My personal experience with conflict has been long and rough.  My scholarly interest and research (which is sourced in and fueled by this personal experience) has focused on ways to transform conflict into collaboration, as I passionately wish to do most of the time.  But we cannot do this alone.  Partners and colleagues must want our relationships more than they want to be right. 

Wanting a relationship that has been hurtful and damaging is hard.  Sometimes we have to let go in order to see how hard we were hanging on to righteousness, or to see the other’s perspective clearly.  Walking away from a marriage, a profitable business, a coaching relationship, or a friendship feels like failure.  It also feels like giving up on wonderful possibilities (greater profit, renewed love, effective collaboration) just because we are unhappy in the moment.  Why can’t we make things right between two people who know about conflict, and know about love?

In my own desperation to try to understand another’s hurtfulness, a friend asked “What makes you think you are not as important as anyone else in this conflict?”  My “not important” comes from trying to twist myself around the other’s assurance that they are right.   The resulting mental muddle only makes me less sure of what to do in the conflict.

I am reading a novel about a white man who lived among Indians in the early part of the 18th century somewhere in the southern U.S.  It wasn’t a pretty time in our history with Indians nor was it a happy time in the life of the protagonist.  He repeatedly loses the woman he loves to another man, the changing times, or his own neglect.  Yet, he is a good man, perhaps a great one.  I thought to myself as I was reading today that none of us gets through this life without some disregard for others, and without conflict.

In a recent conversation with my 87 year old mother, she mused that she didn’t understand why people left marriages just because of infidelity.  I immediately realized that it took me two husbands to understand that there wasn’t a perfect one waiting somewhere for me.  I said to her, “If you believe that there is a perfect person, then you would not put up with or accept the obvious imperfection of infidelity.  If you believe that we all have good and bad whirled together to make us unique beings, you might be inclined to value the relationship more than being right and stay to see if you could work it out.”  Some of us hold onto the possibility of perfection, our own or other’s, for long years into our adulthood.  Then we cannot forgive another for not being perfect.

That forgiveness and acceptance takes two.  Two countries, groups, or people.  One can’t do it.  One can’t kiss and make up, or bury the hatchet.  Both have to give up needing to be right at the expense of the other.  Both have to value the relationship above past hurts.  Only then is collaboration possible.