Finding Out What People Really WantWhy deals, lawsuits, and marriages all break the same way — and how to stop it
Finding Out What People Really Want
Why deals, lawsuits, and marriages all break the same way — and how to stop it
A young couple — newlyweds, hoping to start a family soon — found a beautiful old house. It had character, a great lot, good bones, and a price tag to match. They made an offer. It was accepted. They were, for a few days, homeowners-to-be.
Then the inspection happened.
The house was over a century old, and like a lot of houses that age, it still had its original clay sewer line running out to the street. Vitreous clay pipe was standard for decades — it's durable, but over a hundred years, it cracks. That's exactly what the inspector found. It needed to be dug up and replaced.
This is not an exotic problem. It's a routine one. Anyone who has bought or sold an older home has seen this exact item on an inspection report before.
And the deal died anyway.
The buyers walked. They lost their inspection costs — close to $2,000 — and months of time. The sellers lost their buyers, and the house went back on the market, where it still sits. The sellers, who need to sell this house in order to buy their next one, are stuck. The buyers, who wanted to get on with building their life together, are stuck too. Everybody lost. Over a sewer pipe.
The puzzle worth sitting with
Here's what should bother anyone who's spent real time at a negotiating table: this was a solvable problem. A cracked clay sewer pipe on an otherwise-desirable house is not a dealbreaker in any rational world. It's a line item. Someone gets a quote, the parties split the difference or negotiate a credit, and the deal closes.
So why didn't it?
The easy answer is "the buyers and sellers couldn't agree on money." That's true, but it isn't an explanation — it's just a restatement of the symptom. Money disagreements are almost never really about money. They're about what the money represents to each side. And that's the question nobody in this deal seems to have asked out loud.
It's also not a question unique to real estate. I see the same exact pattern in lawsuits I mediate, and — though I say this carefully, since I'm a lawyer, a mediator and a real estate broker. I am not a therapist — I see it in the way people describe conflict with their own spouses. The arena changes. The mechanism doesn't.
Positions versus interests
In mediation, we draw a hard line between a party's position — what they say they want — and their interest — what they actually need underneath that.
In the house deal, the positions were simple and predictable:
Buyer's position: "Fix it or credit me for it."
Seller's position: "I'm not paying that much to fix a pipe."
Two positions, a few thousand dollars apart, and an entire transaction of many hundreds of thousands of dollars died in the gap between them. That gap should never have been wide enough to kill a deal this size — which tells you the real fight wasn't about the dollar figure at all. It was about what each side believed the dollar figure meant.
The buyers weren't just worried about a repair bill. They were newly married, building a life, and probably feeling — consciously or not — that being asked to absorb a known defect on day one of homeownership was an unfair way to start. Their interest wasn't really the money. It was confidence that they weren't getting taken advantage of in the biggest purchase of their lives.
The sellers weren't just being stingy. They had their own next move riding on this sale. Their interest wasn't the repair cost either — it was momentum, and the fear that conceding too much, too fast, would eat into the funds they needed for their own next house.
Neither side's real interest was actually about the size of the number. But because nobody dug down to find that out, the negotiation stayed stuck on the only thing anyone had said out loud: the number.
Where the negotiation broke down
I don't say this as a criticism of any one person — it's a structural problem, and an extremely common one. Most negotiations default to positional bargaining: one side states a number, the other side counters, and the deal either lands somewhere in the middle or it doesn't. It's fast, it's familiar, and most of the time, on most issues, it works fine.
But positional bargaining has a weakness: it has no mechanism for finding out why either side is holding their position. It treats the stated number as the whole story. And when positions are far enough apart — or when either side starts to feel disrespected by the other's number — the negotiation can stall out completely, even when there's an obvious resolution available just beneath the surface.
What should have happened here is the kind of conversation a mediator has with each side, separately, before positions ever lock in:
What does this number actually represent to you, beyond the dollar figure?
What's driving your timeline — what happens if this falls through?
In mediation we ask parties to define their BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement)
What would it take for you to feel this was handled fairly, not just cheaply?
What's the real cost of walking away, compared to the cost of resolving this?
