A shared decision needs a place for both people’s actual constraints.

Decisions go wrong when somebody’s real limit stays unmentioned. Money, energy, a health matter, a promise made elsewhere: if it is not said, the plan gets built around a version of that person who does not exist, and it collapses later in a way that looks like unreliability. Constraints are not obstacles to the discussion. They are the material it has to be made from.

Before agreeing to something joint, each name one thing you genuinely cannot do. Build it into the plan rather than around it. Decisions shaped by both real lives need far less rescuing.