Lucy Mangan wants to stay in Europe. Her husband wants out. Can the experts help her win the debate at home?

My conception of marriage is that it is periods of fondness, sometimes extreme fondness, interspersed with increasing periods of frustration and hatred. Sometimes extreme frustration and hatred. If you’re lucky, one or other of you dies before the latter stretches join up.

It’s a delicate balance, but with a bit of luck and enough judiciously timed mini-breaks together and “work conferences” apart (remember Dolly Parton’s explanation for her enduring marriage to Carl Dean: “I stay gone!”), you can hope to make it.

Then something like Brexit appears and throws your whole calculation off.

The referendum about whether we should stay in or leave the EU is a national flashpoint. During the 1928 US election, Herbert Hoover’s Republicans promised a chicken in every pot. David Cameron has effectively forced an argument in every home. Up and down the land, between partners, among parents and offspring, grandparents and children, and – because it spills over domestic bounds, like a magic cauldron full of toxic porridge for which you’ve forgotten the stopping spell – friends, colleagues and, if you’re very unlucky, strangers in the bus queue, people are discovering unwanted truths about each other. Usually, that one half of the equation is a little more racist than the other half suspected.

I am all but broken on the referendum wheel already, because I live with a Tory voter who of course, of course, also turns out to be a Brexiteer. “You are the gift that keeps on giving,” I said, when the news broke that he stands alongside some of the worst people in the world.

Our arguments are deeply unsatisfactory. On the one side, there’s him: passionate, convinced, eloquent and well informed. On the other, there’s me: passionate, convinced, choking on my words as the fog of argument descends, and barely informed at all. Toryboy lays out the economic and foreign policy cases for leaving and delivers stirring speeches about sovereignty. (“Other countries emerged from dictatorships into the EU. For them, it’s coterminous with democracy. France has to be in it, because how else do you solve a problem like Germany? And Germany wants it, because it can’t be sure it’ll keep its head if it’s allowed to have it. They are quite fitted to a not-quite-democratic government. We, on the other hand, managed freedom and democracy quite well before Brussels. Because we have the Queen’s head on all our stamps.” I may have missed some of his finer points.)

He delivers philippics on EU corruption, waste and questionable democratic accountability; I respond with phrases I have heard on the radio from people who are not Nigel Farage and which I hope represent winning Remain arguments. “Trade advantages!” “Peace!” “Global realities! Shrinking world! Self-defeating isolation! Imperial arrogance!”

Listening to a Brexiteer makes your relationship, and your longing to crush down on your cyanide capsule, so much worse

Before long, of course, the semi-intellectual argument begins to stray from the narrow facts (or, at least, the narrow facts I am attempting to evoke with wide phrasing) and into more emotional territory. I contend that he is a chauvinist. He contends that I am an ignorant naïf. I think, as someone who passed GCSE history based on repeated viewings of Blackadder, I should be congratulated for trying to understand anything. He thinks I should be punished for not already understanding. I think he should appreciate how far I’ve come and that not everybody starts from the same educational or any other kind of base – but, oh wait, isn’t that just the problem of all Tories everywhere ever?

Before you know it, my resistance to leaving the EU is just another symptom of my general resistance to change of all kinds, which is one of the most annoying things about me, and I am in tears, because he used to love my resistance to change – it was one of the things that drew us to each other.

So. Let us, and anyone else finding Brexit a combination of crucible and proxy for all their relationship ishoos (“It’s ‘ishooes’ and you should put it in italics,” says Toryboy, looking over my shoulder), with their teeth sunk, as Kenneth Tynan’s endlessly useful description of marital life has it, deep in each other’s necks and unwilling to break the clinch for fear of bleeding to death, see if there’s a way of breaking the cycle and stanching the fatal flow. I decide to take expert advice.

“You need to think about how else you can approach a subject, and accept that two people’s points of view don’t have to match,” says Peter Saddington, a possibly aptly named counsellor for relationship guidance charity Relate. “That’s a very adult concept, and it’s not easy, because you get emotional about a subject. So you need a different language to stop you getting so involved.”

Specificity, he says, is key. “Say, I want to talk to you about the EU, putting the bins out, or whatever it is,” he says, “and don’t get drawn into anything else.” Like a man’s love of sovereignty merely being another manifestation of the overprivilege he has enjoyed as if it were an earned right, rather than fortuitous circumstance? Saddington is a professional. He will not be drawn. “When you try to cover multiple things, anxiety and anger take over, and a discussion quickly becomes something very different.”

We’re also not to interrupt each other. “You may find that listening to the whole message changes your perception of it.” On the whole, I find that listening to the whole of what a Brexiteer has to say makes things – your relationship, your sense of history as a generally linear progression towards enlightenment, your longing to crush down on your cyanide capsule – substantially worse, but I can see that it would generally be a good rule of thumb.

