To the marriage of unlike minds

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage, mainly because my wedding is coming up in April (to a great guy, by the way, the patience to my impulsiveness, the calm to my storm, my very own amazing travel agent, and so much more.) I was browsing the Web one day and ran across some profiles of long-married couples so, of course, I read them.

Here's a quote from one: “Bill can be very knot-headed about things. When we have our spats, we each speak our mind and then we go on our way. We don’t always expect everything to be resolved or to change the other person’s mind,” says June Pritchard about her husband. They have been married 64 years.

June’s comment about her knot-headed husband (in my relationship, we have an extremely fair distribution of knot-headedness) is a good guide for any relationship, from marriage to friendship to business. I know that I have learned a lot about letting go of my need to be right during my 13 years as a freelance writer. While my clients do pay me for my expertise and experience, there are times when they want to do things their way. I have to let them. Once I’ve made my point (okay, once I’ve made my point twice), I let it go. You know the saying about leading a horse to water?

This doesn’t mean that I’m happy about the product the client puts out and generally, I wouldn’t use that piece as one of my samples. But the fact that the client wants to do things a different way (and, often in my view, in a less-than-perfect way) doesn’t mean I won’t work with that client again. In fact, if the client is a good one, I will happily work again with the client and we see eye to eye or the client takes my advice and thanks me for it. It’s oddly freeing to let someone else do things his or her way. I can let go of it and go on to something else.

I can learn a lot in my personal relationships from my client relationships. Too often, it seems to me, I’m vested in a need to be right about my advice, about what I plan to do, about how I see politics or religion or some other topic. But do I? Can I still be a good friend, a good girlfriend, a good spouse and not be the source of all rightness? Maybe if I don’t need to be the perfect advice giver or life liver, I’ll be a better spouse and friend.

One of my friends is extremely conservative (in my view) and there have been times when I wondered if I should continue the friendship because I’m pretty liberal. Then I realized that my friend’s conservatism was not the sum of all of her parts. She is generous and kind and loyal and more. Should I cut her off because there is one part of her character that displeases me? Beyond merely not cutting her off, maybe I should listen to her views, really listen, not listen with the idea that I’ll figure out how to rebut what she’s saying. Maybe if I shut off my “no” voice more often, I could hear what my friend is actually saying and then decide if I agree or not. Maybe conservatives have some ideas I could get behind. Maybe the political and religious worlds aren’t as black and white, right and wrong as I used to think they were.

Maybe rightness for the sake of rightness isn’t a virtue, after all. I’ll always be a knothead but I’m aiming to know better when to be knot-headed and when it’s just plain not-headedness, also known as orneriness.