Compromise

I was talking to one of my friends the other day about splitting up from partners and divorce et al. He's going through a split at the moment and was saddened (and slightly bitter) about the fact that, even with the best will in the world, in such divisive processes there's an almost inevitable tendency toward acrimony. Different strokes for different folks of course, but I reckon you can tell a lot about how your divorce is going to turn out from how healthy your marriage was/is. Behavioural attributes like how often you argue, what you argue about, how quickly you recover from arguments and how generous each party is with the other would seem to me to be quite good predictors of how likely, easy or hard such a journey might be. 

Like most of us he felt much more free to (honestly) elaborate on the highs and lows of the relationship now that both parties have accepted it's finished, it was quite eye opening! I couldn't imagine living with such confrontation over such seemingly trivial matters over such a long period of time. It may be an obvious observation but clearly different people have vastly different tolerances for stress and tension in their lives. Generally, I favour compromise and consciously letting things "go" simply to avoid unnecessary confrontation and to live more harmoniously (anything for a quiet life!), evidently some people struggle to let anything go! That's got to wear you down eventually? 

I'm sure there are pitfalls to my approach too, but, after the conversation with my friend, I couldn't help concluding that my way was better.