Do You Want to Be Right or Happy?

ith an asthmatic bulldog snoring on my lap, I spilled my guts. My therapist, a reformed hippie with long white hair, grey Crocs, and a paisley Maxi dress, listened as I groused about life-things. She scrawled something in her ruled notebook, tore off a pennant-shaped sliver, and folded the piece of paper.

“I know you might find this corny,” she began, “but I want you to sit with this before you answer you.”

Chubba — yes, that’s the bulldog’s actual name — snuffled as I leaned forward to pluck the scrap of paper from my therapist’s hand. It read, as I’m sure you already know, as follows:

“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?”

I knew what I was supposed to say. I knew what well-adjusted people should feel. But I had to be honest. Otherwise, what was the point?

“I want to be right,” I admitted.

She nodded.

My throat tensed up. My tear ducts stung. I’d long known that an obsession with “winning” arguments was a critical failing of mine, but hearing it framed as a zero-sum binary choice clarified the stakes: I can’t be happy if I keep sabotaging myself.

I knew where it came from, of course. There was no need to excavate childhood memories buried deep in the hinterland of my mind, nor did we have to trace the behavior down a winding genealogy.

No, I’d known all along, but there’s a difference between knowing something and being able to do something about it.

It came from my dad.

Intheir first faceoff, “Fast” Eddie Felson, played by Paul Newman in The Hustler, told his rival, Minnesota Fats, played by a world-weary Jackie Gleason, “Even if you beat me, I’m still better than you.” The line, standing on its own, is generic bravado, but in the context of the film, well encapsulates Eddie’s character: at once fatalistic and overweening. My dad was the same way.

My dad was right even when he wasn’t. He never backed down, and never conceded a point. Worst of all, he was a relentless gaslighter. I remember having arguments with him as a teenager and thinking I would research a particular point and come back with irrefutable proof that he was wrong, but when I approached him with the proof, he’d tell me he never said what I claimed he said. It got to the point where I considered taping our conversations (seriously), as if I needed admissible evidence for court. So, yeah, it doesn’t take an astronomer to chart my trajectory.

Many studies have shown a correlation between being abused in formative years and abusing others. About a third of abusers were abused as children, according to the National Institute of Justice. Our trauma may offer some insight, but it does not absolve us. At some point, we must all be held accountable for our actions. That my father browbeat and belittled me did not excuse me treating my wife like a hostile witness in a murder trial whenever we had a disagreement.

That need to be right wreaked havoc on my life. I looked at the world as something to be corrected. It affected my marriage, friendships and relationships with coworkers.

I wanted to stop wanting to be right, but how does one go about that?

James Dalton, played by the late Patrick Swayze in the original Road House, said, “Nobody ever wins a fight.” I feel the same way about arguments.

How many times have I tried to win an argument with my wife, my sister, my friends, my dad and perfect strangers? Too many times to count. We’d go round and round, hitting our talking points like presidential candidates in a contentious election cycle (sound familiar?), never ceding any ground and never making any progress.

Eventually, we’d lose steam and settle into a detente, failing to arrive at a resolution. I can’t remember what most of those arguments were about, but I can remember how I felt: furious and wronged.

A misplaced sense of justice has always been at the center of my need to be right; and to be right, I had to show others how wrong they were, from the trivial (Breaking Bad is overrated) to the emotional (why you actually hurt my feelings and not the other way around).

This need informed how I related to people as I moved through the world. If someone rode the shoulder on a highway to cut a bunch of people off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, pushed into the subway car before letting people on the train exit, cut me off in the line at the supermarket, or spouted some hateful drivel online, I needed them to know how f**king wrong they were. I went out of my way to show them, with varying results.

After a while, I started to realize I was the common denominator in my unhappiness. My problem was my certainty. I was so sure I was right that I was willing to sacrifice civility in order to prove it. I was a cult member of my every opinion. It didn’t matter that I was subconsciously trying to prove my father wrong. I was being an asshole.

My upbringing may have instilled this need to prove others wrong, but the digital age exacerbated it. Too many wrongheaded opinions floating around the internet. I had to squelch them all. Of course, that proved to be an endless game of whack-a-mole. Such is the overriding factor in the abject degradation of public discourse today: Everyone thinks they’re right.

The tendency of wanting to be right remains within me, manifesting in my actions if I’m not vigilant, but whenever I feel my outrage engine spooling up, I ask myself if the argument I’m about to mount will make anything better. Will I be better off? Will the person I’m trying to best be better off? Invariably, no.

Rage begets rage. I don’t want to contribute to the rage pool anymore. I don’t want to enter discussions scouring for openings and counterarguments. I want to understand. I want to empathize. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. I want to be a well-meaning, productive influence in the lives of others.

Maya Angelou once said:

“You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot — it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.”

I appreciate this framing because it acknowledges the weight of our histories while leaving room for growth. We can’t change our pasts, but we can change the ratio of positive-to-negative experiences in our lives.

Ifmy therapist asked me that question today, I would answer differently. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s late-onset wisdom. Maybe I’m just too damned tired to be right. You think you know better? Have at it. I won’t argue. I want to be happy.