You Can Understand Your Partner Without Agreeing With Them

Most couples who come to see me arrive with a scorecard. Each person has a version of the fight that is airtight, well rehearsed, and obviously correct.

The argument turns into a trial where both people act as prosecutor and nobody sits in the jury box.

Taking your partner's perspective asks for less than people fear. You keep your opinion. You set it down long enough to learn what the argument looks like from the other chair, and you can pick it back up when you're done. Agreement may never come. Understanding still changes the fight.

What the research shows

One of the best tests of this came from social psychologist Eli Finkel and his colleagues. They tracked 120 married couples over two years. In the first year, every couple's marital quality slipped, which is what usually happens over time. In the second year, half the couples were randomly assigned a short writing task. They described their latest disagreement as an impartial outsider would see it, someone who cared about both spouses equally. Couples who skipped the exercise kept sliding. Couples who did it stopped sliding. The exercise added up to 21 minutes over the entire year, which the authors called "a spectacular return on investment" (Finkel et al., 2013). These couples still had disagreements, but the disagreements left them less angry and distressed, and that reduced distress accounted for the benefit. The authors note a limit worth knowing: the exercise kept marital quality from dropping, but it did not raise it.

A team led by Lindsey Rodriguez at the University of South Florida tested a shorter version in 2020, during lockdown, when a lot of couples had nowhere to go. They recruited 716 adults living with a partner and gave them a writing task that took 5 to 8 minutes. Participants who rewrote a recent argument from the viewpoint of an uninvolved observer reported less conflict two weeks later than the comparison groups. They had fewer arguments, fewer aggressive episodes, and less intense ones.

Accuracy matters too. A meta-analysis pooling 21 studies and 2,739 participants looked at how well partners read each other's thoughts and feelings. Better accuracy went along with higher satisfaction, though the effect was small (r = .134). One kind of accuracy carried most of the weight. Correctly reading a partner's negative emotions was more closely tied to satisfaction (r = .171) than reading positive ones (r = .068, not significant). The moments that count are the ones when your partner is upset.

The problem with imagining

Here is where the popular advice falls apart. "Put yourself in their shoes" sounds sensible, and most people assume it works. Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, and Nicholas Epley tested that assumption across 25 experiments. Imagining someone else's point of view did not reliably make people better at knowing what that person thought or felt. In some cases it made them worse, while leaving them more sure of themselves. The one thing that helped was asking. People who talked to the other person and heard the answer got it right more often. As the title of their paper puts it, understanding another mind "requires getting perspective, not taking perspective" (Eyal et al., 2018).

So stepping outside the fight and understanding your partner are two separate skills. The outsider's view cools you down. Knowing what your partner actually thinks requires asking them and listening to what they say. Both methods below build in that second step.

The Gottman approach

John and Julie Gottman built their method on the work of Anatol Rapoport, a mathematician who studied how rival nations negotiate. Rapoport argued that neither side can move the other until each can describe the other's position in terms the other would accept. The Gottman Institute sums up the lesson for couples as learning to "postpone persuasion" until both partners understand each other (The Gottman Institute, n.d.).

The Gottman-Rapoport exercise gives each person one job at a time. The speaker opens gently, describes their own feelings instead of the partner's faults, and says what they need. The listener writes things down and holds every counterargument. The listener asks questions about what the issue means to the speaker, then summarizes it until the speaker says, "Yes, that's it." If the summary misses, the speaker corrects it and the listener tries again. Then the listener validates, which means saying something like "Given what you've told me, I can see why you'd feel that way." Validation is a statement about logic. It concedes nothing about who is right. Then the two switch roles. Problem solving waits until both people feel understood.

Couples usually find the summary step harder than they expect. Repeating your partner's view without tacking a rebuttal onto the end takes practice.

The psychoanalytic approach

Psychoanalytic couples therapists come at the same goal from another direction. Arguing couples often fall into a tight volley, each person returning serve and defending their own side. The remedy is what analysts call thirdness, the capacity to stand partly outside the exchange and notice its pattern while it is happening. Getting there means each partner admits that their story of the fight is one story, colored by history and by motives they may not fully see.

This approach also watches for polarization. Couples split into fixed roles: one worrier and one optimist, one who spends and one who saves. The roles hide how mixed each person's feelings really are. The person cast as the saver often has a quiet wish to spend, and the optimist has private doubts. When each partner gets space to sort out their own reactions without the other pushing, the extreme positions soften. A partner who feels cornered digs in. A partner left alone long enough will often say they are of two minds.

The two methods look different in the room. One is structured and behavioral; the other is interpretive. Both slow the argument down, both allow for two versions of the truth, and both require you to find out what your partner thinks instead of assuming you already know.

Next time you are certain you know what your partner meant, ask yourself how much of that certainty came from them and how much came from you.

References

Eyal, T., Steffel, M., & Epley, N. (2018). Perspective mistaking: Accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 547–571. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000115

Finkel, E. J., Slotter, E. B., Luchies, L. B., Walton, G. M., & Gross, J. J. (2013). A brief intervention to promote conflict reappraisal preserves marital quality over time. Psychological Science, 24(8), 1595–1601. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612474938

Rodriguez, L. M., et al. (2021). Effects of a brief web-based interpersonal conflict cognitive reappraisal expressive-writing intervention on changes in romantic conflict during COVID-19 quarantine. Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice.

Sened, H., Lavidor, M., Lazarus, G., Bar-Kalifa, E., Rafaeli, E., & Ickes, W. (2017). Empathic accuracy and relationship satisfaction: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Family Psychology, 31(6), 742–752. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000320

The Gottman Institute. (n.d.). World peace starts at home. https://gottman.com/blog/world-peace-starts-at-home