a fight is a family tree.

spoiler for the whole post: family tree. that’s the model. if you get that one image you can stop reading and go have a better argument than the one you were about to have.

ok. from the top.

the trigger

every fight has a node 1, and node 1 is always small.

x says something. a sentence, a tone, sometimes nothing at all with the wrong face attached to it. y finds it wrong.

right there, before anybody has raised their voice, y has two options.

let it be. sit with it, think about it, decide it isn’t worth the next forty minutes.

or say it. upfront, immediately. “that came out wrong.”

everybody assumes the first one is free. it comes with an invoice, it just arrives later. the thing y didn’t say doesn’t get deleted, it gets saved. it sits in drafts with no expiry date and attaches itself to some future argument about something else entirely, and one evening in march it turns up as the opening line of a brand new tree.

so both options build something. one builds now, one builds later.

the tree

say y goes with the second option, which is usually the braver one.

x replies, and x had options too. y replies to the reply, with options. every turn adds a node and every node opens two more, and this is the point where the maths stops being on anyone’s side.

three turns in you’re four levels deep. five turns in, the thing being argued about has no relationship to the thing that started it. i’ve had a fight that began because i typed “ok” instead of “okay” and ended somewhere near my school results.

look at the left side of that diagram. every level has an exit hanging off it. every single turn has a small branch that ends the whole thing on the spot. sorry, my bad. ok, i’m listening. can we pause. one sentence each, available at every node, and they’re the least used sentences in the language.

the exchange rate

starting a fight is simple. genuinely, unbelievably simple. one line does it, sometimes half a line and a face.

ending one is expensive, and the rate is brutal. a sentence makes a node. removing that node takes a conversation.

so a fight that took four minutes to build takes an hour to take apart, and both people walk into that hour convinced they’re being reasonable. they are. at their own node, everybody is being completely reasonable. that’s what makes it hard.

explaining is expansion

this next bit is the one that took me years, because it goes against every instinct i have.

when you’re deep in the tree, you want to explain. explain what you actually meant, explain the context, explain that you weren’t saying that at all.

every explanation is a new node.

you’re trying to close the tree by adding to it. you’re standing at level five, building level six, calling it cleanup. the other person now has a fresh sentence to respond to, and the top of the tree gets further away with every honest attempt to reach it.

the loop

from the inside, none of it feels like a tree. it feels like a loop. down, up, back, forth, and all of it somehow connected.

both people are convinced they’re responding to the last thing said. neither one is. you’re both answering the whole stack, all six levels at once, which is why an ordinary sentence gets met with a reaction that looks unhinged from the outside. that reaction was never aimed at that sentence. it’s aimed at the sum.

the move

at some point somebody has to stop playing and describe the game instead. stop arguing the content, say the shape out loud.

something close to this:

hey. we’re going back and forth. this is going down and up and down again and all of it is hanging off one small thing at the top. can we get back to 1? this is how i felt when it started. and i’m sorry i made you feel like that.

four separate moves in there and each one is doing work.

you name the loop. the fight stops being a thing happening between you and becomes a thing the two of you are looking at together. temperature drops by half, because there’s now a third object in the room.

you point at 1. the top of the tree is nearly always small and nearly always survivable. nobody wants to go back to it, because at level five you have momentum and a much better case. go anyway.

you say how you felt. one sentence, feeling only. “i felt dismissed.” the second you add “because you…” you’ve built another node.

you apologise for impact. you might not be wrong. that isn’t what’s being paid for. something you did landed badly on a person you care about, and that’s a separate bill from who was right, and it’s yours.

and then, mostly, tada. i’ve watched it end in one message.

if it’s already long

sometimes you arrive at this idea on level nine instead of level three. the tree is enormous by then and node 1 is a rumour.

you can’t jump to the top from there. nobody accepts a reset while eight live grievances are still hanging underneath it.

so cut from the bottom.

the last thing said has the least history behind it, which makes it the cheapest thing to take back. so take it back. then take back the one above it. every cut removes a branch and everything hanging off that branch, and after four or five you’ll look up and be at the top, and the top will turn out to be a plate, or a tone, or a text with no full stop on the end of it.

going down is the fast direction. coming up is done one node at a time, from the newest.

what it costs

patience. that’s the whole bill.

p. a. t. i. e. n. c. e.

and in the moment, patience isn’t a personality trait, it’s physical work. you have a good line loaded. a genuinely excellent line, the kind that would land and stay landed. and the job is to let it go unsaid and watch the moment for it pass.

there’s a phrase for this in hindi that english never got around to building: gussa pee jaana. to drink your anger. you swallow the thing whole. not forever, not silently forever, just for the ten minutes it takes to walk the two of you back up the tree.

somebody has to do it. two people both waiting for the other one to be the bigger person is just a tree with a gardener at each end.

and if you’re reading this and thinking “why should i be the one to stop it”, no offence, wrong blog.

where this breaks

some caveats, because i’ve watched this get misused, including by me.

it has to alternate. if the same person swallows it every single time, the word for that stops being patience. it becomes a hierarchy, and a hierarchy doesn’t produce peace, it produces a very quiet person keeping a very long list. the swallowing has to change sides, and the person who did it last time gets to be the one who doesn’t.

getting back to 1 is not the same as dealing with 1. “let’s go back to the top” can be used to shut a fight down and then never return to the thing that caused it. people clock that fast, and once they’ve clocked it the reset stops working forever. the move buys you a calm room. you still have to have the real conversation in it, maybe the next day, after sleep.

”just listen” is a good instruction and a terrible sentence. said out loud to somebody mid-fight it’s an order, and an order is a new node. say it about yourself instead. “i’m going to stop talking and listen now” does the same job and costs the other person nothing.

and the scope

this is about conversational fights. two people who like each other, one trigger, a tree that got away from them in under five minutes.

there are other kinds, and i’m not describing those. fights that are genuinely about a thing, where the fight is the correct response and calming it down is just losing politely. fights that grow back from the same root every month, which means node 1 was never dealt with and no amount of pruning is going to help. and the ones where somebody is being cruel on purpose, where “let’s get back to 1” is a nice way of handing over ground.

i’m describing the very common, very stupid kind. the kind that starts with a plate.

you built the tree together, one line each, extremely fast.

so go back to 1. it’s always smaller than you remember.