"This time it really is about the dishwasher"

It is about the dishwasher. I'm not going to tell you it isn't, and I'm not going to tell you that the dishwasher doesn't matter, because a full dishwasher at half past eight is a small real thing and small real things are most of a shared life. The belief this chapter is about is a different one. It's the belief that the dishwasher is the row, so that if the dishwasher question were answered, the row would be over.

Here's the test, and you can run it on your list from chapter 1. Has answering the topic ever ended the row? Take any instance. The dishwasher got emptied, eventually, by someone. The in-laws came and went. The phone went in a drawer for a week. And the row came back, in a fortnight or a month, wearing something else. If the topic were the row, solving the topic would have solved it, once, in all these years. It never has. That's not a failure of your solutions. It's information about what the row is.

Lauren Papp, Mark Cummings and Marcie Goeke-Morey had a hundred married couples keep diaries of every conflict at home over a fortnight, seven hundred and forty-eight of them in all. They were looking at money. Money wasn't the most frequent topic, which surprised them, but money rows were more pervasive, more problematic, more recurrent and more likely to be left unresolved than the others, and here's the part I'd underline, they contained more attempts at problem solving, not fewer. The couples who fought about money tried harder to solve it than they tried with anything else, and it stayed unsolved and kept coming back. More solving didn't end it. That's what a costume looks like from the outside. It's a topic that attracts solutions and isn't changed by them.

One comparison, and then I'll leave it. A stain on a ceiling can be painted over, and it comes back, because the leak is above it, and painting the stain was never going to touch the leak. The dishwasher is the stain.

So yes, tonight is about the dishwasher, in the sense that the dishwasher needs emptying and someone should do it. Chapter 22 will say that tonight's costume gets tonight's answer, and the answer to the dishwasher takes four minutes. What the belief in this chapter does is spend the evening on the stain and call it the leak. The rest of the book is about the leak.