The Case For Going To Bed Angry

It started out as so many marital spats do: over the minutiae of household maintenance. I had been diligently trying to set a cleaning routine in our new house when a pair of sneakers abandoned in the middle of the living room left me completely undone. All day, I sat in my office, simmering with discontent, waiting for my husband to get home from work so that I could boil over.

It was at that point I decided to take my husband on a tour of the house. We started with the still-up toilet seat before looping over to a bottle of cold brew left unrefrigerated on the countertop. We meandered by beard shavings dusting the sink and took in the view of several wadded up gum wrappers on the side table. Finally, we stopped at the offending sneakers.

“When you don’t close the loop on a task and clean up after yourself,” I matter-of-factly explained, “it leaves me with two choices. Since I work from home, I can either clean up after you myself, or be forced to sit in the mess.”

I knew this unhinged show-and-tell was intense even while the words were coming out of my mouth, but I had truly reached my limit. And then we fought. Lots of things were true: I was overreacting, he was trying to get better at these chores, and we both got overly heated. But then we did something slightly unexpected: we went to bed angry about it.

You might wind up saying something you regret because you’re worked up, ultimately making things worse.

Instead of eating dinner while we yelled out incorrect Jeopardy! responses, we pushed food around our plates and made stilted small talk. We went to bed at separate times and tried not to accidentally face the same direction as we slept, a sharp cry from our usual unruly tangle of limbs. The next morning, we both went our separate ways for work, and although the divide was unsettling, neither one of us seemed to be in a rush to work it out.

For eons, the hallmark of a happy couple has been their obedience to the age-old adage, “Don’t go to bed angry.” Bury the hatchet as soon as possible, they say. But upon further reflection and all-too-real lived experience, that advice is kind of crap. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Psychotherapist Rachel Wright also has her beef with the maxim. Most glaringly, she says, this pithy little saying puts an arbitrary deadline on wading through your emotions, which sets everyone up to fail. If you haven’t had the time to process what you’re feeling and plot out what you’re really hoping to get from a resolution conversation, it’s unlikely to end with a mutually agreeable conclusion. And that’s because stress is, well, stressful.

“Once we're activated or triggered, it's really hard to access our frontal lobe and make great decisions in terms of anything, let alone something that's hard,” Wright says. If you do push through in order to calm the storm before the sun sets, you might wind up saying something you regret because you’re worked up, ultimately making things worse.

And even if you do feel ready to discuss the issue, you might still be actively angry at your partner’s actions, and that can sabotage even the noblest of plans. “If you're in battle mode, and the goal of the conflict is resolution, then that's not a great way to show up,” Wright adds.

Finally, there are practical limitations at play with this advice. If one partner needs to get up early, for example, and the other is hellbent on talking a fight through no matter what, Wright explains this can breed even further resentment. According to Wright, prioritizing instant-gratification resolution over your partner’s needs and well-being is annoying at best and selfish at worst, adding more layers of conflict to an already tense situation.

The issue gets resolved because you want to deal with it, and not because external pressures are forcing you to.

So why force yourself to tidy up an argument just because it’s bedtime? Ultimately, I think (and Wright agrees) it boils down to the vast majority of us being unwilling to tolerate discomfort with our partners. Fighting is awkward! No one wants to gingerly tip-toe around the kitchen to grab a seltzer while the person we love averts their gaze, be it out of shame, remorse, or annoyance. And who relishes the chance to be horizontal and 10 inches apart from someone who’s pissed off at us?

But instead of prematurely putting a bow on an issue for the sake of a goodnight kiss and a little spooning, dealing with your discomfort can have benefits. Sitting with distress is an excellent skill to learn, Wright says, because you’re teaching yourself not to settle for a short-term fix that may not really solve your problem and instead develop the patience needed to reach a truly effective conclusion. Ultimately, she adds, practicing being uncomfortable can lead you to develop more resilience, which is useful for so many areas of life.

Although I abhor the advice to avoid angry bedtimes on the whole, it’s not totally without merit. It’s true that leaving disagreements unaddressed for too long can lead to bigger problems down the road. Sans intervention, Wright says, repressed anger can snowball into mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But even though she acknowledges the mantra’s benefits, she’s not swayed. “It creates a sense of urgency that's not needed,” she says. “There's a middle ground here.”

And that middle ground? Going to bed angry and dealing with your problem when cooler heads can prevail. That creates an essential pause so you can calm your central nervous system and approach an agreement more rationally, using empathy and “I” statements, Wright notes. The issue gets resolved because you want to deal with it, and not because external pressures are forcing you to.

In my case, it allows me to zoom out of a fight and look at my marriage as a whole rather than just an unpleasant fraction of it. When you’re keyed up, the argument can eclipse all of your shared history and all you see are the ways in which you’ve been wronged. After an albeit awkward night’s sleep, I remembered that my husband takes the trash out every time without fail. He’s proactive about doing the dishes and takes out the dog in the morning and at night. Not to mention, he pulls the disgusting, tangled hair from our shower drain for me because ew, no.

And hadn’t I left my clean laundry unfolded on our bedroom chair for a solid 10 business days before finally putting it away? Why was I judging him on his worst day and negating his best? It was important to me that he knew the areas of home maintenance that still bothered me, but it didn’t have to be a bigger deal than just that: an honest conversation.

A day later, he approached me and apologized for the fight we had, saying he didn’t really mean some of the things he said, that his frustration had made him exaggerate. It meant so much more to me than a half-hearted “sorry” would have in the heat of the moment, because I could tell he actually meant it. And that’s a balm more soothing than even the best night’s sleep.