Put it on the LB sheet that when she says "It's not my fault because..." it's an annoying habit. On the ENQ, you can write the solution under meeting your need for conversation in 'how it can be better satisfied': discuss things without assigning fault.

Look, I know how hard it is to have conversations when there's different communication styles. My H and I had a breakthrough the other day--he thinks I don't listen and that's why I misunderstand what he says. I think he's not clear. We had a very specific conversation and later he mentioned something about who we'd talked about, and I said, "Oh, the guy who xyz?" and he got flustered and said no, that was somebody else, I never listen, etc...but here's the thing I noticed. When we'd had the first conversation, it began by him telling me about this client he met late in the day, some trivial facts, and then he says, "So then this guy goes to show me..etc" and I thought we were talking about the same guy. He smoothed right into it. Glad I noticed it, so I could tell him that his transitions weren't clear enough for my literal head. We're talking about a guy, he refers to 'this guy', my head puts it on the last person referred. What he meant was "This OTHER guy".

These are the little nit-picky nuances of marital conversation that only need to be discovered and dealt with, not fussed over and fought about. If I can say, "Hey, are we talking about the same thing, or have you changed subjects?" you can say, "Hey, you said 'fault' again, I don't care about fault, I care about you. Just tell me what you want to say without all the fault stuff, okay?"


Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
(Oscar Wilde)