I live in an apartment. I share it with someone else. We have three chairs for use with the computers. They are all passably decent, but I dislike one of them. My roommate dislikes a different one of them. We have precisely mirrored tastes. The one he dislikes is my favorite. The one I dislike is his favorite.
If you gave us a list of the chairs and had us ‘pick two’, there would be one vote for the chair I like, one vote for the chair he likes, and two votes for the chair we both tolerate. In spite of this, it is the chair we tolerate that we end up not using. Our appreciation of our respective favorite chairs outweighs our agreement on the compromise chair.
I want to read a political analogy into this. I am having trouble making it fit. After all, there are two of us, and thus we pick two chairs. We don’t vote on it, we just each pick (and get) our favorite. If we had to pick one chair, we would likely go with the compromise chair, but that would be silly. There is no reason for two people to limit themselves to one chair.
We put the third chair into the corner and forgot about it.