Chapter 5: Meeting Difficulties Constructively 3. What About Incompatability?

Faults of adjustment should not be a cause of fear, yet "incompatibility" is a big word that frightens people sometimes, because it sounds rather hopeless. Often, in reality, it is no more than a vague way of saying that the persons involved are selfish and unwilling to make concessions. Sometimes it means that they are too ignorant to carry out their physical mating with a reasonable degree of harmony. Few are the pairs who cannot achieve harmony, both sexual and mental, if they are willing to give themselves fully and unselfishly to each other.

There is a growing understanding that incompatibility is not so much a necessary clash between two natures as it is a result of wrong training or a condition that people bring upon themselves; while compatibility is a happy state that married people gain by intelligent effort. It may be aided by good training and fortunate choice but it is not merely an accident. Seeming incompatibility can be corrected in many cases by studying how to lessen misunderstandings and annoyances, and how to grow in patience and mutual self-giving.

If people begin to rub each other the wrong way a change of subject and of interest will often help, or perhaps a change of scene. Even those who love may see each other too much and others too little. Seeing other friends and places helps to restore perspective so that the molehills that looked like mountains return to their real size, and the two can be all the happier because they see things in their true proportions again.