"There's never a good time"

You've been waiting for the right moment. It's worth writing down what the right moment would have to look like, because the list is revealing.

They'd need to be in a good mood, since you don't want to pile on when they're down. They shouldn't be in too good a mood either, since you don't want to ruin a nice evening. You'd need to be calm. There'd have to be time, so it couldn't be a weekday morning or just before bed. The children would have to be out of earshot. It couldn't be just before something important, like a big meeting or a holiday or Christmas, and it couldn't be just after one, when everyone's tired. Nobody should be ill, and work should be going reasonably well for both of you.

Looked at as a list, the conditions can almost never be met together. The right moment is defined so that it doesn't occur. I don't think this is an accident. Part of you has set the entry requirements so high that you can go on waiting with a clear conscience. It doesn't feel like avoiding. You tell yourself you're being considerate about timing.

There's an assumption buried in the waiting that's worth bringing out. It's that a moment exists when the conversation would be easy, and that your job is to find it. No such moment exists. The conversation is about something the other person would rather not hear, and there's no mood in which people enjoy that. A good moment makes it go somewhat better, but it's never going to be comfortable. If you're holding out for comfortable, you'll wait for ever.

Meanwhile, time that isn't chosen gets chosen for you. The blow-up has its own sense of timing, and it's reliably terrible. It comes when you're most tired and most provoked, because that's when your guard fails. For you that was a car park, after a long family lunch, in front of his mother. For someone else it's the end of a bad day at work, in an open-plan office. Many people manage it on Christmas Eve. When the thing finally comes out on its own, it won't wait for a moment when the children are out of earshot.

So you were never choosing between a good moment and a less good one. You can have a moment you pick, which will be imperfect, or a moment that picks itself, which will be about the worst available.

Picking is easier than you'd think, because a moment only has to clear a low bar. You need half an hour, some privacy, neither of you drunk, exhausted or about to leave the house. That's all. Such moments turn up several times a week.

Better still, don't hunt for the moment at all. Make one. "There's something I'd like to talk about. Could we sit down after the kids are in bed on Thursday?" This has several advantages that I'll come back to in chapter 12. The main one here is that it ends the search. Once Thursday is agreed, the conversation is going to happen, and it's going to happen at a time when you're both sitting down and expecting it.

You might worry that giving notice makes it worse, since they'll fret until Thursday. You can soften that. "It's nothing terrible. It's about how we do weekends, and I'd rather talk about it properly than in passing." A day or two of mild curiosity on their part is a small price. It's far better than an ambush, because notice lets them arrive ready to listen, and an ambush doesn't.