What waiting does to the conversation

The subtitle of this book says that the conversation you put off becomes a worse one. This chapter sets out how. It's the centre of the argument, and most of it is my own reasoning, with one study.

Compare the two conversations you could have had about Saturdays.

The April conversation would have gone something like this. "Can I talk to you about Saturdays? I'm glad you've found the cycling, and I can see it's good for you. I'm finding it hard having the kids on my own every week, though. Could we work out something that gives me some time as well?" It concerns one thing, which is recent. There's no history to argue over. It comes with a request he could say yes to. You're not angry yet, only a bit tired, so your voice is ordinary. He's surprised, but he isn't under attack, and there's nothing for him to defend.

The August conversation began with "you're never here", and everything about it was different.

It was about too much. Four months of Saturdays had gathered other things to them. There was the holiday, and his mother, and the remark at Christmas. When a grievance has waited a long time it attracts others, because a mind that's been keeping score on one thing starts keeping score in general. You couldn't say what you wanted because by then you wanted a dozen things. He couldn't respond to any of them because they came all at once.

It was in the wrong words. "Never", "always", "everything" and "every single" are the vocabulary of stored-up anger. They're also false, and the other person knows they're false, so the conversation becomes a dispute about accuracy. "I'm not never here. I was here all day Sunday." Now you're arguing about Sunday.

It was at the wrong time and in the wrong place, as chapter 4 described, because a blow-up chooses its own.

It came as an ambush. Sam had no warning and no time to think. A person who's ambushed defends himself, and you shouldn't read that as a flaw in his character. It's what nearly everyone does when attacked without warning in front of their mother.

There's evidence that the opening of a difficult conversation matters a great deal. Sybil Carrère and John Gottman recorded 124 newly married couples discussing a point of conflict for fifteen minutes. They coded the emotional tone minute by minute. Then they followed the couples for six years. The tone of the first three minutes alone was enough to predict, better than chance, which couples would later divorce. Conversations that began harshly tended to stay harsh, and couples who habitually began that way did worse. I'd add a caution from general knowledge. Predictions of this kind have been criticised as less impressive than they sound, since a pattern fitted to one group of couples may not predict as well in another. But the narrower point is hard to doubt. A conversation that starts with an accusation rarely recovers inside the same half hour.

A conversation that's been put off for months nearly always starts harshly. By the time it happens you're too angry to open gently, and you didn't choose the opening anyway.

Waiting also adds one more subject to the conversation, which is the waiting itself. "Why didn't you say something?" is a fair question, and it has no good answer. If you've been unhappy since April and said nothing, the other person learns two uncomfortable things at once. They learn about the problem, and they learn that you can be unhappy for four months while telling them you're fine. The second can disturb them more than the first. They start to wonder what else you're not saying, and whether "fine" means fine.

The same thing happens outside marriages. Take a manager whose team member, Callum, has been handing in work late since January. In January the conversation would have been two minutes at his desk. "The last two reports were a few days late. Is something getting in the way?" The manager finds it awkward and lets it go. By June there have been nine late reports, and two colleagues have complained. The manager is irritated every time Callum speaks. The conversation that finally happens is a formal one with HR in the room, and the first thing Callum says is, "Nobody ever told me it was a problem." As far as he knew, it wasn't. In January he'd have had an easy fix available. By June there's a file on him, and he's resentful, and he thinks the manager doesn't play straight with him. That's an invented example, but people who work in offices will have seen it happen.

Finally, waiting weakens your position, which is the opposite of what people expect. It's natural to think that a longer record of patient suffering gives you more moral authority. In practice it works the other way. In April your request was plainly reasonable. After the car park, your original point, which was just as reasonable as it had been in April, has been buried under the way it came out. Now the evening is about your outburst. You may even end up apologising, and the Saturdays may go undiscussed for another month, because nobody wants to go back there.

None of this means that a conversation put off too long can't be rescued. It can, and chapter 15 covers how. But the pattern is dependable enough that I'll state it as a rule of thumb. The conversation is rarely easier than it is this week, because the subject is as small and your feelings as mild as they're going to be. Every week you wait, the subject grows and your feelings harden a little more.