They Can Be Right Without You Being Wrong

A lot of relationship advice focuses on communication. We’ve all heard it, right? You need to be clear about your boundaries, you need to express directly what’s bothering you—there’s a whole industry of communication techniques. And these things aren’t wrong. But they often ask you to jump into the middle of a situation and work your way out from there.

The thing is, sometimes you are very clear on what you need and want to say. You go in, you say it… and it just doesn’t land. The harder you try, the less it seems to get through. And you’re both trying so hard just to be understood and heard. It’s incredibly common, and it’s usually not—or at least not just—a failure of communication.

These moments happen because you know exactly what you’re experiencing, what you need, and why that matters. And you’re right.

And your partner is on the other side of the gap, knowing exactly what they’re experiencing, what they need, and why that matters. And they’re right too.

And when what you’re each saying can feel like polar opposites, it’s incredibly hard to start from the position that both of you are expressing something real and important. But that position is the only one from which real change can happen. It’s the only place anything actually starts to move. It’s the only place those communication techniques can actually start to work. Otherwise you're just spinning your wheels.

Because wheels don’t spin because we’re not giving them gas. They spin because something is blocking all that effort from moving forward. 

As a therapist myself and in my work teaching other therapists, I was looking for a way to help people access and understand the principles that would allow all of their efforts to get more traction. That’s what led me to develop my I2I framework, which is based on the idea that there are two equally valid experiences that need to be navigated in every relationship. 

I like to say that while there's no I in team, there are two in every relationship. To make a team work, each individual takes a backseat to the whole. You function as part of the whole, and the whole matters more than any part. Relationships aren't like that, especially our most important partnerships. What each of us brings as an individual can't be back-burnered or put aside. We each need to be able to function and feel prioritized as individuals. At the same time, there is a space where each of our subjective experiences overlaps with the other. 

Let me take a step back here, because this is where it can get a little abstract. What is a subjective self or subjective experience? Simply put, this is your inner world. Your fears, your hopes, your pain, your needs, the way you experience and interpret everything around you. When you are trying to be heard by your partner, this is what you're trying to get through. 

See me. 

Hear me. 

That me is your subjective self.

Let's take a really common, really simple example. Adam and Eve have been married for ten years and have three kids. As Adam heads out the door to work in the middle of the morning rush, Eve says, "can you please text me if you're going to be late?" Adam nods, heads to work, where he has a crazy day and keeps getting slammed with new requests. He finally finishes and comes home exhausted, and when he sees Eve he remembers she asked him to text. He clocks her face—she's disappointed and angry. The fight can start in a dozen different ways, but it's primed to start somehow.

Pause for a second. You probably have an instinctive response. Maybe one of these hypothetical people seems more sympathetic to you. Maybe one seems overly harsh or inconsiderate. Maybe if one of these people were your friend and told you their story, you'd think, "well, of course you're right!" and explain why the other person was obviously unfair or wrong. Notice that instinct.

Let's look at Eve here. She wants to feel considered, thought about—like she matters in her husband's day. She wants to be able to plan her time, but more than that, she wants to feel important to him. Maybe she's already lowering her ask from what she really hopes for, and the text request already feels like a compromise. When she doesn't get it, her internal experience is, "I'm not worth even 30 seconds to him. He doesn't care about me at all." There are likely other components of this, things that will get dragged into the argument later, but the core of it is: "you don't treat me in a way that makes me feel valued."

Who can't sympathize with that feeling?

But what about Adam? Is he trying to make Eve feel unvalued? Does he actually not value her? Chances are very high that the answer to both questions is a strong no. In fact, chances are he's not thinking about any of that in this interaction—and if Eve brings it up, he dismisses it because it's nowhere near his mind here. Adam experiences the request to text entirely differently. For him, the request has meanings of its own: you need to keep me informed of your movements. Or, I don't trust you. Or, I need to tell you exactly what to do or you won't do it right. Those meanings make it feel like pressure or coercion, and he tells himself that if it's not any of those things then it's just a nice thing to do—and it's no big deal if he forgets, because he's busy. So when his day is already demanding a lot of him, he lets it slide. And when Eve is angry, it feels like proof that the request was just what he feared. She doesn't trust him. She probably doesn't understand what his day was like. Maybe she thinks his hard work just isn't good enough. There are other things that he'll drag into the argument too, but the core is: "no matter how hard you try, you're failing—and I can't trust or rely on you."

Anyone who wants to sign up for that feeling?

