"Winning clears the air"

Here's a belief about what the win does. Once the fact is settled, it's over. The air's clear. Better to have it out and finish it than let it fester.

Look at who's holding the fact at the end. You are, with the calendar. What's your partner holding? They said Wednesday, they were shown Tuesday, they said "whatever". They're holding the "whatever", and the edge you produced the calendar with, and the fact that dinner became a demonstration. Nothing's clear for them. The air is full of a thing you can't see, because from your chair the argument is over and from theirs it's been filed.

Eli Finkel and colleagues, in 2013, followed a hundred and twenty couples for two years. In the first year, everyone's marital quality declined, which the researchers noted is the normal pattern. In the second year, half the couples were given a short intervention, twenty-one minutes in total, spread over the year, that asked them to think about their conflicts differently. I'll describe it in chapter 20. The couples who got it stopped declining. The couples who didn't kept going down. And the thing that carried the effect, in the researchers' analysis, was distress about conflict. The intervention reduced how distressing the couples found their arguments, and that was what preserved the marriage. Not fewer arguments. Less distress in them.

That's what the win doesn't clear. It settles the fact and leaves the distress, and it's the distress, not the plumber, that the research connects to how the marriage goes. Every win adds to the distress on one side of the table while feeling like resolution on the other, and the side that's carrying it isn't the side that thinks the air is clear.

Look at the sofa, half an hour after the calendar. You're pleased, in a small way, and slightly puzzled that the room is cold. Your partner is on their phone. Neither of you says anything about the plumber, and neither of you says anything about anything else either. That's the cleared air, and it's clear in the way a room is clear after somebody's left it.

There's a related habit worth a paragraph, which is having the same argument again. If the air were clear, the argument about the route wouldn't recur, and it does, monthly, because it was never about the route. The recurring argument is a sign that the last win didn't settle anything, and that both of you are carrying the same disagreement to the same table and fighting it on the same ground. A later book in this series may take that habit on its own. Here I'd say only that a repeated argument is one that winning can't end, because winning is what's kept it going.