There Are No Winners and Losers in Love
The moment I decided I had to win every conflict, I also began learning how to lose relationships.
Why Winning Arguments Can Destroy Relationships
When I was seventeen years old, I made one of the most important decisions of my life.
It was also one of the worst.
I decided I was going to be a winner.
At all costs.
That sounds inspirational if you put it on a coffee mug.
It wasn’t.
At the time, my mother and I were locked in a battle over my sexuality, my boyfriend, my independence, and who got to decide what kind of life I was going to live.
She was strong.
My father was quiet.
I was scared.
And somewhere inside that fear, I reached a conclusion:
There were only two kinds of people in the world.
Winners and losers.
I was never going to be a loser.
I would never be weak.
I would never let anybody control me.
I would win.
That philosophy served me beautifully in business.
It was considerably less successful in love.
I Confused Strength With Control
I looked at my parents and formed two crude ideas.
Mom was strong.
Dad was weak.
Mom pushed.
Dad retreated.
Mom made decisions.
Dad went along.
So I decided I would be like Mom.
Strong.
Decisive.
Impossible to overpower.
I didn’t understand then that strength and domination are not the same thing.
Neither are compromise and weakness.
But at seventeen, nuance was not exactly my specialty.
I saw power as a seesaw.
If you were up, somebody else had to be down.
If you gave in, you lost.
If somebody got their way, you didn’t.
And once you see relationships that way, every disagreement becomes a competition.
That’s exhausting.
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Love Is Not a Courtroom
For a long time, I approached arguments as though they required a verdict.
Who was right?
Who was wrong?
Who started it?
Who apologized first?
Who had the better argument?
Who had more evidence?
Who won?
This is wonderful if you’re preparing for trial.
It is terrible if you’re trying to live with another human being.
Because your partner is not opposing counsel.
Your mother is not a hostile witness.
Your father is not a juror.
And the person you love should not need to lose in order for you to feel secure.
That took me a long time to learn.
Longer than I care to admit.
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Winning Can Feel Like Safety
The reason I clung to winning wasn’t simply ego.
Although, let’s be fair, there was plenty of ego.
Winning felt safe.
If I was the smartest person in the room, I couldn’t be humiliated.
If I controlled the situation, I couldn’t be blindsided.
If I left first, I couldn’t be abandoned.
If I lied well enough, I couldn’t be trapped.
If I never surrendered, nobody could rule me.
That isn’t confidence.
That’s fear wearing shoulder pads.
And I wore them well.
The Trouble Is, Love Requires You to Be Influenceable
This may be one of the hardest truths I’ve learned:
To love somebody, you have to let them affect you.
You have to let their feelings matter.
You have to be willing to change your mind.
You have to occasionally say:
You’re right.
Or:
I was wrong.
Or the truly horrifying:
I understand why you feel that way.
You don’t have to agree with everything.
You don’t have to surrender your boundaries.
You don’t have to become passive.
But you do have to allow the other person to exist as an equal reality.
That means you cannot always be the ruler.
A relationship with one ruler eventually produces one of two things:
A subject.
Or an escapee.
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I Was Good at Winning Arguments
I could think quickly.
I could talk quickly.
I could read people.
I could find the soft spot in someone’s argument and press on it.
I could use humor.
I could charm.
I could deflect.
I could turn the subject.
I could make somebody question whether the original argument was even worth having.
Useful skills.
Also deeply irritating.
You can win an argument and still leave the other person feeling unheard.
You can be factually correct and emotionally disastrous.
You can prove your point so efficiently that nobody wants to talk to you anymore.
Congratulations.
You won.
Enjoy dinner alone.
Sometimes the Need to Win Is Really the Need Not to Be Wrong
Those are not the same thing.
Being wrong can feel dangerous if, somewhere in your past, being wrong meant losing control.
Or getting punished.
Or being humiliated.
Or being dismissed.
So you build an identity around certainty.
I know what I’m doing.
I know what happened.
I know what you meant.
I know what I need.
I know who’s at fault.
Eventually certainty becomes armor.
And armor is wonderful in battle.
It is awkward in bed.
My Mother and I Were Too Much Alike
This is the part I enjoy admitting least.
I spent years complaining about my mother’s need to control things.
Her stubbornness.
Her refusal to lose.
Her ability to dig in.
Her insistence that she knew best.
Sound familiar?
It should.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
It rolled about three feet away, put on better clothes, became a hairdresser, and announced that it was nothing like the tree.
I inherited some of the very traits I fought against.
And then I used them in my own relationships.
That is one of the cruel jokes of adulthood.
You spend years escaping your parents.
Then one day you hear yourself talking and think:
Oh, shit.
Love Keeps Score Differently
In competition, the score is obvious.
One person wins.
One person loses.
Love is stranger.
Sometimes the person who apologizes first is the stronger one.
