Charlie: When it comes to relationships, it's very possible that the ten most powerful words you'll ever hear are "You can be right or you can have a relationship." And the most powerful word of those ten is "or." I first heard this phrase about twenty-five years ago when a friend from whom I'd been trying to gain some sympathy instead gave me something far more valuable: the realization that being right and having good relationships are mutually exclusive and do not go together. You can have either one or the other; you just can't have both. I wanted to have it both ways and when things didn't work out that way, which was more often than not, I would generally feel resentful, unappreciated and misunderstood. The idea that my needing to be right was actually at least as big a part of the problem as the "crimes" I had judged Linda to be guilty of had been inconceivable to me prior to the awakening that was provoked by my friend's simple words.

Although it would be a slight exaggeration to claim that my