It started with a dinner party. Antoinette was retelling a story about a miscommunication involving the boys, something that had happened at a friend’s house. Her version didn’t match mine. I could feel the correction forming before she’d even finished. The words were right there, ready, precise.
I didn’t say them. Barely.
What I noticed instead was her face. The feeling in it. The weight of what the moment had meant to her. And I made a choice, not a heroic one, just a small, deliberate one: I let her version stand.
She never mentioned the discrepancy. But I could feel the ease come back into her voice. Her body leaned toward me rather than away.
That’s the thing about needing to be right. The cost doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates quietly, in conversations that close a little too soon, in stories left unfinished, in the slight withdrawal you can feel but can’t quite name. You weren’t trying to hurt anyone. You were just clarifying. Just holding the facts in place.
I know this reflex from the inside. I started school a year younger than everyone else due to a regional enrolment mix-up and spent years overcompensating, wanting to sound older, more certain, more in command of the room. The impulse to control the story became armour. If I held the facts tightly enough, I believed I’d be safe from misunderstanding, from blame, from the shame of being seen as less than enough.
It took a long time to see that control and connection are, in practice, opposites. Our nervous systems don’t respond to logic. They respond to tone, to rhythm, to the quiet signals that tell us whether we are being received or revised. Even a gently delivered correction can feel like dismissal. A small fracture. A message, not spoken but felt: you’re being managed, not heard.
Gottman’s research points to the same thing. It’s not conflict that erodes a relationship. It’s defensiveness, the habitual edge in the voice, the reflex to counter before you’ve stayed with what was said.
There’s a kind of restraint that most of us are never taught. Not the passive kind, not biting your tongue and silently winning the argument in your head. Something more present than that: choosing the person over the detail. Letting the story live in the way it was told, because what matters isn’t the accuracy of the facts. It’s the accuracy of the presence you brought.
Being understood matters. Being right, it turns out, mostly just gets in the way.
My book “Shut Up: A Journey into the Lost Art of Listening” is available on Amazon if you want to go further with this.