And finally: “When you’re talking, don’t use the ‘You always…’ formulation,” Saddington says. “It sounds like an attack or a criticism.” Yes. Because it is. He always does it. “Instead, use ‘I don’t like it when you…’ or ‘It makes me feel like you…’ Then people don’t become so defensive and don’t feel the need to fight back.”

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I try it next time we are facing off. “I don’t like it when you align yourself with racists, thugs and dog-whistlers to racists and thugs. It makes me feel that you want to align yourself with racists, thugs and dog-whistlers to racists and thugs. I don’t like it when you want to reject a structure that, whether the direct cause of peace and prosperity to a formerly vividly war-inflected continent or not, does nevertheless seem now to be facilitating both. It makes me feel like I want to kill you.”

I may need to work at this. At least I stayed fairly specific.

Not that any of this bothers Toryboy. The man, after all, lives to argue. The process, whatever the content, that paralyses me with fear and hatred (“Inwardly mutinous, outwardly mute” is my motto) is the breath of life to him.

Perhaps I should arm myself with the basic tools of argument. Perhaps that way I can win one and kickstart a virtuous circle, success breeding confidence breeding success, and we will become more evenly matched. Especially if I manage to pack a few facts and stuff under my belt, too.

“You do need to demonstrate the truth and the importance of the arguments that support your case,” agrees Tony Koutsoumbos, founder of Debating London, a club for adults, and director of the Great Debaters’ Club training programme, who is used to dealing with people who feel they missed out on these valuable skills during their formative years. “And remember, the meat of a debate is hearing both sides, getting different perspectives. But the purpose – the purpose – is to decide. To make people come down on one side or the other.”

I want to win, I say. “You’re not necessarily trying to win,” Koutsoumbos replies. “You’re trying to bring so much clarity and confidence to your argument that it is impossible for a listener to remain undecided.”

I think of my listener. I sigh. I ask in a small voice how one might muster such clarity and confidence. How does one erode a Mount Rushmore of certainty? “You need to think critically, to organise your information with logical consistency, so that someone will reach the same conclusion as you without you actually telling them to.”

“Trade advantages!” I pipe feebly. “Global realities! Shrinking world…”

“Signpost it,” Koutsoumbos continues robustly. “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them – and make them follow you. Avoid logical fallacies. No appeals to authority, no appeals to emotion, which have been favourites of both sides of the Brexit debate. No fudging of the difference between correlation and causation. Define your terms. And a bit of showmanship, good eye contact, mastery of rhetoric on top of that never hurts. Likability is persuasive, too, but again that’s been lacking on both sides of the Brexit argument so far.”

Toryboy narrows his eyes. His head moves back, like a cobra preparing to strike. ‘Are you trying to debate with me?’

I do my best. I mug up on facts, but all the while knowing they will never become part of my soul, as his are for Toryboy. I prepare. I make eye contact. I tell him what I am going to tell him, about how trade will be damaged if we leave the EU, and then start to tell him.

He narrows his eyes. His head moves back, like a cobra preparing to strike. “Are you,” he says carefully, “trying to… debate with me?”

“Uh,” I say, frantically flipping through my notes. “Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. And we should, like, define our terms before we start.”

“‘Define our terms,’” he says, almost shivering with delight as he taps steepled fingers gently against lips that are curving into a wintry smile. “‘Define our terms.’” He leans forward, presses a hand to his breast, and speaks soft. “Among my people, the argumentative, the stylised practices of the Oxford Union and any and all other debaters are held in special contempt. Such practitioners are but perfumed musketeers to our honest brawling.”

I look down at my notes on rhetoric. They don’t help. I am outclassed on every front. He continues: “Debating is kabuki argument. To the true adept of arguing, it does not exist. Why? Because debate, as with barristerial argument – for money! In front of a judge! Who will rule! – is designed for one unnatural purpose: to settle something. Arguments must never settle anything. If they did, we might one day run out of arguments. And then what would we do? And then what would we do?”

The yawning chasm that I was already well aware existed between our world views quakes before me and with a mighty roar opens further – wider, deeper, a sheer drop on each side into the fathomless canyon below. On the far side, raging conflagrations, melting rock, black smoke as far as the eye can see and, in the midst of it, Toryboy, fists raised to the sky. On mine, meadows full of sweet grass, wildflowers and peace. I take a step back from the edge. There are no bridges here.

“We’re now arguing about arguing,” I say.

“We are,” Toryboy says, his eyes shining with a maddened glee. “We are.”

I turn and run back to Peter Saddington. “What do you do when you are with someone who enjoys arguing but you do not and never will?” I cry.

“If you care about someone, then when that person hates something, you learn not to do it, or learn to do it better, in a way that doesn’t upset them. With arguing, you can set time limits, arrange breaks, where you say, ‘I’m starting to get worried something awful’s going to happen’, and press pause on the discussion.”

I look back at the fire. I look at the calendar. If the worst of it dies out after the 23rd, I’ll have a go. At the moment, I think my voice will get lost in the abyss, or amid the hiss and crackle of the flames. I am worried something awful is going to happen, and there is nothing I can do.