How to Win Arguments. Robert Allen

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.

      Arguments and the Gender Gap

      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.