To break free from your narrative, become aware of the meaning you’re making.
Key points
- Even when two people love each other, it can be difficult to have different opinions or beliefs.
- Many couples get entrenched in the same arguments over minor subjects because they need to be “right.”
- Being open to other people’s perspectives and versions of realities doesn’t have to invalidate your own.
As a couples therapist and also someone who’s been married a long time, I often wonder why it’s so difficult for two people who love each other to bear the experience of believing different things and holding different opinions. Of course, we want to feel aligned with our partner’s point of view; one of the reasons we choose a partner is because of how they see the world and what they believe. We like like-minded people. But when agreement is not there, when our partner has a different experience from ours, sees reality differently, it becomes a real problem, and harmony feels impossible.
It also surprises me to see the kinds of issues couples fight about and what they’re willing to go to war over. Even when the topic is utterly trivial, partners will argue viciously for whose version of reality is right, whose opinions are accurate in some imagined absolute reality. But as we all know, the cap on the toothpaste is never about the cap.
Couples get embroiled in winning the argument rather than understanding why the issue matters to their partner. The relationship then gets stuck in the land of right and wrong—in whose version of reality is reality. What moves the dial is when we drop the contents, unstick from the minutiae, and speak directly to the wound behind the toothpaste cap, to the pain that’s trying to speak through them. While the contents of the argument feel sticky and seductive, and it’s easy to take the bait—don’t. Don’t bite the hook.
On an existential level, we experience ourselves as our thoughts. We are thoroughly identified with our thoughts and opinions—we are what we think. Anyone who doesn’t accept our thoughts as valid (regardless of the topic) doesn’t accept us. If someone holds a different opinion from ours, it means that our opinion is wrong, which means that we are wrong. If someone has a different experience of reality, it means that our experience is invalid—given that there can only be one true reality. As a result, our opinions and experience must be continually validated and affirmed for us to feel valid and for our experience to feel like it matters.
Problems arise when we listen to our partner’s thoughts and opinions through the filter of whether we agree with them. Do we like those thoughts and opinions? Do they make us feel good? Do they validate us? In this way, the attention we offer, at the core, is self-centered. The contents of their experience must validate our own so that we ourselves can feel justified and legitimate. Essentially, good about ourselves.
In couples therapy, I’m often asked to play umpire, to award one person’s story with my official seal of rightness—to confirm that their version of reality, their experience in a particular situation, is the psychologically correct one to be having, and most importantly, more correct than their partner’s. If their narrative is the right one, then it follows that they’re allowed to feel the feelings that come with it. They’re entitled to empathy for their experience, which, at the end of the day, is what everyone is trying to get, albeit in our primitive and misguided ways.
And yet, a deeper and more trustworthy kind of intimacy exists. One in which we’re not just trying to turn our partner into someone who works for our own ego needs. Rather, we want to know our partner’s actual experience, not just the experience we want them to have—the one that feels good for us. It’s an intimacy in which we come to trust and feel safe in the truth itself, as opposed to any particular truth. We want to know what’s actually true, not just what protects our ego. Ultimately, it’s an intimacy that requires choosing love over fear: love of the truth over the fear of being hurt.
But this way of relating is not how we’re taught to relate. We’re taught that other people’s experiences and beliefs, if they’re different from ours, pose a threat. An open and truth-loving way of being with another person’s experience requires a profound paradigm shift; it demands that we be willing to set aside our me-story and loosen our grip on the thoughts and opinions that define that me.
When we get it that our self-story is not who we are, but just something we’ve constructed to protect ourselves, then we can listen without an agenda and wear our selfness like a loose garment rather than our own skin. Then, we can experience ourselves as a loving space rather than a solid entity defined by our thoughts and opinions. And then, we can be that being that can welcome another’s experience in whatever costume it arrives.
What I’m describing here is no small endeavor; it’s a shift at the deepest level of how we conceive of and experience ourselves. It’s extraordinary at every level, and with it comes a new life. Know this: A far richer and more satisfying way of living and loving is possible, but you have to be willing to release the separate you who’s doing the living and loving.
Excerpted from my upcoming book Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck (November 1, 2026).