As you do to ugly faces. It is indispensable if they depend on us, or we on them... At first they arouse disgust, but gradually they lose this influence, and reflection provides for disgust or puts up with it.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Every durable arrangement, marriage, partnership, family firm, old team, contains failings that will never be fixed, in people who will never be replaced. That pair of facts leaves exactly two prices: habituation, paid once, after which the failing becomes background like a familiar face; or friction, paid daily, in the currency of irritation, at compound rates, forever. The observation about the mechanism is the useful part: disgust fades under exposure IF reflection lets it, meaning the daily payers are usually re-deciding to be irritated, rehearsing the failing instead of filing it. The skill is a deliberate reclassification: this is not an offence being repeated; it is weather, and one dresses for weather.
Practice
- Sort each familiar's failings once, in writing if needed: fixable (raise it properly, once), fatal (a different decision entirely), or weather. The unsorted middle is where daily payment happens.
- For the weather items, retire the commentary, inner and outer; noting the failing each time is the friction, self-administered.
- Check what your own weather costs others; habituation runs both directions, and someone is currently paying one of your subscriptions.
Use this when
- Use this in every arrangement you intend to keep; the intention without the habituation is a plan to be resentful.
- Use it early in new partnerships: the failings visible in month one are the weather of year ten; price them before signing, not after.
Ignore this when
- Don't habituate to the genuinely corrosive; disrespect, dishonesty, and harm are not weather, and adjusting to them is self-erasure (the fatal column exists for a reason).
- Don't announce your tolerance; acceptance advertised becomes scorekeeping, which is friction wearing generosity's clothes.
A picture of it
The two sisters' boutique survived twenty-two years on one unspoken treaty. The elder never learned punctuality; the younger never learned tact with suppliers. For the first two years each tried to reform the other, and the shop nearly did not see a third. The treaty, never negotiated aloud, was signed the season each stopped: the elder's mornings were covered without comment, the younger's calls were followed by the elder's smoothing visit, and the energy previously spent on reform went into the shop. Customers thought them perfectly matched. They were, in the only way that lasts: each had budgeted for the other.
Long relationships are kept by people who stopped billing each other for known faults. The invoice was the real failing.