Ryan Stewart's answer was almost there. In the case where you actually don't want to delete your local changes, there's a workflow you can use to merge:
git status
. It will give you a list of unmerged files.git commit
Git will commit just the merges into a new commit. (In my case, I had additional added files on disk, which weren't lumped into that commit.)
Git then considers the merge successful and allows you to move forward.