Ask the buyers those questions, and you likely find their real concern isn't "we refuse to spend $2,000" — it's "we don't want to start married life feeling outmaneuvered." Ask the sellers, and you likely find their real concern isn't "we refuse to negotiate" — it's "we can't afford to lose more time, because our own move depends on this."
Once you know that, the path to a deal looks different. Maybe it's a repair credit framed as the sellers "taking care of it" rather than "losing." Maybe it's a faster closing timeline that gives the sellers certainty in exchange for splitting the repair cost. None of that requires either side to lose. It just requires someone to ask what they actually need, instead of negotiating against what they said.
The same pattern, in a lawsuit
Take the same mechanism and put it in a courtroom-bound dispute instead of a real estate deal, and almost nothing changes except the vocabulary.
Two businesses are in a contract dispute. One side is suing for breach; the other is countersuing. On paper, the fight is about money — a specific dollar figure, usually with a lot of zeros, that each side's lawyer has anchored to and is defending like a property line.
But sit with each party privately, the way a mediator does, and the dollar figure often turns out to be a stand-in for something else entirely. Sometimes it's about being believed — one side feels falsely accused of acting in bad faith, and no settlement number will satisfy them until someone acknowledges that they didn't. Sometimes it's about precedent — a business owner who fears that settling "too easily" will invite the next disgruntled vendor to sue. Sometimes it's simply exhaustion dressed up as principle: a party who would take a fair number today, except that admitting it now feels like losing face after a year of insisting they wouldn't.
None of those are positions a lawsuit's pleadings will ever surface. They're not legal arguments — they're human ones. But they're very often the actual reason a case that "should" settle for a reasonable number instead drags on for another eighteen months of legal fees that dwarf the original dispute.
A mediator's real job in those cases isn't just doing math on a settlement range. It's finding out what each side needs to hear, or to walk away believing, before they can let go of a position they've been defending too long to give up for free.
The same pattern, at the kitchen table
I want to be careful here, because I'm
not a marriage counselor and I don’t have a stellar record in navigating my own domestic rhubarbs, and I'd never claim the training is interchangeable. But the underlying mechanism doesn't stop at the courthouse door or the closing table. Anyone who's been in a long relationship has lived through a version of this same trap.
A couple argues about money, or about whose turn it is to handle something, or about how a holiday gets spent. The argument repeats, sometimes for years, and it never seems to actually resolve — because the thing being argued about out loud usually isn't the thing actually driving the fight.
"You spent too much on that" is sometimes really "I don't feel like we're a team on money decisions." "Why didn't you tell your parents we can't come this year" is sometimes really "I need to feel like you'll choose us when it's hard, not just when it's easy." The stated position is real — the money was spent, the holiday plan was made — but it's rarely the actual source of the friction. The friction is almost always underneath: about fairness, about feeling chosen, about not feeling taken for granted.
Couples who get stuck in the same fight over and over are very often doing exactly what the buyers and sellers did over that sewer pipe — negotiating hard over the stated position, without ever asking the other person what's really driving it for them.
What all three have in common
A real estate deal, a lawsuit, and a marriage are not the same thing, and I'd never collapse them into one. But the pattern that breaks all three is identical: people state positions, the other side responds to the position instead of the person, and the conversation never gets anywhere near the actual interest sitting underneath. The fight goes in circles because everyone is negotiating against the wrong thing.
This is the first thing I look for in any dispute I mediate — real estate, business, or otherwise: what do the parties say they want, and what do they actually need? Those two things are rarely identical, and the gap between them is usually exactly where the conflict is stuck.
Good negotiators learn to ask these questions instinctively. It's also exactly the skill set mediators train for — finding the interest buried under the position, on both sides, before the positions calcify into a standoff.
If you're buying or selling real estate and a deal feels stuck over something that, on paper, shouldn't be a dealbreaker — that's usually a sign the real issue hasn't been named yet. If you're in a dispute that's already escalated past a normal negotiation, that's exactly the kind of situation a mediator is trained to untangle. And if you find yourself in the same argument with someone you love, over and over, with no resolution in sight — it might be worth asking what you're actually fighting about, underneath what you're saying.
Either way, the lesson is the same: don't negotiate against what someone said. Find out what they actually need.