Values in a Relationship: How to Find Out What Someone Actually Values

29 Sep Values in a Relationship: How to Find Out What Someone Actually Values

Most writing on this subject hands you a list. Honesty, respect, loyalty, kindness. Nobody reads that list and discovers anything, because nobody is against those things.

The useful question is not which values matter. It is how you find out what someone’s actually are, given that everyone describes themselves well and most people believe their own description.

Shared interests are not shared values, and the confusion is expensive

Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study asked married adults what makes a marriage work. Having shared interests came top at 64%, ahead of a fair division of household labour at 56% and adequate income at 42%.

Shared interests are the easiest thing to spot and among the least predictive. You both like hiking. You both watch the same things. This produces an excellent third date and tells you almost nothing about how the two of you will handle a sick parent, a bad diagnosis, or a request for money from an adult child.

A value is not what someone enjoys. It is what they do when something costs them. Interests are revealed in a good week. Values are revealed in a bad one, which is why the early stage of a relationship is so poorly designed for detecting them.

Why this matters more at this stage of life

At twenty-five, two people build a life together and their values get negotiated on the way up. Nothing is settled yet, so a great deal can be absorbed.

At fifty-five, both of you arrive with a life already built. A view on money that has been tested. Obligations to children and parents that are not up for discussion. A way of handling conflict that has thirty years behind it. Nothing here is being formed. It is being merged, and merged things either fit or grind.

That is the whole case for finding this out early rather than hoping. It is also why the pleasant, agreeable early months can be so misleading: nothing has yet asked either of you to give something up.

The four that actually cause the trouble

Not a comprehensive list. These are the ones that, left unexamined, tend to end things at the two-year mark.

What money is for

Not how much either of you has, which is a separate and later conversation. Whether money is for security or for use. One person’s prudence is another’s refusal to live, and both positions are entirely defensible right up until you share a household.

This also covers what is owed to adult children, which is where it usually surfaces first and most sharply, and which we take further in our note on dating someone with children.

What family obligation requires

Whether you drop everything. Whether Sunday is standing. Whether a grown child’s difficulty is theirs to solve or yours to absorb.

People are rarely in the middle on this, and two people at opposite ends will each find the other’s position not merely different but wrong.

What is owed in an argument

Whether you stay in the room. Whether raised voices are normal or a breach. Whether an apology is expected, and what it has to contain.

This is what people are least able to describe about themselves and most consistent about in practice.

How much independence is normal

Separate friendships, separate travel, separate evenings, and whether any of that reads as healthy or as distance.

Someone who has lived alone for eight years and someone who has not will usually differ here without either being unreasonable.

How to find out, without an interview

Asking directly produces the answer someone believes about themselves, which is worth having but is not evidence. Three things work better.

Ask about a decision, not a principle. Not “how do you feel about supporting adult children.” Instead, what happened when his daughter asked for help with the deposit. People describe principles aspirationally and decisions accurately, because a decision has a result attached.

Watch what costs them something. Anyone is generous when generosity is free. The informative moments are small and easy to miss: what he does when the restaurant gets the order wrong, how she talks to someone who cannot do anything for her, what happens when a plan you both wanted gets cancelled by someone else’s need.

Listen to how they describe people who chose differently. This is the most efficient signal available. Someone describing a friend who put a parent in residential care, or a brother who lent money and was not repaid, is telling you their own position and the temperature of it in a single answer.

Which differences are survivable

Not all of them need to match, and a relationship where they all match is rarer than the advice suggests.

The workable difference is one where each of you can state the other’s position fairly and neither regards it as a defect. Two people can genuinely differ on how much help a grown child should get and manage it for thirty years, provided neither privately thinks the other is a fool.

The unworkable difference is one that requires an ongoing verdict. If every instance of it re-opens the question of whether the other person is a good person, the difference is not about the subject any more. That is worth catching early, and it is a different question from ordinary compatibility, which we take apart in our note on chemistry and compatibility.

Frequently asked questions

How soon should values come up?

They come up on their own by about the fourth or fifth meeting if you are paying attention, because ordinary conversation is full of decisions. Setting out to interview someone on the second date tends to produce performance rather than information.

Do we need the same politics or religion?

Pew found shared religious belief ranked well below shared interests and a fair division of labour among things people consider important to a marriage. What tends to matter more than the position is whether either of you needs the other to hold it.

He says the right things but something feels off. What is that?

Usually a gap between the stated value and an observed decision that you have registered without articulating. It is worth taking seriously enough to look for a second instance, and not worth acting on from one.

Can values change?

They can, usually slowly and usually because of an event rather than an argument. Entering a relationship on the expectation that yours will change theirs is a poor plan, and it is the most common version of this mistake.

Is it unromantic to think about this so deliberately?

It would be, if it replaced the rest. It does not. Most people who have had one long marriage end already know that liking someone was never the difficult part.

When the difficult questions are asked before you meet

Almost none of the above is comfortable to raise over dinner with someone you have met twice, which is why most people leave it and find out at two years. A matchmaker’s consultation covers this ground directly and on both sides, so that the introduction is made between two people whose positions on money, family and independence are already known to be compatible. It does not remove the work of getting to know someone. It removes the part where you discover at two years that it was never going to fit. If that sounds like the right order of operations, you can start with an application.