Agreeing to agree

Esther Perel is a very wise woman when it comes to talking about sex and relationships. I saw something by her yesterday where she talked about polarization, effectively how we are able to, within ourselves, see both sides of an issue. We can— we weigh up the pros and cons and we come to a decision which is a mixture of those two things, but that within relationships we tend to take those positions and move them into trenches, to entrench them, to put them into a position where they're fighting against each other, so that, um, it's impossible to come to any sort of synthesis, any sort of, uh, agreement over the question. And this tends to happen most to people who have been in relationships for a long time. Um, they become entrenched in their positions, unable to move from them, arguing with each other about things where you know damn well really that you can see that the other person has a position which is reasonable and which can be taken. You could probably take it yourself, but you maintain your position because it is your position. And when you're younger, you can probably get around this. You can usually get around it with sex and then make up sex and then having an argument and the rest of it. But as you get older, I think it's possible in a relationship to fall into this entrenched position in which it's necessary to take a yes or a no stance. And I think a lot of that can be solved simply by agreeing to see each other's point of view. Not agreeing to disagree, but agreeing to agree.