War over Being Nice

A turns into war, bulling and tyranny, B turns into toxic cesspool of blame and playing a victim. Especially that there's a mechanism of self-selection, and people fed up with the group tend to leave.

If you're a parent you see a micro-versions of both almost all the time in kids interacting with each other.

Most people with reasonable life experience must have been involved repeatedly in groups with both A and B cultures, some of which worked great, and some of which were terrible. The difference is not in A/B but in particular group dynamics, their morals etc.

IMO, A healthy, well-rounded adult should be able to encompass and integrate both cultures and fluently switch them depending on the context and a need at hand, and not fall into worst version of any.

Resistance to a power structure is a conflict.

It's a balancing act of reasonability, and some people are indeed bad actors. Like people walking past eachother on the sidewalk, some people are (unreasonably) upset when not everyone gets out of their way. While we're responsible for making reasonable (but not absolute) effort not to bump into eachother, "reasonable" is socially determined. It can feel unsatisfactory without a game-proof absolute rule, but it really does work.

Like yourself, I have a partner that is a different culture than myself; I leaning towards A, and them to B.

It was a constant source of bickering for us because I'd never be able to express myself fully without affecting her negatively. Being too considered in my speech, would keep them calm but would leave me dissatisfied, which would make the next one worse. During fights, only after being sufficiently emotionally exhausted we'd come to accept each other's "incorrect" perspective and move on. We share a lot of values, so that isn't hard and we were quite happy on the whole.

There was a point about a year ago where some acute external stress started to weigh down on us, and we were increasingly getting worse at resolving those arguments. I tried to take their feedback at face value, by trying to be accommodating of their stated needs. But that too failed miserably. In fact I was now being similarly emotionally devastated, for things that usually would be a quick quarrel. Because of all the extra emotional work I was trying to do, and didn't have the stamina for.

We recognized it was a deteriorating condition, so somehow my partner brought up the idea of going through The 5 Love Languages book. Neither of us had read it before, but the audiobook was on YouTube, so it couldn't hurt. Long story "short", that book has revolutionized the way we communicate. It was night and day difference within a week, and we haven't been happier.

My key takeaway from the book wasn't that we were different cultures (while that is still true). It was that there are some very simple but powerful techniques, that allow you and your partner to store much more emotional energy in your reservoir (book calls it "love tank") so communication mismatches can be handled much more gracefully. In the end, we can approach disagreements in either style, depending on subject.