"Dealbreaker"

[jack]

This is a completely random rant, but it really bugs me when people misuse "dealbreaker". I'm not sure, but I think it's similar to why so many people are annoyed by exaggerating "literally".

In my vocabulary "dealbreaker" means "I'm not willing to give this up. I'd rather walk away from the negotiation and accept the consequences of not getting _anything_ I want than give this up." Obviously, that means in a one-off negotiation you may have an incentive to lie about it: if tiny parliamentry party is needed to form a majority government with large parliamentry party, it's in tiny party's interest if everyone thinks they won't budge an inch on any issue, because then the big party has to agree on everything the little party wants, or go shopping around for another less-acceptible party they think they can compromise with. (In fact, the little party usually manages to get their way on ONE issue that's important to them, and compromise on everything else.)

But in general, it's more efficient to be honest. It wastes EVERYONE's time if you negotiate for a long time, and then someone suddenly refuses to budge on an important issue and you have to start over.

If you're looking to date someone short of marriage, it's likely that for most people "of the wrong continent" or "of the wrong gender" are dealbreakers: however much they may like the person, they're likely to be unable to agree to date.

But I don't think things like "intellectual, intelligent, British, same religion, same dietary preference, good job" are usually dealbreakers. Sure, most people find the vast majority of compatible partners in the set of people who match each other on those preferences, so it makes sense to triage and pay attention to those people _first_. But it's hardly a dealbreaker if you mean "well, it's less likely, but I'm perfectly happy with it if I like everything else". That's specifically the OPPOSITE of a dealbreaker.

But sometimes people continue to say "dealbreaker" in those situations, apparently specifically to annoy me, personally. (Not that I've ever said the word in my life, but I think I know what it means :))

Seriously, "having a car" is a dealbreaker? You'd refuse to date the president of the usa if his cars are all provided by the government by security reasons? You'd refuse to date someone between having their car stolen and getting the insurance money? You'd refuse to date someone living in NY or London who took taxis or public transport everywhere because parking and traffic are so expensive and slow even for middle class people like you? If you mean "not being an idle layabout" is a dealbreaker, say so, you'd probably offend fewer people than publicly denouncing everyone who's not you :)

Comments

[redbird]

This makes sense. I'd add that the commonest dealbreakers in dating may not even be mentioned: many straight people don't bother to say that gender is a dealbreaker, because that's an "of course" for them.

(I wouldn't date the president, but that's to do with the amount of public scrutiny that would be involved in any such situation—hypothetical "some future president," this is not a comment on the incumbent or his family.)

[jack]

because that's an "of course" for them.

Yeah.

I wouldn't date the president, but that's to do with the amount of public scrutiny

Yeah, indeed. (And maybe other problems as well.) I expect people to think that, but I didn't expect people to avoid dating him because he wasn't successful enough at life, if they cared about that.

[jack]

PS. An anonymous commenter wants to reopen the flamewar on the definitions of "sex" and "gender", but I don't think that's likely to be productive.

[redbird]

Ah, that explains why I got a notification and then "do not have permissions to reply." Thanks for this explanation. (My first thought was that I had somehow gotten logged out of the site.)

[jack]

Feel free to make a concise explanation if you want. I had a feeling the anonymous commenter just wanted to say "Argument from etymology is the only truth! There is only one right way to use language, and changing language to convey new meaning and avoid hurting and disenfranchising people is evil!" but I may have been too cynical, and if they had a good point I didn't understand I'll unscreen it.

[redbird]

My hunch is that with any reasonable distinction, it would turn out that there are some people who felt strongly about potential partners' gender, some who felt that way about sex, and some subset who felt that way about both. (And for all I know, even if we let them make what seems like a less-than-useful distinction, there's probably someone out there who will date only people who want to be addressed by a specific set of pronouns.)

[hairyears]

The question is, of course, about definitions. A 'Deal-Breaker' is a precondition to negotiations, which *should* be stated in advance: "If I've got to put up with x, I'm not taking the deal. Not at any price, no matter what else you offer or concede".

I would point out that no-one uses 'deal-breaker' in this way in real life: why would there be any need for a term to describe a nonexistent 'deal' that both parties know is never going to enter serious negotiations leading to a reasonable possibility of agreement?

