What the fresh case costs you

Add it up. Not the dishwasher, which costs four minutes, but the fresh case, which is the way you've been handling it.

It costs the evening, every time. An instance handled as a new case runs for an hour and ends in different rooms, and the evening was the only time you had together, and it's gone, and it'll go again in a fortnight. Over a year that's a lot of evenings spent on one row that never got settled.

It costs the between. Johnson and Roloff's list of what went with an unresolvable row included mulling it over between instances, and that's what the fresh case leaves you with. The instance ends unresolved, because it was never going to be resolved on its topic, and you carry it into Wednesday and Thursday, going over it, and the going over compiles the record, and the record is what you'll open next time. The between was supposed to be your life. It's become the preparation for the next instance.

It costs the record, in both directions. Every fresh case adds an entry, and every entry is a reading made at the worst moment, and the file now describes a partner who leaves you to it or who blames you constantly, and that partner is not the person you married. They're the person you see when the row is on, and the file means you see them more often.

And it costs something harder to name, which is the sense that the two of you are stuck. That's Johnson and Roloff's central finding, turned round. The belief that the row can't be resolved was what went with the relationship doing badly, more than the row itself. The fresh case manufactures that belief. Fifty instances, each one a new case, each one unresolved, and the conclusion that forms isn't "we have a row". It's "we can't sort things out", and that conclusion doesn't stay on the dishwasher. It spreads to the whole of the two of you, and you start to wonder, on a bad night, whether you're right for each other, which is chapter 5, and which the row never justified.

The fresh case turns two people with a difference into two opponents with a case. That's the cost, and none of it was charged by the row. It was charged by the way of handling it.