"It's always me who has to let it go"

Here's an objection that carries a history. In your house, the one who says "let's stop" is always the same person, and stopping has come to mean giving in, and this book is asking you to be that person again.

Andrew Christensen and Christopher Heavey, in 1990, described a pattern in couples' conflicts that they called demand and withdraw. One partner presses, with requests and complaints, and the other pulls back, with silence or defensiveness. They found that whoever wanted the change was the one who pressed, and whoever was being asked to change was the one who withdrew. An earlier book in this series uses this study and I'm using it here for one point. Withdrawing isn't a truce. Withdrawing is one person leaving the argument without agreement and without a time to return, and the other person is left pressing at nothing, and it settles nothing and it feels, to the presser, like being abandoned. If "let's stop" has meant that in your house, then the objection is right, and the fix isn't to stop stopping. It's to stop withdrawing and start calling truces.

The difference is two things. A truce is joint. Both of you agree to stop, or at least both of you know the stop is happening and why. And a truce has a time on it. "Eight o'clock" is what makes it a truce and not a withdrawal, because the presser knows the argument hasn't gone anywhere, it's been parked, and they'll be heard at eight. A withdrawal has no time. It's an exit. The silent treatment, the sleeping on the sofa without a word, the "fine" and the turned back, are withdrawals, and they're the thing the old rule was reacting against, and it was right to.

So if you're always the one who lets it go, the method changes what letting go is. You're not giving in. You're calling a truce, out loud, with a time, and the time is what makes it not giving in, because at eight the argument is yours as much as theirs and you'll have your say with a rested head. And if the other person is always the one who withdraws, the truce gives them a way to stop that isn't abandonment, and chapter 24 is about what to do if they won't take it.