Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, and it belongs to two people. You have a row. It's about the dishwasher on Tuesday and about your mother-in-law at Christmas and about the phone at dinner and about who booked the thing on Saturday, and each time it feels like a different argument with its own facts and its own fair outcome, and each time it ends in the same place, with the same two sentences, and the same two people not speaking on the same sofa. You've had it, in one outfit or another, for years. You've never once called it the same row.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that treating each appearance as a new case makes sense from the inside. Tonight's topic is real. The dishwasher really was left. A new case can be won, and calling it the old row feels like giving up on it. The second is that the topic is a costume, and that solving the topic has never once ended the row, because the row isn't about the topic. There's research on arguments that come back, and it points somewhere useful. What wears couples down isn't how often the row returns. It's the belief that it has to be settled for good and hasn't been. What's underneath, when researchers ask thousands of married people what they were actually feeling, is usually one of two ordinary worries, and neither of them is the dishwasher. The third is practical. Find the one row. Give it a plain name you both accept. Agree in two sentences what it's about. And when it turns up in a new costume, say the name, deal with tonight's costume, and leave the record of every past instance shut. Chapters 20 to 23 cover how, and none of it takes longer than ten minutes.

This book won't tell you to stop arguing, or that the row will go away, or who's right. It's about the fresh case, the habit of fighting a row you've had fifty times as if it were the first.

Three cautions.

If your rows come with contempt, threats, control, or fear, or if one of you isn't free to leave the room or the house, that isn't a habit and this isn't the book. The NHS page on domestic abuse lists who to call. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by Refuge, is free and open day and night on 0808 2000 247, and the page gives the lines for men and for LGBT+ people. In an emergency, call 999.

If the rows are the surface of a low mood in either of you, low most of the day for a fortnight or more, the NHS says that's a GP conversation, and the rows will be easier to handle once it's had.

And if what you're arguing about is whether one of you is right about a fact, that's the earlier book You don't have to win this one. If the row happens at midnight, Go to bed cross if you have to is about the hour. This book is about the row that comes back.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.