I agree with you in deploring the use of the term as an exaggeration, a label for a point that one party might well concede, for a price that they will drive up by using this dramatic language, and the drama of threatening to walk away... The term 'Deal Breaker' is mostly grandstanding, and frequently heard in slanging matches when there was never any intention of considering a deal to broker or to break.

Where it gets difficult is in the ways that a 'deal-breaker' can emerge in a real negotiation. I can see four common scenarios:

(1) "No-one realised this would be a problem, before we sat down at the table"

Did one party discover, to their horror, that the other has some unacceptable business practice (a refusal, say, to countenance the use of Fair-Traded sources) - something that the discoverers had never imagined that it would be necessary to state in advance of entering a serious negotiation? Something, perhaps, that the other party never thought of mentioning beforehand because it never seemed important: assumptions and blind spots on one or both sides can create 'deal-breakers' without deceit or any accusations of negotiating in bad faith.

(2) "They sprung it on us!"

The other party will, of course, protest: "They sprung it on us!" - which is another way that a 'deal-breaker' can (and often does) emerge - one party is negotiating in bad faith, keeping quiet about an issue that should have been declared beforehand as a non-negotiatiable item, a precondition.. Revealing this item in a late-stage threat to walk out of the deal forces the other party - who may have committed a great deal to the success of the negotiation by this time - into conceding the point when, had they known about the 'deal-breaker' in advance, they would have priced-up the whole deal very differently and demanded far more on the items they agreed to before the trap was sprung.

(3) "Maybe we can pay them enough to swallow their principles..."

A cynic might suggest that many 'deal-breakers' that emerge at a late stage of negotiations might actually be negotiating positions for terms which - at a price - the objecting party might concede and find acceptable if they were offered enough money. But we'll never know, because the party which backed down was never stupid enough or desperate enough to offer that much money, just to close the deal; and so it allowed the 'deal breaker' to break the deal.

And in all of the transactions where some key principle was negotiated away, there was no 'deal breaker' - the deal didn't break - and everybody's keeping quiet about the things they shouldn't have agreed to, no matter what the price.

(4) "Sh**! Did I just agree to that? Gimme an excuse to break it all off!"

Darker cynics might suggest that a negotiation which is going badly for one participant - they have conceded far too much, and realise this late in the day - might end when that participant 'discovers' something that they declare to be a moral principle or vital economic interest that cannot ever be conceded. Generally there is some figleaf or face-saving statement that informs the wider world that, with hindsight, everybody should have known this obvious and self-evident truth from the beginning, and this unfortunate misunderstanding is now a matter of good-natured regret.



I'm sure that there are many variations on these four themes - but I would point out that only one of them exists in a form that allows all participants to walk away without well-founded accusations of bad faith. Some of the time. Failed negotiations can easily become recriminative and acrimonious.

[catyak]

It's probably a subset of (1), but an unexpected external event might be a good reason. If you're negotiating for a new house for your gran and she loses an argument with a car, suddenly you don't need the house any more. There's an implicit assumption that she'd be around to need the house to which both sides may have been party. Perhaps an aeroplane crashed into it and destroyed it, so although gran is still alive, there's now no longer a house to buy.

D

[hairyears]

The accepted term for that is force majeure - an event that makes the deal invalid - both after and before contracts are exchanged.


Discovering the building has narrow doorways with reinforced concrete frames that are structurally irremovable and make every room completely inaccessible for wheelchairs would be an example of a deal-breaker.

[fluffymormegil]

I appear to have only managed to encounter the term in respect of interpersonal relationships, where there is often an expectation that one can proceed at least some distance without having to first exhaustively enumerate all of one's squicks and squees, and where one might not even have fully realized all of one's squicks and squees. It makes an awful lot of sense to, having misfortunately discovered a squick, express the squick using the slightly clinical term "dealbreaker" rather than try to articulate one's possibly revoltingly visceral disgust.

[corrvin]

I think "has a car" is sekrit code for "not going to bug me to drive them around all the time."

Or it's also code for "everything I know how to do requires having $ITEM, so if you don't also share that cultural expectation, we may not mesh well." (This fits for the gender/sex thing, too.)