Who is right?

How do you disagree well when you both feel right?

Our Experience

It’s a bad sign whenever Libby has an idea for a weekly post.

A bad sign, for me that is.

After nearly three years of encouraging couples to talk more like friends than business partners, or worse, adversaries, she knows she has a public forum to prove how right she is whenever we have disagreements.

“This should be your next Good Conversation,” she announced as we were disagreeing about something I had just done.

Her timing was unfair considering I was still engaged in the disagreement. (By “engaged” I mean that I had stopped talking and decided to totally ignore her point of view. Who teaches us men that skill?)

The disagreement?

I have found a new place in our house where I can sit, be silent, listen to a devotional and pray when it is too cold to be outside. (I had to find a new place because my spouse is retired and is always around, usually doing chores.)

I sit in a rocker looking out the window of a front bedroom.

I raise the shades halfway because the sun is too bright to open the shades fully.

Every morning I notice that the bottom half of the window I am looking out is dirty. I say to myself that I will clean that window.

So, today I did.

The bedroom is on the second floor but I am proud that I know how to free the window from the frame and lean it in so that I can clean the outside.

The window comes out at the top of its frame while being held in at the bottom by two small posts inserted in small holes in a spring-loaded sash. I move the window carefully because I do not want it to come out of the holes.

When it does there is a loud spring noise and you are now holding a window totally detached.

This is no problem for people who clean windows every day, but it is tricky to get those posts back into the holes, especially if one cannot see the posts or the holes.

So, I needed Libby’s help.

Apparently, I did not explain the task clearly because initially she was attempting to guide the posts into the wrong hole. But when we got that straight it was still difficult to angle the window so that it could go in the holes.

It only took one or two sudden spring-loaded releases, a window’s version of Jack-in-the Box, before Libby asked why I had attempted this.

“We’re never doing this again,” she declared.

“We’ll pay to have our windows cleaned.”

“Are you kidding?”, I reply.

“Pay a couple hundred dollars just because of a little aggravation?”

“But look at the marks you left on the frame.”

“And you broke off the pole that adjusts the shades. That’s the second window you’ve done that to!”

(Note the shaming. One person’s evidence is another person’s shame.)

“But by trying I finally figured out how to do it,” I countered.

That’s when she announced going public with this conversation, which was actually better than her going deeper into analysis.

“Are you just trying to prove that you are a man,” she could have asked.

“Or once again you’re denying your disability,” she could have added.

I call that coping.

Will I keep cleaning windows?

Probably. But not when she’s around.

Perhaps this conversation is not over between us. But, the how we disagree is always more important than the what we are disagreeing about.

It may be the case that friends would have been kinder and more curious and not as quick to jump to conclusions, but our friendship was not injured.

How safe are your disagreements?