I’ve come to understand that a great marriage isn’t something you stumble into. I’m not going to focus on the things a couple has nothing to do with, such as chemistry, luck, or divine favor. I’m focusing here on the choices we continue to make, on our decision-making regime.
It’s a slow, deliberate sculpting. Fifteen years in, I tell my wife this often: we have a great marriage. Not because it’s free of conflict—but because we’ve learned how to make peace a craft.
What made the difference wasn’t magic. It was subtraction. Over time, we crowded out the things that corrode—the need to be right, the need to dominate, the cheap victories of silence and withdrawal. We replaced them with something simple, almost naïve in its power: argue for clarity, not conquest. That shift changed everything.
When you argue to understand—not to win—the ego softens. The selfish gene retreats. You’re no longer sparring for control; you’re searching for connection. And in that shift, conflict becomes less about destruction and more about discovery.
But even that isn’t enough.
There’s something else that must live in a marriage that hopes to last: the willingness, in the heat of the argument—not after, not later, not in the tidy calm—to say, “You’re right about that.”
Not as surrender. But as truth. Because if two people can rage against each other and neither one can name the truth even as it stares them down, then what you have is not a conversation—it’s a siege.
The strongest marriages I know are not free of disagreement. They’re built on a kind of sacred reflex: to recognize truth in real time, even mid-battle. And then again, afterward, when the smoke clears and both parties are nursing the bruises. The ability to say, “I see now. You were right about that.” That is the salve. That is the seam that keeps the whole thing from unraveling.
In our marriage, that practice has saved us again and again. Because once you anchor your arguments in clarity, in truth, the grudges get lighter, the regrets fewer, the distance shorter. You stop fighting each other and start reaching toward understanding.
And when understanding becomes the point, even disagreement becomes a way of holding each other.