Sometimes the person who says, “I need you,” is braver.
Sometimes walking away is the right choice.
Sometimes staying is.
Sometimes the victory is ending the argument before you destroy something more important than your point.
Sometimes both people can be right.
Sometimes both can be wrong.
And sometimes the only useful question is:
What helps us now?
Not:
Who won?
I Mistook Independence for Emotional Superiority
I have always valued independence.
Money meant freedom to me when I was young.
A car meant freedom.
A job meant freedom.
My own home meant freedom.
The ability to leave meant freedom.
And all of that was real.
Independence is valuable.
But emotional independence can become a trick.
You begin telling yourself:
I don’t need anyone.
I can take care of myself.
If someone leaves, I’ll be fine.
If someone disappoints me, I’ll move on.
If this relationship becomes difficult, I can replace it.
That can sound powerful.
Until you realize you’re using independence to avoid intimacy.
There is a difference between being able to survive alone and refusing to need anyone.
One is strength.
The other can become loneliness with excellent posture.
The Need to Win Can Destroy Trust
Trust requires room for mistakes.
Yours.
And theirs.
But if every mistake becomes evidence in the next argument, people stop feeling safe.
If every vulnerability can later be weaponized, people stop sharing.
If every disagreement must end with one person submitting, resentment builds.
And if your goal becomes victory instead of understanding, you may eventually train the person you love to stop telling you the truth.
That’s a terrible win.
Because then you get peace.
But not honesty.
And a quiet relationship is not necessarily a healthy one.
Sometimes everyone is simply exhausted.
I Thought Love Was Something I Could Manage
I was good at managing things.
Businesses.
Clients.
Projects.
People.
Chaos.
Schedules.
Money, occasionally.
Hair, definitely.
So I sometimes approached relationships the same way.
Identify the problem.
Fix the problem.
Move forward.
Unfortunately, people are not color corrections.
You cannot always formulate your way out of hurt.
You cannot process love in twenty minutes and move to the next appointment.
Some things need time.
Some things need listening.
Some things require you to sit there without winning anything.
I hate that.
Growth is irritating.
The Real Opposite of Losing Isn’t Winning
I think the opposite of losing in love is connection.
Did we understand each other better?
Did we tell the truth?
Did we protect the relationship without sacrificing ourselves?
Did we repair something?
Did we learn?
Did we leave with dignity if the relationship truly needed to end?
Those are better measurements.
Because there are relationships where both people stay and both lose.
And there are relationships that end where both people eventually become healthier.
Life is inconveniently complicated like that.
My Younger Self Needed a Different Rule
If I could climb into that Ford Econoline van and sit next to seventeen-year-old me, I wouldn’t tell him:
Don’t be strong.
He needed strength.
I wouldn’t tell him:
Just obey your mother.
Absolutely not.
And I wouldn’t tell him:
Stop fighting for yourself.
He needed to fight.
I would tell him:
Fight for yourself without turning everyone else into an enemy.
That’s the lesson I missed.
You can have boundaries without domination.
You can protect yourself without manipulating.
You can disagree without humiliating.
You can leave without destroying.
You can love without surrendering your identity.
And you can be strong without requiring somebody else to be weak.
I No Longer Want to Win at Love
I want to be honest.
I want to be understood.
I want to understand.
I want to be able to say I’m sorry without feeling defeated.
I want the other person to be able to say no without me interpreting it as rejection.
I want disagreement without war.
I want boundaries without punishment.
I want humor without using it to avoid every uncomfortable emotion.
I want intimacy that doesn’t require somebody to give up.
That sounds much less dramatic than winning.
It also sounds much healthier.
And at this point in my life, I’ve had enough drama to last several reincarnations.
Maybe This Is What My Mother and I Were Really Fighting About
For years, I thought our battles were about specific things.
Chuck.
Being gay.
Lying.
Control.
Independence.
Respect.
But underneath all of them may have been one shared belief:
One of us had to win.
And if one of us won, the other had to lose.
What a waste.
Because love was never the prize.
Love was already there.
We were just too busy fighting over the trophy to notice.
That’s something I wish we’d both understood sooner.
And maybe that’s one reason I’m writing all of this now.
My mother and I no longer have to defeat each other.
We no longer have to prove who was right.
I can look backward and say:
She hurt me.
I hurt her.
She was wrong sometimes.
I was wrong sometimes.
We both loved each other.
All of those things can be true at once.
No winner.
No loser.
Just two complicated people who loved each other and didn’t always know how to do it.
If someone has to lose every time you win, eventually you may win your way right out of the relationship.
— Jon-David
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How I Killed My Mother is my memoir podcast about family, forgiveness, relationships, humor, identity, grief, spirituality and the uncomfortable things we discover when we finally stop telling the story entirely from our own side.
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And maybe ask yourself:
When you argue with someone you love, are you trying to solve the problem—or win?
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