Forget asking who’s right. Try asking how to ‘apply love’

My wife and I have a unique pastime. Sometimes, we read the relationship-related #AITA threads on Reddit and discuss them.

For the uninitiated, #AITA (Am I The A******) is a popular subreddit where users share personal, interpersonal conflicts and ask the internet to judge who was in the wrong.

People post about a dispute with their partners and ask if their behaviour makes them the “a**”, or in the wrong.

An example of such a thread is when a man stopped taking his partner on dates for meals because her home cooking was “too good”, much better than eating out.

The man essentially turned his partner into his private chef, even on date nights. He was surprised when she became despondent and eventually rejected his marriage proposal.

Having grown up in the Singapore school system, these discussions form a question bank for my wife and me to discuss how to tackle relationship issues. The questions are like a 10-year series for relationships.

The #AITA discussions that we have are often vigorous and can get quite animated, as if we were the couple involved in the post.

Work with young couples

Such exchanges are useful for our work as marriage-preparation facilitators. In that role, we mentor young couples who are preparing to get married. By discussing the #AITA threads, we open ourselves up to situations beyond those that we have encountered in our own marriage.

Having served as facilitators for more than a decade, we have seen how conflict often arises not from big betrayals, but from everyday decisions that carry emotional weight.

Frequent issues we encounter include the amount of money to give to aged parents as their monthly support; the value of the first marital home at the start of a marriage; and something as simple as how many guests to invite to the wedding.

The arguments tend to follow a familiar pattern. Partner A feels, with complete conviction, that a certain choice is the “right” one, while partner B responds by listing a thousand practical, financial or emotional reasons it might not be.

What follows is less a discussion than a stalemate. Sometimes, these stalemates get fractious, leading the couples to call off their engagement and marriage.

In many cases, it is not because the issues are unsolvable. It is because both are arguing from different frames of reference. No party is absolutely right and nobody is absolutely wrong.

Applying love

When couples come to us with such dilemmas, we hear them out first, asking them to outline their resistance to the other’s position.

Then we ask, have you applied love? It is often a showstopper. What follows are hard blinks, blank looks and, sometimes, a stuttering “huh?”

The question is an argument-stopper because it asks for an explicit act of taking the other’s point of view.

When we ask people to apply love, we are saying to take the other person’s point of view with deep compassion.

After dropping the “apply love” bomb, we next challenge partners with a question. Do you really understand the hopes and fears that drive the other person’s point of view? Don’t stop trying to understand the other point of view until that viewpoint makes sense.

We have learnt over the years that if a decision seems irrational, it is only because the other party’s reasons have not been fully understood. In our minds, everyone is rational.

Different accounting

We often tell couples that the sum of a relationship is found in the multitude of everyday decisions that they make together.

We urge them to break the habit of deciding who is right in an argument. Understandably, this is difficult from an evolutionary standpoint – being right has meant survival. Fast-forward to today, being right means status and identity.

Asking couples to “apply love” is a call for them to take a different approach to accounting in a relationship. Deep down, it asks each party within the relationship to set aside his or her status and identity for the good of the relationship.

Deciding who is right is a win-lose dichotomy. The goal in a relationship is not about being right. It is about finding an optimal outcome for both parties in the relationship, one that considers the other partner’s desires, hopes and dreams.

This different accounting becomes essential over the course of a marriage and family life. Raising children, caring for aged parents – these moments are repeated invitations to apply love rather than keep score.

In the most imbalanced relationships – a parent caring for a deeply disabled child or a partner lovingly attending to a spouse with dementia – we see this most clearly. Someone has chosen to sacrifice for another. They have decided to grow together, rather than apart, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

In most cases, applying love regularly is as precious as buying a multi-carat diamond ring, or whatever extravagant gesture of love currently occupying the reels and posts on Instagram.

Good relationships are among the strongest predictors of longevity. The protective effects of happiness on health are well established in research.

Beyond longevity and health, good relationships make life richer and far more meaningful.

If we believe that relationships are the bedrock of our lives, the choice becomes clearer. Family life is not about winning arguments; it is choosing to keep going even when the ground is uneven.

In conflicts, the question is not “Who is right”, but “How do we apply love”.

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Source: The Straits Times