"If I don't push, nothing changes"

If you're the one who raises it, you'll have this belief, and it has a good pedigree. Things do get done because somebody asks. The dishwasher got emptied on Sunday because you said something on Saturday. If you stopped saying something, you're fairly sure the kitchen would silt up, and so, in the one row, you push, and pushing feels like the only thing standing between the house and entropy.

Andrew Christensen and Christopher Heavey watched thirty-one couples discuss a change one of them wanted, and then a change the other wanted. The pattern they described, and named, is demand and withdraw. Whoever wanted the change pushed, and whoever was being asked to change backed off, and the roles swapped when the topic swapped. It wasn't a fixed feature of either person. It was a feature of wanting something from someone who isn't sure they want to give it. Johnson and Roloff, in the serial argument survey from chapter 4, found that this exact pattern, one partner pushing while the other backed off, went with believing the row couldn't be resolved.

Here's the part the belief can't see from the inside. The push is half the row. The quiet one's backing off is the other half, and each one produces the other. You push because they've gone quiet, and they've gone quiet because you're pushing, and the row has a shape now that neither of you chose and both of you are keeping. Pushing harder doesn't break the shape. It's what the shape is made of. That's not blame. If you're the pusher, you've very likely got the fairer point on the topic, and the topic still isn't the row.

I'd separate two things the push is doing. One is asking for a real thing, the dishwasher, the phone away at dinner. That's fine and often necessary, and a plain request for it on a calm day, which the earlier book They can't read your mind covers, gets it done more often than a push at half past eight. The other thing the push is doing is trying to get the underneath heard, and the underneath can't be pushed into anyone. Chapter 21 gives it a different route. When you take the underneath out of the push, what's left is a small request, and small requests don't need pushing.