You're Addicted to Being Right

The need to “win” is hurting your relationships

My husband is an incredible cook. Peking duck, fresh sushi, boeuf bourguignon — meals you’d see on a restaurant menu, not an average weeknight. The only problem is, I don’t eat most of it. Unfortunately, I’m a picky eater (as much as I’ve tried not to be!) and I don’t eat a lot of meat or seafood. Even when he’s made things I did eat, like coq au vin or roast chicken, I’ve been known to “not be in the mood.” Eventually he stopped trying.

For a while, this turned into a real fight. I accused him of being selfish. Why would he spend two hours making something he knew I wouldn’t eat? He’d fire back that I was impossible to cook for. We both dug in. I started building my case the way you do when you want to win: I brought it up to friends. I mentioned it in therapy. I collected agreement like evidence. See? He is being selfish. Everyone thinks so.

Then my mom said something I didn’t want to hear. “You know, Amanda, at some point you have to decide — do you want to be right, or do you want to be married?”

I didn’t argue with her, but I didn’t agree either. I wasn’t trying to be right — I just was right. Or at least that’s what I told myself, until I realized that was exactly her point.

I know I’m not alone in this. Algorithms have trained us to mistake certainty for competence. Social media rewards the most declarative and extreme version of every opinion, and nuance gets buried. We’ve been bathed in that certainty for so long that curiosity has started to feel like weakness, like you don’t know where you stand. Having a strong take has become the way we announce who we are, so we end up defending positions we don’t even fully understand.

Robert Burton, a neurologist who has written extensively about why certainty feels so irresistible, found that the feeling of being right activates the same pleasure-reward system as drugs. Your brain gives you a hit every time you feel certain about something, and as with any hit you build a tolerance. You need to be more right, more often, about more things. Which is why an argument about cooking becomes a referendum on your partner’s character, or why you can’t let a stranger on the internet be wrong about something that has nothing to do with your life.

When you bring this need to win into your relationships, people eventually stop pushing back. They learn it’s easier to agree with you than to be honest, and you might not even notice because, from where you’re standing, everyone sees it your way. But agreement isn’t the same as resolution. When every disagreement becomes a trial, you never get to the part where you fix anything. You can see this everywhere, but in politics especially. Fixing things requires compromise, flexibility, and accepting that someone else’s experience is just as valid as yours. Being right is easy. Compromise is not.

What actually shifted things in my marriage wasn’t biting our tongues or swallowing our frustration. It was being curious about each other. One night I asked, “Why do you love cooking these elaborate meals? What do you get out of this?” I truthfully had never thought he had a deeper reason. But his answer surprised me. He told me it was his only creative outlet, and that when he feels powerless at work, conquering a difficult recipe gives him a sense of accomplishment. Suddenly it made perfect sense why he didn’t feel like cooking chicken teriyaki with rice.

Then he asked me why it mattered so much, especially when I didn’t always even want dinner. I said, “Because when you cook for me, I feel taken care of and loved. And even if I’m not in the mood, I often eat leftovers for lunch.”

The next time you’re certain someone else is wrong, get curious. Ask a genuine question and truly listen, as though you’re willing to have your mind changed even slightly. I’ve spent years sitting across from people, hearing what’s underneath the thing they say out loud, and the gap between what we assume about someone and what’s actually going on is almost always bigger than we think.

That conversation with my husband led to a compromise that could have happened months earlier if either of us had been curious instead of certain. We sat down and brainstormed meals that worked for both of us — things like chicken Thai curry, where he still gets to be creative and I actually eat dinner. He still makes Peking duck some nights while I eat cereal. But we have stopped keeping score. Once we understood what the other person actually needed, there was nothing left to win.