"It's the principle"

When the fact is small, the habit reaches for something larger. It's not about the plumber. It's the principle. It's about whether what you say gets believed in this house.

I'd ask you to name the principle, out loud, in a sentence. When people try this, the sentence usually comes out as something like "I want to be believed" or "I don't want to be treated as though my memory can't be trusted". Those are real things and they matter. They're also not about the plumber, and the plumber's day is a poor place to fight for them, because winning that argument doesn't get you believed. It gets you the calendar, and a partner who's learned that disagreeing with you about a date costs an evening.

If being believed is the principle, then the way to be believed is to be someone whose disagreements are proportionate. A person who fights every date is a person whose certainty is worth less, not more, because it's spent on everything. A person who lets the plumber go and holds firm on the mortgage is a person whose firmness means something. The principle is served by dropping the small ones. It's undermined by winning them.

And if the principle is bigger than that, if the real thing is that you feel your partner routinely dismisses what you say, then that's a real disagreement about the relationship, and it deserves a real conversation, at a chosen time, in the shape an earlier book in this series describes. What it doesn't deserve is to be fought as a proxy war over the recycling, where it can't be won because it isn't on the table.

So when "it's the principle" arrives, take it seriously enough to ask what the principle is. If it's about the fact, it's not a principle. If it's about the two of you, it's not about the fact, and the fact is in the way.