I'm curious, was it along the lines of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Love_Languages
Isn't the definition of "important" what people disagree over when it comes to compromise? My girlfriend can say X is super important to her but in my eyes Y is more important than X and hence I will have to let go of X and hold on to Y. Convincing someone of why X or Y is more important than the other is where most of the conflict happens.
>"You need to show love in the ways that other people want to receive it, not the way you want to send it."
This is true and easy to follow but it doesn't capture my concern above which seems to be much more complex than this scenario.
There are some issues that really are mutually exclusive, mostly because they cut to the heart of what a relationship is. If one partner wants kids and the other wants no-kids, there isn't really a way to resolve that and still have what people would consider a marriage. If one partner wants to live on a farm but the other wants to live in the city, or one is a neat-freak and the other is a compulsive hoarder, you're headed for problems. If one wants the kids raised as Orthodox Jews and the other wants them to be fundamentalist Christians, this is probably insoluble within the conventional definitions of those religions. These are beliefs where you really want to make sure you match before you get married.
But even a lot of things that look totally contradictory at first can have solutions if you're willing to give up other stuff. I know couples that live in different cities and only see each other on weekends, or ones of different religions where they've just decided to mash their different cultures together and create their own religion for the kids.
That's a brilliant insight. Thanks for sharing!
Most people come into the world assuming that their desires are everybody's desires. We live life by the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." This obscures that there's often a wide variety in the things we would like others to do unto us, and that assuming everybody wants what you wants often leads us to do exactly what they don't want.
It was a revelation when my therapist told me "You need to show love in the ways that other people want to receive it, not the way you want to send it." It hadn't really occurred to me before then that things I considered really inconsequential - checking if she got home okay, or leaving the porch light on for her at night - might really matter to my girlfriend (now wife), or that things that I considered really important - like listening to my latest theory on reality, or showing enthusiasm when I show her my latest product demo - might be considered inconsequential by her.
Many people have this intuitive idea that service & favors are a zero-sum game, but in actuality, some actions cost you a lot less than the recipient benefits from them, and some cost you a lot more than the recipient cares. It makes a lot of sense to perform favors that are cheap for you but benefit the recipient a lot. It's on you to figure out how much the recipient cares and how much time & energy you can spare for them.