"We've talked about it a hundred times"

You have, and this is offered as proof that talking is the answer, only you haven't yet done it well enough. So the next instance gets more talking. Longer, later, more carefully worded, with examples. And it goes the way the last hundred went, and the conclusion drawn is that you need to talk about it more.

Go back to Papp's couples and their money rows. Those rows had more attempts at problem solving than the couples' other rows, and they were the rows most likely to be left unresolved. More talking about the topic didn't move the topic. I'd say that's because the talking was about the costume. A hundred conversations about the dishwasher, or about money, or about your mother, are a hundred conversations about a stain. They can be careful and long and honest and they'll still be about the wrong thing, and the row will still come back, because you've never once talked about the row. You've talked about what it was wearing.

Notice what the hundred conversations have in common. They start from the topic. They try to settle the topic. They drift, within minutes, to the two sentences at the bottom of your chapter 1 list, and then they stop, because those two sentences are where the row lives and neither of you has a way of talking there. So you go back to the topic, because at least the topic has facts. The hundred conversations aren't evidence that talking doesn't work. They're evidence that talking about the costume doesn't.

There's a related habit, which is waiting to raise something until it's grown, and then raising it badly. The earlier book Say it this week is about that, and it's worth reading if the one row tends to arrive as a build-up. What this book adds is that the one row can't be raised in the usual way, because it isn't a thing to be raised. It's a shape the two of you make. Chapters 20 and 21 give you a different conversation to have, and it's shorter than any of the hundred, and it's not about the dishwasher. It happens once, on a calm day, and after that you don't need the hundred-and-first.