Divorce Balance

Negotiation > Recovery > Enhancement

Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Absolutely Absolute Absolutes.

Divorce negotiators can learn a lot about entrenched beliefs by challenging cultural givens. Not "theirs" — but ours.

For a half-dozen years arcing the ratification of NAFTA, it was my great privilege to work for thirteen companies, all told, on various international negotiations designed to help each of them make the most of those newly-penned freedoms.

Six of my projects were for U.S. companies, and seven were for Mexican nationals. Similar outcome interests; radically different cultural paths that had to be discerned, respected, and navigated to get there.

One Friday in 1995 stands out as a particular watershed for me as a mediator in all this. A client with whom I'd been working for a number of years by then, invited me to spend the weekend at his family home in Cuernavaca. Some 45 minutes southwest of Mexico City.

It is the highest form of trust one can express or receive, and it's held tightly in reserve. I can offer you no parallel for reference here in the United States. Think of the cultural equivalent of becoming brothers.

I knew this before I accepted the invitation, and it was surely front-of-mind as I enjoyed dinner with my client — es muy amigo mío! — and his wife.

"Lo invito a cenar a su casa de usted."

But this didn't stop me from carelessly dismissing my host's invitation to dialogue as if he were simply asking me a schoolboy question to which there could be only one, obvious, answer.

"Why do you think America is free?"

What I missed was the implied subordinate clause: "...as if Mexico is not." So I pressed forward with my reality ("the absolute truth"). It was all that I could believe.

Now can you imagine, mi respetable colega, peer in age, seemingly different only in accent and language, saw things very differently. And he said as much.

So, one of us had to be wrong. Right?

Well, that's certainly how a lot of couples come to me when asking for help with their divorce mediations.

And the temptation was certainly there that night in Cuernavaca to either argue him down or retreat to higher, more distancing ground. "We're really here to negotiate objective business agreements, not debate philosophies," I could have lectured, by way of escape.

I'm sure there were more polite options available to me, too. "I see your point of view." But wouldn't my patriotism then be subject to question? Wouldn't leaving him without persuasion have rendered me de facto "less American"?

How could we possibly negotiate the complicated new relationships he needed to define without my forcing, er, helping him to come to understand that my country is a perfect free nation? And his country, therefore, would have to be — something else. Only room for one, absolute, point of view.

Maybe we had a third option. As Dr. John Gottman once wrote, simply talking things out, listening, so that others "...feel accepted as they are." Like in successful marriages, "Empathy is not only hearing what your partner is saying but understanding the feelings behind it."

Now try this.

"Another important lesson I have learned is that in all arguments, both solvable and perpetual, no one is ever right. There is no absolute reality in marital conflict, only two subjective realities."

"...no one is ever right"? I don't know if I can completely agree with that.

I don't have to: He's right enough for me to follow. There are absolutely absolute absolutes I'll go to the mat for, but I'm also gonna tell you this: There are darn few of them.

So, Gottman's right, in my world; just as I was a decade ago in Cuernavaca. And so, too, was my friend, a man who invited me to be his brother.

How many absolutes did I leave behind in Mexico City? Not enough. It took the crucible of divorce court to burn off those warts for me.

Antes me importaba mucho pero ahora me siento en la diferncia.

My skewed translation, via divorce: Do you know your absolute absolutes, absolutely?

—posted by Dell Deaton @12:01 PM EST 1/26/2005 [675]

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