"The morning's too busy"

The resume time is the hinge of the method, and the objection to it is that there is no morning. Alarm at half past six, children, lunches, the door at eight. Where's the ten minutes?

Two things. The first is what the morning is for, on the evidence. Brant Hasler and Wendy Troxel, in 2010, followed twenty-nine couples for a week with sleep monitors and daily reports of how they got on. The findings ran in both directions. For the men, a better night's sleep predicted less negative interaction with their partner the next day. For the women, less negative interaction during the day predicted better sleep that night, and their partner's better sleep too. It's a small study and I'd hold it loosely, and the gender findings are the study's and I'm not generalising them. But the direction is the thing. Sleep and how a couple gets on feed each other, day to night to day, and a row at one in the morning is a bad night that produces a bad day that produces a bad night. The morning after a truce, with sleep behind it, is the one place in that loop where the two of you are on the good side of it, and it's the reason the resume time works at all.

The second is the arithmetic. Ten minutes. Not the three hours the sofa took. Ten minutes at the kitchen table, with coffee, before the children are down or after they've gone, in which the two of you say the thing that was actually the matter and agree what to do about the dishwasher. Most rows that took three hours at midnight take ten minutes at eight, in my observation, because at eight the fourth point from chapter 11 is available and the circuit isn't running. The morning isn't too busy for ten minutes. It's too busy for three hours, and three hours was never what the row needed.

Make it an appointment. An earlier book in this series, about raising difficult things, has a method it calls booking it, asking for a time, and the resume time is that. "Eight o'clock, kitchen table, before the school run." Named, agreed, kept. If eight genuinely can't work, the walk after drop-off, or the phone call at lunch, or half past eight tomorrow evening before the low hour arrives. What matters is that the time exists, that both of you know it, and that it's kept, because a resume time kept is what makes the next truce believable.