After the Fight

Description

The argument ended an hour ago and now there’s the rest of the evening.

Someone is in the kitchen. Someone else is being scrupulously polite. The question of who speaks first has become larger than whatever the row was about, and both of you have privately started building the case you’ll make if it comes up again.

Almost everything written about conflict is about the conflict — how to argue well, how to listen. Very little is about the day after, which is when the actual damage is either done or undone.

What this book argues

That repair is a separate skill from arguing, with its own timing. Go too early and you’re apologising for something neither of you has finished feeling. Go too late and the silence becomes the subject. Most couples who describe themselves as bad at conflict are fine at conflict and have simply never learned the day after.

Inside

• Why the twenty-four hours afterwards decide more than the argument did
• The first message, and why length works against you
• Apologising for the right thing — most apologies name the wrong one
• What to do when only one of you wants to repair yet
• The arguments that are actually about the same unresolved thing every time

Who this isn’t for

It’s a book about ordinary conflict between people who want to stay together. It isn’t relationship counselling, it can’t referee anything specific, and where a situation needs a professional it says so.

Format: 126 pages, photographs throughout, read in one sitting. PDF, any device.

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