What the late argument costs you

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and it arrives at half past six.

The sleep. Five hours instead of seven, after three hours at full stretch. The NHS says adults need seven to nine, and a row that ends at one has taken the bottom of that and left you with the adrenaline as well.

The next day. Hasler and Troxel's couples with worse nights had worse days together, and the day after a sofa row is a day with two tired people in it being short with each other about nothing, which produces the next row. The loop from chapter 5, running.

The things said at one. Anderson and Platten's sleep-deprived participants failed to hold back responses to negative things and responded wrongly, faster. The sentence about their mother at half past twelve is that finding in a living room. It wasn't meant. It's remembered. And it'll be in the next row, as evidence.

The distress. Finkel's finding was that it's distress about conflict, not conflict itself, that erodes a marriage over time. A row at one in the morning is the most distressing form a row can take, and a couple who has one a fortnight is depositing distress at a rate the marriage will notice.

The children who hear. Walls are thin and children sleep lightly. A child who's heard the sofa at midnight has learned what a row is and how long it lasts and that grown-ups don't stop, and will bring that to their own sofa in twenty years. A child who's heard "eight o'clock" and a door closing has learned something else.

The rows that were never about the dishwasher. The circuit at midnight pulls in everything, the mother, the thing from March, because the late brain can't hold one subject. So the dishwasher row becomes the everything row, and the everything row can't be settled because it's about everything, and a couple who only argues at midnight only ever has the everything row, and never gets to have the ten-minute one about the dishwasher, which is the one that would have fixed the dishwasher.

And the old rule itself, which has cost you a night a fortnight for years in exchange for the feeling of not having gone to bed on an argument, which is a feeling and not a result.