Imagine them trying to explain this to each other. The more Adam tries to defend himself, the more Eve hears confirmation she's not important enough. The more Eve tries to show him that she wants him to show her she's valued, the more he hears confirmation that nothing he does matters. They're stuck. And the more they try to get unstuck, the deeper they dig in. They both mean well, they both have real painful internal experiences—and most important, they would both want to fix what's wrong if they could.

But if Adam says, yes, I need to show you that you matter, he feels like he's betraying himself—accepting that he's not doing enough, and that feels awful. If Eve says, yes, I see how hard you're working and I trust you to show up, she feels like she's giving up on herself—accepting that he doesn't need to do more for her, and that feels terrible. I think we can all imagine how the fight might go. How quickly it could escalate to explosion or freeze into silence. 

Each one has a valid experience - they are genuinely feeling what they are feeling, and it hurts. But being hurt doesn’t mean you can’t also be hurting your partner at the same time. They don’t need to be right about you to be right about themselves. They don't have to be right about you to be saying something you need to listen to. And hearing what they're saying doesn't mean saying you're wrong about yourself.

But if Adam can remember that he needs to feel his labor is seen AND Eve needs to feel her value shown more directly, then letting himself hear her pain doesn't cancel his out. If Eve can remember that she doesn't feel like a priority AND Adam doesn't feel trusted or respected, then letting herself hear his need doesn't mean giving up on meeting her own. 

Neither one can win alone - the only victory is if they both do. 

Now both experiences being real doesn’t mean nobody is ever wrong and nobody is ever at fault. It doesn’t mean all harm is always fifty-fifty and evenly distributed. Both people are equally entitled to have an internal experience and reality that  has to be grappled with. That does not make the conclusions drawn from them equally accurate, the behaviors arising from them equally acceptable, or the harms caused equally serious. But crucially, neither person's internal experience gets demoted because the other person's experience contradicts it.

With that shift in mind, they can be sorry for the harm they caused without needing to defend themselves as having good intentions. They can acknowledge each other's hurt without believing it's the only hurt that exists in the relationship. And then.....then they can work together to come up with solutions that care about more than just one of the problems. Each one can be right about their own experience, and what happened can include both of those true experiences.

So instead of the usual fight, imagine this instead:

Adam comes in, sees her face, and when he instinctively feels like defending himself, something different happens. He remembers—oh right, this mattered to her. And he might say something like, “I know I said I’d text. I got completely slammed today and I forgot. But I’m sorry. I can see this really hurt you.”

Not perfectly. Not as some kind of script he’s following. But he’s letting her experience be real, instead of pushing it away.

And Eve, on her side, might still feel hurt—and maybe angry—but she has just a little bit more space to remember that his forgetting wasn’t actually a statement about her value, even though that’s how it landed.

So instead of going straight to “you don’t care about me,” she might say something more like, “I know you were busy… but it really did hurt.”

They’re both still having their reactions. He’s still tired and probably a little defensive. She’s still hurt and probably a little angry. They don’t need to pretend. They’re both allowed to feel what they feel. But neither of them is using that feeling to shut down the other person’s experience. 

That’s the shift. Instead of this turning into a fight over whose experience is the “real” one, something else becomes possible. Sometimes it’s a quick repair—a kind of emotional band-aid that lets things settle. Sometimes it opens into something deeper—patterns, histories, the bigger stuff underneath. But what it doesn’t turn into is digging the wound deeper than it already was.

Knowing this isn’t a magic fix. Even when you understand it, it can be hard to put into practice in the heat of an argument or injury. Because in that moment, even if you understand that there are two people with real pain there, it’s hard to remember—or care—over the noise of your own pain.

Pain is loud.

And we don’t get stuck in these cycles because we don’t want to care about our partner. We get stuck because we’re hardwired to protect ourselves. These moments don’t feel like an opportunity for connection. They feel like a threat to our own safety. So we do what we’re built to do—and we defend. We stand up for our pain deserving care. 

Doing things differently is incredibly hard. Hearing the other person's reality is hardest at precisely the moment your own reality feels threatened. But slowly you start to notice the patterns. You start to see both pains in the room, more and more clearly. And then all the tools you’ve been trying to use start to actually move you forward.

It’s not that you’ll never be stuck again. Relationships stay real. People stay human. But the work you do to get unstuck doesn’t dig you deeper anymore. And over time, that changes things. Because there are always two people in the relationship. Two inner worlds. Two real experiences. Two people who want to be seen and heard - and who both deserve to be seen and heard.

The shift is learning how to make space for both of them at the same time. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But it changes what happens next. Because it changes how you see and hear in the first place.

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Avigail Gordon, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, writer, and educator. She is the creator of the I2I Model, a framework for understanding relationships through the coexistence of two subjective selves.