I’ll start with something that doesn’t seem related to our arguments, but you’ll see why it is.
Dan Ariely, professor of psychology at Duke University studied people’s relationships with their dentists. It turns out that the more money we spend with our dentist, and the more painful treatments we receive, the more loyal we are, and the less we question the diagnoses and recommendations our dentists make. He also discovered that our dentists are correct only about 50% of the time when diagnosing which teeth have cavities in need of being filled. We tend to be more loyal to our dentists than other professionals who hurt us less.
Why?
When we have invested ourselves in something painful and costly, we really want to believe all that suffering has been for a good reason. So we have a hard time questioning those decisions. Ariely likens this to Stockholm syndrome.
How does this relate to arguing with your most beloved? Even though we want to stop arguing so much or so painfully, perhaps there is a part of us that says, “I’ve put in this much painful energy, this is no time to stop. Questioning our harshest criticisms and most self-righteous positions with our partners might feel like a risky thing to do because we’ve invested so much already.
Giving up on being right may feel like admitting defeat. Digging in our heels might feel like the right thing to do, even though it leads to so much anguish.
So in this case, it’s not a person we’re being irrationally loyal to, it’s a position and a set of beliefs. So I’m curious: Are there any old beliefs that you might be holding on to, that perhaps don’t really help you or your relationship? Would you feel you’d lost too much if you softened some of your judgments or questioned your own righteousness?
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Relationships and Communication 