Dalio talks about compromise like this: "Rather than seeing things as a ‘this or that’, how do we get as much of both as possible”?

If we take a few extra moments to think beyond the immediate decision and get creative about what other options are available, it’s very often that there are win-wins that you hadn’t considered.

For example: Planning my wedding, it was very important to my wife’s mom that incorporated unity candles and had a religious component to our wedding. But when we envisioned our wedding day, Irene and I agreed that we didn’t want to incorporate religion in our main ceremony.

So rather than rejecting the request altogether, we weaved it into the wedding in a more private way. We win because we had the ceremony we wanted and Irene’s Mom wins because we represented the religious practice she values.

Would you call that compromising? I wouldn’t. We all got exactly what we wanted!

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to compromise and sacrifice what you want, but I am telling you that you don’t need to.

Wouldn’t it be way better if everyone got everything they wanted and not just a diluted version of it? It simply requires that you do things differently.

So bring to mind something you might be compromising on right now and ask yourself “Is there a way for everyone to get what they want?”

I’m sure there’s a version where everyone gets more of what they want at the very least, and that’s a step in the right direction.