Day 10 - content attempt more more more!

Why have a negotiations section, introduction to negotiations section.

Why am I motivated to write the negotiations section? I am guessing this is a chapter people will be interested in, because people like thinking about negotiation as something skill-based that they can actually improve at, versus other things that are more feelings-based.

But you can have a whole book on negotiation. There are some good ones out here. So what would be the introduction to that specific chapter? What is motivating me to write it?

I think there are two generally strong failure modes around negotiation in relationships. One is that everything is negotiated. You have to fight for everything, talk about everything. One is that nothing is negotiated. The idea is that negotiations make a relationship toxic or inauthentic. Everything is feelings based in the moment. Reactive.

I think both lead to pretty deleterious effect.

For the former, you don’t set up things that are naturally incentives based, and don’t work with your partner to “unblock” things that are blocked for them. You assume that the good things happen “when the negotiation happens.” But this misses that if you are with a long-term partner, you are sharing resources, either literally or you are sharing your energy a lot. Therefore “after the negotiation happens” you two are still…together. They are generally not going into the world, finding special resources, bringing them back and using them to make the negotiation work. Or if they are doing that, generally that is an organic incentive for one of the people (such as them working a job they’d already been working at for 10 years), and the other person is attracted to that in some way. That is, some trade around a person going out and getting energy from the outside world is already being made.

For the latter, if everything is feelings-based in the moment, then it can be hard to debug things. You have hopes that things “will happen” in the direction you want them to, but then there aren’t really interventions if they fail to do so. This can lead to sucking up negative feelings.

In both of these modes, you can have a plan that “something is happening” or “something is changing” but actually nothing is really happening or going to happen. You can have “stalled negotiations” for years.

And “winning arguments” doesn’t mean much if it costs your partner something you’d been counting on them to have. If you “won an argument” but now they are severely depressed and are doing only the bare minimum, then that isn’t much of a victory.

And so you still need to be doing something like negotiation, or bargaining, or maintaining momentum or self-growth patterns, or motivating your partner when they are feeling stuck. But “just convincing them” doesn’t usually work because if you are the person they are spending most of their time with, then “being convincing” might not actually get you what you really want.

“Really wanting something” also often doesn’t work in relationships, because if they knew you wanted it and could do it for you, they often would. Often there is something in the way of them pleasing you.