every debrief turns into a row and I do not know who starts it

This is going to sound petty written down.

We have been doing this for about eighteen months, roughly every couple of months, and the evenings themselves are fine. She goes out, she has a good time, nobody breaks anything we have agreed. Then she comes home and within about forty minutes we are having a row.

It is always the same shape. I ask how it went. She tells me. I ask something more specific. She answers, a bit shorter. I ask another one and she says something like, do you want the whole transcript, and after that we are off.

From where I am sitting I am asking about three questions. From where she is sitting apparently I am asking twenty and she can feel me building a picture. She said last time that it feels like being debriefed by somebody who already thinks she did something wrong, which I promise is not what is happening in my head.

The complicating part is that I do want to know. Not in a suspicious way. It is genuinely part of what I like about this and I think she knows that, which may be exactly why it lands badly, because then she is not telling me about her evening, she is performing it for me while exhausted at half past midnight.

We have tried her writing it down instead, which lasted twice. We have tried me asking nothing and waiting, and then I sulk, which is worse.

So how do other couples do the afterwards part? Is there a number of questions? Is it the timing? Am I the problem here or is this normal and we are just bad at it.

Wife here and I have been on your wife's end of this exactly. The thing that made it unbearable for me was not the number of questions, it was that I could hear him checking my answers against something. He had a version in his head from before I left and he was auditing mine against it. When I said something that did not match he would go quiet and then ask it again a different way half an hour later. I was not being asked what happened, I was being marked. Once he stopped doing that I could have talked all night.

Practical thing that fixed ours. We stopped doing it the same night. She comes in, we have a cup of tea, we talk about nothing much and go to bed. The proper conversation happens the next evening. Everything that felt enormous at midnight is a normal size by Tuesday teatime, for both of us, and neither of us is running on no sleep and adrenaline.

Seven years and I would add one thing to the above. Agree in advance what she is going to tell you, and agree it before she goes out rather than after she gets in. Ours is roughly: how the evening felt, anything that was outside what we had agreed, and anything she wants to tell me. Everything else is hers unless she offers it. Written like that it sounds cold. In practice it means neither of us is negotiating at one in the morning with our defences up.

counter view. we did the structured thing for a year and it was awful, felt like a performance review. now she just talks and I just listen and if I want to know something I ask. six years and no rows. some couples need scaffolding and some are strangled by it.

The single half of an arrangement, and I want to raise something none of you has mentioned. I am in that account. Whatever is said in your kitchen at midnight is said about a third person who is not there and cannot correct it. I have been described back to myself twice by couples who thought it was funny, and both times the version was not one I recognised. I am not asking for a veto. I would just ask people to remember that the debrief is not only about the two of you.

If it goes wrong every single time then I would stop having them for a while and see what happens. Not stop the arrangement. Stop the debrief. If the marriage is better without it, that tells you something about what the debrief was actually for.

Coming back to this because the tea suggestion sounded too simple to work and it worked. We did it that way after the last one and had the conversation on the Sunday instead and it was the first time in a year it did not end with one of us going to bed first. No idea why the twenty four hours makes that much difference but it does.