"I can't stand being misremembered"

The worst arguments are about memory. What she said at Christmas. Whether you told them about Saturday. Who suggested the holiday. There's no calendar for these, and the certainty on both sides is total, and the argument has nowhere to go and goes there for an hour.

I'd like to say something plain about memory disputes, and it's this. They're unwinnable by design. Not because your partner is stubborn, and not because your memory is bad, but because a memory isn't a recording. It's a reconstruction, made fresh each time from fragments, and shaped by what you expected and how you felt and what's happened since. Both of you are reconstructing Christmas, and both reconstructions are confident, and there's no third recording to check them against. Chapter 3's point about certainty is at its sharpest here. You're both sure, and being sure is what reconstruction feels like.

So what's the argument for? If it can't establish what was said, it must be about something else, and I think it's usually about one of two things. Either it's about a feeling that's real and current, that their mother is dismissive of you, say, which the Christmas remark is being used to prove and which could be talked about directly. Or it's about being believed, chapter 7's principle, and the memory has become the test. In neither case is the remark the thing. The remark is the ground the thing is being fought on, and it's ground on which nobody can win.

The two questions from chapter 19 settle memory disputes faster than any evidence could. Is it true? Unknowable. Does it matter? If the answer is that it matters because of what it shows, then talk about what it shows. If it matters only as a fact, it's a fact nobody can check, and the only thing that continuing establishes is that both of you would rather be right than have the evening.

"I can't stand being misremembered" is a real feeling and I'd honour it by saying it plainly rather than fighting it out. "It bothers me that we remember that so differently" is a sentence about you, and it's true, and it can be heard. "You're wrong, she said it on Boxing Day" is a sentence about Boxing Day, and it can't be settled, and it'll be back next Christmas.