09 Oct Non-Negotiables in a Relationship
Someone asks what your non-negotiables are and you produce a list: kind, honest, financially stable, no smoking, must like dogs. It is a perfectly reasonable list and almost none of it is a non-negotiable.
A non-negotiable is not a quality you would like. It is a specific thing that would end a relationship you were otherwise happy in. Most people have never written that list, which is why they discover its contents at month eight.
The test that sorts the list
One question does most of the work. Imagine everything else is good: you enjoy each other, the company is easy, there is nothing you would change. Now imagine this one thing is present. Do you leave?
If the honest answer is no, it is a preference. Preferences are legitimate and worth having. They are not non-negotiables, and treating them as such produces a list so long that nobody can satisfy it, which is its own way of staying single.
Run the test on “must like dogs” and most people find they would, in fact, stay. Run it on “drinks more than I am comfortable with” and the answer is usually different.
Why most lists are wrong
Three errors account for nearly all of them.
They describe a person rather than a behaviour. “Kind” is not a non-negotiable because nobody announces that they are unkind. What you can actually observe is how he speaks to a waiter, or what he says about his former wife when he is tired. Behaviour under mild pressure is the only readable version of character in the first few months.
They are inherited. A good proportion of any list is made of things a previous marriage taught you to fear, and those items are often precisely calibrated to a person you are no longer with. Worth asking of each item whether it is about the next relationship or the last one.
They leave out money. This is the most consistent omission and the least defensible. Pew Research Center found that among people looking for a relationship, 59% of those aged 40 and older said they probably or definitely would not consider a relationship with someone carrying a significant amount of debt, compared with 41% of adults younger than 40. Older daters hold a harder line on this than younger ones, and yet it rarely appears on anyone’s stated list, because saying it out loud feels unkind.
This is not the same as your values
The two get used interchangeably and they do different work.
Values are what you are: how you spend money, what you owe your family, how much of life should be planned. They describe the shape of a good life for you, and two people can hold quite different ones and still be happy, provided neither requires the other to convert.
A non-negotiable is narrower and more brutal. It is the short list of things that would end it. You can share almost every value with someone and still be sitting on one non-negotiable that makes the relationship impossible. The longer treatment of the first half of that is in our note on values in a relationship.
What usually belongs on the real list
Most honest lists, once the preferences are stripped out, come down to four or five items and tend to cluster in the same places.
How conflict is handled. Not whether you argue, which you will, but what happens afterwards. Whether contempt appears. Whether silence is used as a sanction.
What he wants the next ten years to look like. Someone who intends to be in a different country, or who has decided never to live with anyone again, is not wrong. He is incompatible if you want the opposite, and no amount of goodwill resolves it.
Honesty about the plain facts. What he does, whether he is actually divorced, what his financial situation is. A person who is vague about verifiable things in month two is usually vague about them in year four.
How he treats the people who cannot do anything for him. His adult children, your friends, staff in restaurants.
Anything you have already left a marriage over. If it ended something once, it is not a preference, whatever you have told yourself since.
Keeping the list short
A list of four is useful. A list of fifteen is a filter so fine that nothing passes, and it usually belongs to someone who is protecting themselves from the risk of trying rather than from the risk of a bad match.
Lists also tend to shorten with age, and that is worth saying plainly because it is often mistaken for settling. At twenty-five the list is long because the stakes feel abstract. At fifty-five it is short because you have found out which things actually make a life difficult, and height was never one of them. Shortening is a result of better information, not of lowered standards.
One last test: have you ever actually enforced it? An item you have overlooked twice is not on your list. It is on your wish list, and the distinction matters because you will overlook it again.
Frequently asked questions
How many should I have?
Four or five, in most honest versions. If you have more than eight, some of them are preferences wearing a stronger label, and the test above will find them in about ten minutes.
Should I tell him what mine are?
Not as a list, and not early. Presenting terms in month two reads as a job interview. What is reasonable is to raise the relevant one when it becomes relevant, which for most items is somewhere between the second and fourth month.
Is wanting marriage a non-negotiable?
It is if it is. Many people at this stage find on examination that what they want is permanence and priority rather than a ceremony, in which case the honest item is the former. Some genuinely want the wedding, and that is equally legitimate. The error is leaving it unexamined and assuming he has guessed.
What if he meets everything except one?
Then you find out whether it was a non-negotiable. This is uncomfortable and it is also the only real test there is. What you should not do is renegotiate it privately and tell nobody, because that version resurfaces as resentment about something unrelated.
Can they change over time?
Yes, and usually in the direction of fewer and more precise. Reviewing the list every couple of years is sensible, particularly after anything ends, because an item added in the aftermath of a divorce is often too specific to be useful five years later.
Screening for the things that actually end relationships
The awkward part of a non-negotiable is that most of them concern facts you cannot establish yourself without asking questions that sound like an interrogation on a third date. Whether someone is genuinely divorced, what their situation actually is, what they want the next decade to contain. A matchmaker asks those questions before anyone meets, which is the whole function rather than a courtesy, and what you are told about the qualities that matter to you is covered in our note on what to look for in a partner. It does not spare you the work of deciding what your list is. It does mean the list is applied before the fourth month rather than after it. If that order appeals, you can start with an application.
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