Almost every couple who comes to me can describe their argument in detail. They can tell me how it starts, roughly what each person says, and exactly how it ends. What they cannot tell me is why it keeps happening when both of them genuinely do not want it to.
The answer is that they are not having an argument. They are running a loop, and the subject is close to irrelevant. This month it is the dishes. Last month it was money, before that a comment your mother made. Change the topic and the sequence stays identical: the same trigger, the same story each of you tells about what the other one meant, the same reaction, the same aftermath.
That is why resolving the topic never works. You can settle the dishes and you have settled nothing, because the dishes were never load-bearing. What is load-bearing is the meaning underneath — usually some version of you do not notice what I carry, or nothing I do is ever enough.
Loops also get faster. The first time you had this argument it took an hour to escalate. Now it takes four seconds, because both of you are working from years of accumulated evidence. You are not responding to what your partner just said. You are responding to the last two hundred times.
There is often a translation problem sitting inside it too. Under stress, men more commonly withdraw to regain composure, and women more commonly move towards connection to restore it. Each reads the other's coping as rejection. Neither is doing anything wrong — but if nobody has ever named the difference out loud, it looks like proof of not caring.
Here is the useful part: a loop only needs one person to stop running their half. Not to concede, and not to swallow it. Simply to stop making the move the other person is braced for — the pre-emptive defence, the sentence you always say two seconds too late, the walk-out that has become predictable.
So do this. On a calm day, when nothing is live, sit down together and write out the sequence. Trigger, the story each of you tells, the reaction, the aftermath. Four boxes on one page. Almost every couple I have done this with goes quiet halfway through, because seeing it written down makes it very hard to keep believing it is about the dishes.
You are then in a different position. You are not two people arguing. You are two people looking at the same diagram of a thing you both dislike — and that is a problem you can actually work on.