"Once they finally understand, it'll stop"

This is the belief that keeps you in the kitchen past the point where you'd have stopped with anyone else. Somewhere in you there's a final version of this row, the one where you say it clearly enough and your partner hears it properly, and something goes in that has never gone in, and it never comes back. You've been trying to have that conversation for years. Each instance is another attempt at it. And because it's never happened, each instance also feels like a failure to get there, and you go to bed with the row unsettled and the final version still owed.

Kristen Johnson and Michael Roloff studied what they called serial arguments, the same argument between the same two people, repeated. They surveyed people in dating relationships about an argument that kept coming back, and what they wanted to know was which mattered more for how the relationship was doing, how often the argument recurred, or whether the person believed it could be resolved. It was the belief. How often the row happened mattered less for the relationship than whether the person thought it was resolvable. And the things that went with thinking it wasn't resolvable were a specific list. Rows that came from expectations being let down. Complaining back when complained at. One partner pushing while the other backed off. Being able to predict when the row would happen. Mulling it over between instances. Pulling away from each other afterwards.

Read that list against your own row and I'd guess you'll tick most of it. That's the finding, and I'll be careful with it. It's a survey, it can't say what causes what, and it's dating couples, not marriages. But it points at something the final version can't see. The weight you're carrying isn't the row. It's the sense that the row is unresolvable and ought to be resolved. Every instance that fails to be the final version adds to that sense, and the sense, not the dishwasher, is what's doing the damage.

Which means the final version is doing something backwards. The harder you try to have the conversation that ends it, the more each instance becomes a conversation that didn't, and the less resolvable the whole thing feels. Understanding isn't the missing piece. Your partner has understood you many times. They've understood you on Tuesdays and Sundays and once at length in a car park. What they can't do is make the row not exist, because it's the row two different people have, and chapter 5 is about that.