Why You Should Not Compromise

A better way to resolve conflict

Did you read last week’s post:

Conflict is like the flu. You know it happens, but you hope it won’t happen to you, and not today. And, if it does, it will be easy, and you’ll be back on your feet in no time. But sometimes, it puts you out for weeks. As long as you live, conflict and the flu will happen to you.

While some contentions get resolved with as little as clarifying your statements, intentions, and plans, admitting fault or a mistake, others linger and eat you up for weeks, months, and even years.

“If you don’t want to fight, learn to compromise,” you’ve heard it a million times. I consider this a recipe for stewing in resentment, leading to recurring arguments about the same thing. Here’s why.

Compromise often relies on the same assumptions as distributive bargaining: that there is a fixed pie and every gain for one person comes at the expense of the other. It works in some situations, like when you and your friends need to split the bill at the pizza shop. You all ate a different amount of pizza. Count the slices. Determine your portion of the bill. People pay for what they eat. Everyone goes home full and happy.

The classic example of distributive bargaining is haggling over price. You have a bike to sell and want $100 for it. I want to pay $50. We settle at $75. Neither of us got what we wanted.

The compromise worked, but the result is mediocre. We could get over the bike price after a while, especially because we may never see each other again, and the stakes are pretty low. But when these types of compromises occur in relationships, the mediocre results can cause people to feel and behave in strange ways.

Not everything divides like a pizza pie or should amount to a haggle. Values, beliefs, wants, and human needs do not subject themselves to these strategies.

If you believe Christmas should be spent with your parents, but your partner wants to go skiing and brings up the fact that last year Christmas was at your parents’ house, you are about to enter a negotiation. If you are married to someone whose wants, values, priorities, or needs regularly conflict with your own, good luck feeling happy about the compromise you end up making. At best, you will feel begrudgingly accommodating. Inevitably, you will start keeping a mental score that you will gladly bring up at the next negotiation, whatever that might be about.

Usually, no one wins, not even the person who gets to have their way, because they will have to contend with their partner’s resentment and eventually give up something they want to even out the score. The winner still has to live with their partner’s disappointment or withdrawal. A negotiated victory often becomes a relational loss.

Sometimes “compromise” means the less powerful person consistently accepts slightly less than they want. Many unhappy marriages are built on decades of “reasonable compromises” that disproportionately favored one partner. If every major decision is split down the middle or skewed towards the more powerful person, people may slowly lose touch with what they genuinely want. You see this in career choices, lifestyle choices, sexuality, parenting, retirement plans, and even in who people vote for and where a couple chooses to live.

Even though compromise is fast - let’s just meet in the middle, many conflicts have objectively better solutions than the midpoint. But to find them requires a different way of thinking about them.