Think of the person you love most in the world.
If you’re in a primary relationship, think of that person. If you’re not, choose the person with whom you have the closest and most important relationship and with whom you have frequent contact.
Now answer these ten questions.
For each one, give yourself a score from 0 to 10, where 0 means almost never and 10 means very often.
How often do you become defensive with this person?
How often do you react in ways you later regret?
How often do you blame them—even silently—for how you feel?
How often do you feel misunderstood by them?
How often do you find yourself trying to change, correct, or manage them?
How often do disagreements turn into arguments or leave lingering tension between you?
How often do you assume you know what they mean, think, or feel rather than becoming curious?
How often do you hold on to resentment about something they said or did?
How often do you avoid saying something important because you’re concerned about how they’ll react?
How often do you find yourself wishing they would simply be different in some important way?
Now add up your score.
The highest possible score is 100.
I’m not going to tell you what your score means.
There is no chart saying 0–20 is excellent, 21–40 is healthy, and anything above 60 means you should seek counseling. I don’t think relationships work that way.
Instead, I want to ask you a different question:
How much lower do you think your score could be?
Most of us assume a certain amount of defensiveness, blame, misunderstanding, resentment, and recurring conflict is simply part of being in a close relationship. Two people are different. Of course they’re going to push each other’s buttons. Of course they’re going to fight sometimes.
After working with individuals and couples for more than thirty years, I’m no longer convinced this is true.
I think most of us assume far more interpersonal conflict is inevitable than actually is.
Not because two people become perfectly compatible. Not because they learn to agree with each other. And not because they become endlessly patient or suppress their reactions.
Something more fundamental can change.
You can change how you make meaning.
Consider a few ordinary sentences:
“You made me angry.”
“You don’t care.”
“You’re being unfair.”
“You never listen.”
We usually experience statements like these as descriptions of what is happening. But they aren’t. Each contains assumptions about where our feelings come from, what another person intends, and who is responsible for our experience.
Those assumptions shape what happens next.
If I believe you made me angry, I have already located the cause of my experience in you. If I decide you don’t care, I’m no longer responding simply to what you did; I’m responding to the meaning I’ve assigned to what you did.
By the time we start using our communication skills, much of the conflict has already been created.
This is why I’ve become less interested in teaching people how to resolve conflict and more interested in what happens before the conflict is created.
Over the years, my colleagues and I have developed a psychological model called SAGE that focuses on this earlier level. It changes the way we use language, but more importantly, it changes the way we make meaning—how we understand responsibility, interpret other people, and participate in creating our own experience.
The result isn’t always perfect harmony.
People still disagree. They make mistakes. They sometimes behave in ways the other person doesn’t like. They have different needs, preferences, moods, values, and ways of seeing the world.
But differences don’t have to become conflict.
So look at your score again.
The most interesting question may not be:
Is this a good score?
It may be:
How much lower do you believe it could go?
And what might you have to change—not in the person you love, but in the way you make meaning—to get there?
If you’d like to go deeper into the world of SAGE, we invite you to download our recent paper, The Overview Effect in Psychology:
If you download our recent paper, you are welcome to join our SAGE Zoom conversations, where we explore how to live a SAGE life every day.
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