“This story is yet to be written,” he told me. He was talking about his marriage.
I had asked him the question I often ask in my work: can you stay connected to someone you deeply disagree with on fundamental values?
He took a long time before answering.
He and his wife come from the same cultural background. Same social world, similar families, shared religion, aligned values on almost everything that matters in daily life. They parent their three children well and are, by his own description, strong partners.
Except when it comes to politics.
She is far left. He leans right. Both feel passionately about their positions, and both have the kind of personalities that do not hold back. When they argue about politics, the volume rises fast. They say things they regret. They have both wished they could walk back words that came out in the heat of the moment.
“It is often embarrassing,” he said, “how loud our conflicts can get.”
What they agreed on, the one thing they hold firm, is that their children should not witness it. They are ashamed of how they express their disagreement, not the disagreement itself. They know they have not learned to debate these things calmly, and they do not want their children to absorb that pattern.
So they keep the political conversations private. When the topic comes up around the kids, each parent speaks to them separately about their own perspective. They are raising their children to hear both sides from people who love them, even though the two sides come from opposite ends of the table.
Their teenagers are getting older now and more aware of the world. He told me he worries about what happens when the kids start asking harder questions, when they can sense the tension even behind closed doors.
“I don’t have a clean answer for how we will manage it,” he said. “For now, this is where we stand.”
This couple is doing something that rarely gets credit: they are being honest about what they have not figured out. They are not pretending to have a system that works. They are holding an imperfect arrangement together with the only tools they trust, their love for each other and their commitment to their children.
The goal is not to eliminate disagreement. It is to stay connected through it. And staying connected does not always look graceful. Sometimes it looks like two people who fight too loudly, regret what they said, and get up the next morning to try again.
He did not tell me they had found the answer. He told me they were still looking. And he told me the relationship was worth the search.
That is what I want to say about the people we love and disagree with: this story is yet to be written, and I am choosing to stay for the next chapter.
This story is from my book Loving Conflict, Amazon Best Seller and #1 New Release in Business Conflict Resolution & Mediation. Link: https://linktr.ee/anna.lecat.
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