The People You Argue With in the Shower

The comeback was perfect. Devastating, actually, delivered with total composure and unanswerable logic, landing exactly where it needed to land, and the person on the receiving end had nothing, nothing at all, to say back. It was one of the finest arguments ever constructed. And it was delivered, at full volume in the mind, to a showerhead, about a conversation that had happened three days ago, or would never happen at all.

Everyone does this. It is one of the most universal and least discussed features of being a person. You replay the exchange, the one where you were caught off guard and said something weak or nothing at all, and this time, in the warm water, you are magnificent. You say the thing you should have said. You win completely. The other person, played by your own imagination, crumbles appropriately. And then the water shuts off and you towel off and the victory evaporates, because it was won against no one.

There is something a little funny and a little sad about the shower argument, and the funny part is easy. A grown adult, alone, naked, mounting a flawless rhetorical assault on a fixture. But underneath the comedy there is something worth noticing, which is what the shower argument reveals. It is a kind of confession, delivered to the one audience that will never repeat it. It shows you, more honestly than almost anything, what you actually needed to say and did not, what you actually think and could not risk, where you actually feel wronged and have not admitted it.

The Stoics spent a great deal of energy on the line between what is in our control and what is not, and they put other people's reactions firmly in the second category. You cannot control what the other person said, or will say, or how they would receive your perfect comeback. All of that is outside you. But the shower argument is you trying, desperately, to control it anyway, to script the other person's collapse, to win in imagination a thing you could not win in the room, and the reason it never satisfies is that it is a victory over a puppet. The real person is not there. The real person is off living their life, entirely unaware that they have just been demolished in your bathroom.

So the shower argument is a kind of trap, a way of spending real emotional energy on a fake resolution, over and over, without ever getting the actual thing. Because the actual thing was never the perfect comeback. It was being heard. It was saying the true sentence to the real person and having it land. And that, the thing you actually want, cannot happen in the shower, no matter how many times you win there. The showerhead can hear your true position perfectly. It is the one audience that cannot help.

There is a better use for what the shower argument reveals. Instead of treating it as a rehearsal for a fantasy, you can treat it as information. If you are arguing with someone in the shower, some part of you has something real it needs to say and has not said. The eloquence you find alone is the clue. It is showing you exactly where the unfinished business is, exactly what you would say if you could bear the risk of saying it to a person who might not crumble on cue.

And then, occasionally, you can do the hard thing the shower lets you avoid. You can take a small corner of the perfect speech, drop most of the eloquence, which was for the puppet anyway, and say the one true sentence to the actual person. It will not go the way it goes in the shower. They will not crumble. They will respond like a real person, unpredictably. But it will be real, and being heard by a real person, even imperfectly, is worth more than a thousand flawless victories over a fixture.

The water shut off. The perfect argument dissolved, the way it always does. And somewhere underneath it was the small true thing it had been standing in for, still unsaid, still waiting for the one audience that could actually do something with it.

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Perhaps while reading this you smiled at your own shower arguments, the flawless comebacks delivered to a fixture, and felt, underneath the comedy, the thing you actually needed to say and never did.

I wonder why we spend so much real energy winning fake victories over people who are not there, when the thing we actually want is not the perfect comeback but simply to be heard by the real person, which the shower can never give us.

You might treat your next shower argument as information rather than rehearsal. The eloquence you find alone is a clue, showing you exactly where the unfinished business is. And then, once in a while, you might take one true sentence of it to the actual person, who will not crumble on cue, but who can do the one thing a showerhead never can, which is hear you.