Agreement Grey Areas

Even when you do everything “right”, things will still get messy.

You’re negotiating agreements in relationship. You have the talk - the uncomfortable dialogue past midnight where you cover seemingly exhaustive “what if” scenarios and share your most vulnerable fears. You negotiate agreements with care and intention. You show up genuinely, love your partner honestly, and desperately want this to go smoothly.

And you are still - 100% guaranteed - going to hit bumps along the way. Because perfect agreements don’t exist. Nor are agreements designed to wholly protect against challenges. Rather, they provide the structure necessary to build trust.

Nothing is airtight. Not because you didn’t prepare thoroughly enough, but because language is imperfect, people are complex, and life has a way of presenting impossible-to-anticipate scenarios.

Maybe there’s a detail you left out - something you assumed would be obvious to your partner but wasn’t. Maybe you understood the same words differently, each walking away from a conversation with a slightly different map of what you’d agreed to. Maybe something just happened - an unexpected situation, an emotion you didn’t predict you’d feel, a circumstance your preparation couldn’t have covered.

I offer a guide - available here on my Substack - that walks through the various categories and concerns that tend to come up when opening a relationship. I tried to account for every aspect of relationship, even offering a few nitty gritty details that are commonly overlooked. Logistical questions, reconnection practices, examples of the kind of language you might use.

But even if you nail everything and go through every bullet point in that document, stuff gonna stuff.