Marital Arguments
By PHIL LEE, M.D., and DIANE RUDOLPH, M.D
You don’t have to be married to argue, but it seems you have to argue to be married. All arguments are not created equal, but how do you rate them? Most destructive, most persistent, most common, most annoying? You see the problem, right? The one thing we can agree on is that marital arguments rarely resolve conflict. They just prolong it, in a death spiral of humorless recrimination and domestic forensics that would make the CSI team proud. We’ve divided the entries here into he said/she said binaries, using the criterion: which argument, introduced by He or She, can actually lead to closure one way or the other?

PHIL LEE, M.D., and DIANE RUDOLPH, M.D. are the co-heads of marital therapy at Payne-Whitney Clinic of New York Presbyterian Hospital. Married in real life, they annually enact a feuding couple for the residents to interview. Some years demand more acting than others. Phil Lee is also the author of Shrink Your Handicap.