Both People Believe They Are The Reasonable One

Two people in a long-running disagreement usually each hold a version in which their own conduct was measured and the other's was not. Both versions are sincerely held.

Each person has different evidence

Everybody has full access to their own intentions and only to the other person's behaviour, and those are not comparable categories.

So one's own sharp remark is remembered along with the restraint that preceded it, while the other's identical remark is remembered on its own.

This produces two accurate accounts that cannot be reconciled, because they are built from different material rather than from different honesty.

The starting point is chosen differently

Every dispute has a history, and where somebody begins the story determines who appears to have started it.

Each party naturally begins at the point where they were first affected, which places the other's action first and their own response second.

Arguments about who began it are therefore not resolvable by recalling more detail, since the disagreement is about the frame rather than the facts.

Proportion is judged against a private baseline

What counts as an overreaction depends on how significant the original act was, and significance is calculated using information the other person does not have.

A remark that lands on something already sore produces a response that looks disproportionate from outside and is proportionate from inside.

Explaining the baseline usually deflates the dispute faster than defending the response, because it supplies the missing evidence rather than arguing about the conclusion.

Rehearsal hardens both accounts

An account told to sympathetic listeners becomes smoother and more coherent with each telling, and the parts that complicate it drop out.

By the time the two people speak, each is presenting a polished version, and polished versions are difficult to modify in conversation.

This is why disputes discussed extensively with third parties are harder to settle than ones dealt with quickly, whatever their original size.

What moves it

Agreement on facts is usually unavailable and mostly unnecessary. What changes the position is each person hearing what the other believed was happening at the time.

That can be done without conceding the point, since describing a belief is not the same as accepting it was correct.

Most durable repairs consist of two people who still disagree about the events understanding why the other behaved as they did.

That outcome is unsatisfying to anybody hoping for a verdict, and it is the version that survives, because it does not require either person to abandon an account they know to be true.