Robert Allen - How to Win Arguments

An argument within the family is rarely concerned with the apparent subject matter. Most arguments start over something so banal as to be hardly worth considering, like whose turn it is to wash up, or whether someone remembered to lock the front door last night. If such an argument were to start outside the family it would probably be resolved quickly and possibly even amicably. However, families are different. When a little group of people lives together year in year out, often in a fairly confined space, frustrations are bound to build up. And because we are supposed to love our parents, partners and children no matter how badly they behave towards us, we often feel we have to suppress our resentment. No wonder explosions occur so often. When you see a family argument in full swing, that old statistic about people being most likely to get murdered by a member of their own family makes perfect sense. As the zoologist Desmond Morris observed, the interesting thing about people is not that they are so prone to violence but that for most of the time they manage to avoid it so well. It is worth mentioning that these remarks apply not just to traditional families but to other sorts of households, such as groups of students.

Furthermore, the very closeness of family relationships makes for high levels of emotion. Because our family members do love us we feel that we can exhibit to them a side of our personality that we have to keep hidden from the world at large. Sulky teenagers become even more morose with their parents, while frustrated husbands pick on their harassed wives and vice versa.

Family arguments are also in a class of their own in that they have almost nothing to do with reason, concern for the truth or even, in many cases, true self-interest. All these things are quite alien to the way people in families behave. Their main concern will be with methods of manipulation (see page 94). They will use every trick in the book to cajole, blackmail or bamboozle their loved ones into behaving in the way they want. This process of manipulation will be the main purpose of the argument. The ostensible object will on most occasions be peripheral to the real aims of the arguers. In other words it doesn’t matter in the slightest that you washed the car; what matters is that I made you wash it.

Manipulation has a bad name because it involves emotional dishonesty. People believe that it is not possible to have a good relationship with someone if you are not honest with them. However, families have their own internal structure and the practice of manipulation helps to maintain that structure. Many couples maintain a sort of emotional Punch and Judy relationship in which verbal assaults, followed by reconciliations, help to ensure that aggression is channelled safely and real violence never occurs.

There is little that we can do about this. Arguments of this sort, in moderation, help us to blow off steam and release the pressures under which we live. That is all to the good. The occasions when people lose control and a domestic argument turns into a blood bath, though they make sensational headlines, are mercifully few.

At the moment we are concerned with only one question: how do you win a family argument? Obviously different criteria apply from just about any other sort of argument. Within the family, just because you manage to make your spouse or child admit that it really was his or her turn to mow the lawn that does not mean you have in any meaningful sense won the argument. In fact, beating someone into submission (figuratively or literally) never counts as a win in such circumstances. Winning is only achieved by an outcome that will help the family to continue functioning effectively. A bloody good row in which all parties give vent to their suppressed anger can be a win for everybody involved if it is followed by a genuine reconciliation. ‘Say what you like but never go to bed mad,’ is the best advice anyone can follow in a family row.

When considering the types of arguments in which people indulge I thought it might be interesting to consider whether women argue differently from men. Perhaps my whole perspective on argument was exclusively male and was therefore blinding me to a side of the subject that women would find obvious. I started by asking friends and colleagues what they thought. Almost without exception they claimed that women would argue differently with members of their own sex than with men. They accepted that in mixed company women might well be pressured into emulating a male style of argument but, among themselves, they would be far more reasonable. A lot of well-worn prejudices started to appear. Men felt that women were more inclined to argue from a purely emotional point of view while they, of course, were practical, hard-headed chaps who seldom let emotion rule their reason. Strangely, women felt something similar about themselves. However, they preferred to put it a different way and used words like ‘feeling’, ‘intuition’, and ‘consensus’. They, you will be unsurprised to hear, were not impressed by the men’s claims to be more reasonable. They felt that they were themselves perfectly reasonable but possessed some ill-defined extra quality that men could never quite grasp.

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